This is quoted from a friend of a friend on Facebook. I don’t know the author, but my friend who posted it assures his readers that the original author posted it for public view. So I’m not stealing it, I’m sharing it. :) If someone discovers the author, please credit the author in the comments and I will update the diary.
One of the biggest disservices we can do as a nation is to consign the entire South to the wrong side of the Civil War. For every Southern “gentleman” and “well-bred lady” (or their poor counterparts) who supported and aided the Confederacy, there was one who resisted the traitors by word and deed. The #Resistance against the Confederacy in the Southern states was large and, in some areas, well organized enough to keep entire regions free from traitor rule.
Please remember this when you see some clown on this or other sites dismiss the entire South as “a bunch of bigots and traitors who ought to secede” or similar bullshit. It’s not true, it’s not fair, and it pisses all over the hundreds of thousands of Southerners who resisted the Confederacy as best they could, and the millions of rational, often liberal/progressive Southerners alive today who work as best they can to combat bigotry, hatred and barbarism.
Without further ado:
When we talk about monuments and histories, it's important to remember what was erased so that a pack of lies could be raised up. Hundreds of thousands of Southerners fought against the Confederacy. They did so often against impossible odds and at immense cost.
But there's no monument to [Western North Carolina's] two hard-riding Union regiments in the middle of Asheville. The Confederate massacres of local mountaineers are tucked away, when mentioned at all. Dedications to the Virginian commander George Henry Thomas, who rejected his slave-owning family and spent the next decade annihilating Confederates and the KKK, do not dot Southern towns. No statue of the brilliant radical political and military leader Abraham Galloway, who declared the need to fight with both "the cartridge box and the ballot box" stands in Wilmington's place of power, nor markers to the maroon resistance fighters in Elizabeth City's. Sculptures of Tubman's heroic Combahee raiders do not dot the South Carolina coast. Charleston harbor is not named after Robert Smalls.
It is not an accident, because while bigots and oppressors don’t make up the majority of Southern citizens, they have controlled an outsized proportion of governmental representation since Reconstruction.
You might also want to read this: The Confederate General Who Was Erased.
