Just remind me..

[DaShi]

The North wasn't a whole lot less racist than the south. And even today I run into a distressing number of racists in the Rochester area, seriously. And Rochester was this huge center of anti-slavery and women's rights stuff.

The anti-slavery people frequently advocated deporting the slaves back to africa because while they thought slavery was wrong, they still thought black people were inferior. Kind of like how people today think fighting dogs is wrong, but still thing dogs don't have the same rights as people.

Stonewall Jackson was less racist than many prominent abolitionists.

[Tupac Shakur]

Virginia law forbade teaching a slave, free black or mulatto to read or write, as enacted following Nat Turner's Slave Rebellion in Southampton County in 1831. Nevertheless, Jackson secretly taught the slave to write, as he had promised. Once literate, the young slave fled to Canada via the underground railroad. ...

Little as he was known to the white inhabitants of Lexington, Jackson was revered by many of the African-Americans in town, both slaves and free blacks. He was instrumental in the organization in 1855 of Sunday School classes for blacks at the Presbyterian Church. His second wife, Mary Anna Jackson, taught with Jackson, as "he preferred that my labors should be given to the colored children, believing that it was more important and useful to put the strong hand of the Gospel under the ignorant African race, to lift them up." The pastor, Dr. William Spottswood White, described the relationship between Jackson and his Sunday afternoon students: "In their religious instruction he succeeded wonderfully. His discipline was systematic and firm, but very kind. ... His servants reverenced and loved him, as they would have done a brother or father. ... He was emphatically the black man's friend." He addressed his students by name and they in turn referred to him affectionately as "Marse Major."

Jackson's family owned six slaves in the late 1850s. Three (Hetty, Cyrus, and George, a mother and two teenage sons) were received as a wedding present. Another, Albert, requested that Jackson purchase him and allow him to work for his freedom; he was employed as a waiter in one of the Lexington hotels and Jackson rented him to VMI. Amy also requested that Jackson purchase her from a public auction and she served the family as a cook and housekeeper. The sixth, Emma, was a four-year-old orphan with a learning disability, accepted by Jackson from an aged widow and presented to his second wife, Mary Anna, as a welcome-home gift. After the American Civil War began he appears to have hired out or sold his slaves. Mary Anna Jackson, in her 1895 memoir, said, "our servants ... without the firm guidance and restraint of their master, the excitement of the times proved so demoralizing to them that he deemed it best for me to provide them with good homes among the permanent residents." James Robertson wrote about Jackson's view on slavery:

Jackson neither apologized for nor spoke in favor of the practice of slavery. He probably opposed the institution. Yet in his mind the Creator had sanctioned slavery, and man had no moral right to challenge its existence. The good Christian slaveholder was one who treated his servants fairly and humanely at all times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_Jackson

Pretty enlightened viewpoint for the time.

[Hauldren Collider]

Stonewall

[Tupac Shakur]

I don't think you should be giving a religious coot and traitor to his country a thumbs-up just because he was relatively less racist than the average person of the mid-19th Century.

[Berzerker]

praise one second, contempt the next

[MichaeltheGreat]

I don't think you should be giving a religious coot and traitor to his country a thumbs-up just because he was relatively less racist than the average person of the mid-19th Century.

Stonewall. He wasn't a traitor to his country. Or to his state. If anyone was a "traitor" it was those in Yankee government who tried to compel the raising of an extraconstitutional army, then march it through private property in the sovereign states of Virginia and North Carolina, to settle a political dispute with the citizens of South Carolina at bayonet point.

[Tupac Shakur]

praise one second, contempt the next

Rare is the person who is uniformly good or uniformly evil.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Stonewall. He wasn't a traitor to his country. Or to his state. If anyone was a "traitor" it was those in Yankee government who tried to compel the raising of an extraconstitutional army, then march it through private property in the sovereign states of Virginia and North Carolina, to settle a political dispute with the citizens of South Carolina at bayonet point.

So... what you are saying is that Jackson was a damned dirty traitor?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Nope, Gen'l Jackson valiantly defended his state and his country, and was a great athletic coach to boot.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Valiantly defended his traitorous state and faux-country, that is...

[MichaeltheGreat]

A state cannot commit treason. Virginia rejected secession, that is, until ol' Abe decided unilaterally he was going to use it as a pasture for his extraconstutionally raised army - oh, and "directing" (with no authority) Virginia to raise, fund and equip regiments of "volunteers."

So Gen'l Jackson, being the devout and generous soul he was, helped lots of Yankee invaders get closer to the Lord, and taught the rest the Yankee triathlon, to wit, march south, run back north, then swim the Potomac. Always the patient teacher, he continued to school the Yankees who didn't get it the first time.

[Alexander's Horse]

They left out a lot in your history classes didn't they? Did you forget what the Romans did to Carthage? What the Visigoths did to Ravenna? What the Vandals did to Rome? What the Mongols did to Babylon? What the Catholics did to northern Germany? What the Swedes did to southern Germany? What the British did to the Gangetic plains?

As a matter of fact I won two university prizes for history, but never mind...

Sherman is considered the first modern general because of his grasp of the applicatiion of industrial methods to warfare, like concentration of firepower, it wasn't pretty, but it was pretty effective. He ripped the heart out of the confederacy by destroying its infrastructure, communications and economic base. He put great emphasis on supply and logistics and used overwhelming force whenever he could. By the time he reached Lee's army, Lee had no choice but to surrender, there was no final battle, there was nothing to fight with or for. Sherman had destroyed it all. US generals have pretty much applied methods inspired by Sherman ever since, in fields as diverse as the firebombing of Japan or the free fire zones in Vietnam. That is why for example US forces are good at conventional warfare but not very good at counter-insurgency, they can't get their finger off the trigger.

Sherman is my favorite civil war general. Few generals from that war really understood the war they had embarked upon. It foreshadows the mass slaughter and mobilisation of WWI. The union won because it was economically much more powerful.

[dannubis]

A state cannot commit treason. Virginia rejected secession, that is, until ol' Abe decided unilaterally he was going to use it as a pasture for his extraconstutionally raised army - oh, and "directing" (with no authority) Virginia to raise, fund and equip regiments of "volunteers."

So Gen'l Jackson, being the devout and generous soul he was, helped lots of Yankee invaders get closer to the Lord, and taught the rest the Yankee triathlon, to wit, march south, run back north, then swim the Potomac. Always the patient teacher, he continued to school the Yankees who didn't get it the first time.

Unfortunately this smart man was shot by his own dumb soldiers... A truly American way to go so to speak...

[Alexander's Horse]

which raises another point about Sherman - he wrote clear orders and was confident they would be carried out, which meant he didn't have to go riding around out in front in danger of getting shot, this was another modern innovation, detailed plans and orders, the commander vacating the battlefield.

[kentonio]

The North wasn't a whole lot less racist than the south.

This is some dumb **** right here. Yes, the south was considerably more racist than the north, both in thought and deed. Try reading some accounts from slaves from the border states who chose to desperately flee north and risking their lives doing so to avoid being sold to masters in the deep south. In many cases we're talking about people who had suffered under slavery for decades, but were then willing to risk the cruelest of deaths to avoid a far worse treatment further south. Those southron ****s kept their slaves like absolute animals to be raped, tortured or killed at will. The north was plenty racist, but nothing compared to the deep south.