<p>“In my mind I’m goin’ to Carolina
Can’t you see the sunshine
Can’t you just feel the moonshine
Ain’t it just like a friend of mine
It hit me from behind
Yes I’m gone to Carolina in my mind”
James Taylor</p>
<p>enough said…</p>
<p>The South Carolina statehouse in Columbia still has the markings from Union cannon balls visible on its facade; they left them as a reminder when they repaired/rebuilt the building. After the war they also changed the main entrance so that it now faces north so that they can never again be in a position of not seeing the enemy approaching from the north.</p>
<p>They also still ONLY refer to the war as the “war of northern aggression.”</p>
<p>James Taylor’s father was head of the UNC Med School at one time. The student health center is named after him.</p>
<p>There’s a bar in Chapel Hill called “He’s Not Here” that got it’s name from the fact that JT used to play there often back in the day and they got so many phone calls about his appearances that resulted in the response of “he’s not here…” that they renamed the place accordingly. :)</p>
<p>I love the story that the campus tour guides tell at the U of Alabama. The Union soldiers were burning the campus. The soldiers then began gathering the furniture in the center of the university’s president’s home to burn the home. The president’s wife confronted the Union soldiers and scolded them for burning a college. They agreed to stop, they put the furniture back, and they stood guard during the rest of the war to protect any further damage to the university. </p>
<p>The president’s wife thanked them by serving them lemonade and cookies.</p>
<p>Those saved antebellum buildings are quite precious.</p>
<p>My GGgrandfather also fought in the Civil War, a Captain in the confederate army. Ironically, I’m African american.</p>
<p>^^^
I know that must seem odd, but many African Americans fought on the Confederate side.</p>
<p>^ And even more African-Americans have white ancestors, including former Confederate soldiers and officers—not to mention slaveholders. Heck, some African-Americans have white ancestors who were President of the United States.</p>
<p>My husband and I joined Ancestry.com last year and found out we have a number of well-known ancestors, including many former presidents (George Bush is my cousin?!), signers of the Declaration of Independence, actors, authors, and other famous people (Hillary Clinton is my cousin, too?!)</p>
<p>I’m Caucasian, but I learned that Booker T. Washington, Richard Allen (African American pastor and the founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church), and P.B.S. Pinchback (1st African American governor of a US state) are my cousins. I haven’t explored the relationships yet, so I’m not certain where the connections lie. I suspect that my ancestors were slave owners. That’s extremely unsettling to me, but it is what it is.</p>
<p>Remember John Noland was a free African American who was the premier scout for Quantrill’s Raiders and did the advance work in casing Lawrence Kansas when the Raiders burned Lawrence, Kansas and executed hundreds of pro-union abolitionists.</p>
<p>Anyone else have a family related to Robert E. Lee? When I was a kid, it seemed like everyone was related to him ;). We are supposedly related through his mother’s side, but I think most of my ancestors were either carpetbaggers, Crackers, or Cherokees who somehow escaped from the forced march.</p>
<p>Let’s not get carried away with the idea of African-American Confederate soldiers. Nearly 200,000 African-Americans served in the Union Army. The Confederate armies made extensive use of both free and slave African-American labor, but arming African-Americans was hugely controversial in the South and was not officially authorized by the Confederate Congress until the spring of 1865, very late in the war, as an act of desperation. Apparently fewer than 50 ever officially enlisted, though some Union officers reported military encounters with larger units of African-American Confederate soldiers so there may have been some unauthorized “off-the-books” arming of slaves and free blacks earlier in the war. In any event, the number of African-Americans voluntarily serving in the Confederate army is dwarfed by the much larger numbers on the Union side.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone is getting “carried away” with anything. We’re just discussing some of the oddities of the war. No one is implying that many AA’s wanted slavery to continue.</p>
<p>Not Robert E. Lee, but a senior citizen neighbor is a great great granddaughter of J.E.B. Stuart.</p>
<p>My grandmother’s maiden name was Davis, and we are supposedly related to, but not directly descended from, Jefferson Davis. But I have never been able to document that link.</p>
<p>My great grandfather in a different branch of my family tree was a Confederate soldier and owned a few slaves. But by the late 1860s all my ancestors who weren’t there already had moved to the far western US, so the family cultural and political connections to the South have long since faded away.</p>
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<p>One thing I’ve always wondered is if the South had won the Civil War or at least fought it out to a standstill, how long would slavery have continued? I seriously doubt they would still have it today, but it seems to me that it might have lasted into the early 20th century. They had shed so much blood spent so much money to hang on to it that the entire Civil War generation would have to die out before it could have become politically possible for the Confederacy to ammend their constitution to forbid slavery.</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>Who knows…</p>
<p>If Germany had won WWII, what would the entire world be like? We might not be speaking English.</p>
<p>A disturbing fact that’s not well-known: At the time of the Civil War, many free African Americans owned slaves. In 1860, 28% of the free African Americans in New Orleans owned slaves, as compared to about 1-1/2% of all American whites and less than 5% of Southern whites.</p>
<p>Mapsey, you may be interested in reading a book entitled ‘Slaves in the Family.’ I believe the author is John Ball, a young man whom discovered that his ancestors were among the largest slave-holding families in America. It’s a fascinating story about confronting uncomfortable family history…and about a white man seaching for his African-American relatives, as the males in the Ball clan did what many Plantation gentry did; they conceived their own slave children.</p>
<p>Many southerners, black and white are recently coming to grips with this and are actually meeting their blood kin in person. There’s a reason why so many African-Americans of a certain generation grew up being called ‘red’ or ‘yella.’ Sally Hemmings and Thomas Jefferson, anyone?</p>
<p>Almost forgot my point. Governor Pinchback of Reconstruction fame, was criticized by political opponents for not actually being, to use the term of the day, a Negro. Given that he was Governor of Louisiana, well I’m not surprised that there was controversy. As was said about Sally Hemmings, Governor Pinchback was ‘damn near white!’</p>
<p>Yes Mapsey that’s true, but only a very few free blacks owned slavesand typically in the port cities of New Orleans and Charleston, where free blacks had a measure of indenpendent wealth…for a time.</p>
<p>As historians have written, free Negroes were a absolute threat to the prevailing societal order and power in the southern states. Supremacists and successionists couldn’t very well intellectually condemn and oppress African decendants with the presence of successful blacks in their midst. Before the war broke out, many southern communities actually made it illegal for free blacks to reside or remain in counties and towns throughout the south.</p>
<p>I just came from a few meetings/appts downtown, and the civil war plaques/markers that I had recalled seeing on a particualr route I take wer still there. Not budged an inch.</p>