this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
447 points (98.3% liked)

Fire Memes for Traitor Haters

307 readers
211 users here now

Where we meme (joking in tone and detail, serious in sentiment) about General Sherman, the Civil War, and how the secesh traitors had it coming.

RULES

  1. No bigotry. The Union, or at least the part of the Union WE support, fought AGAINST that shite. We are anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, and in general anti-bigot here, even if not all the lads in Union blue uniforms were.

  2. No Confederate sympathizing. Anti-democratic racist slaver traitors don't deserve shit.

  3. Follow all Lemmy.world rules

founded 5 months ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] PugJesus@lemmy.world 18 points 2 days ago

Sounds evil, which it was, but at the same time it was a matter of survival, as proven after the war when many plantations and businesses using the former slaves collapsed.

Yes, but not because they became enslaved to northern machinery. Because the slaves left, having been treated horribly, and the post-war planter aristocracy was incapable of luring any but the most desperate back since the aristocracy was darkly hilariously (in the sense of "the sheer gall of asking someone to come back and work for peanuts or goodwill after enslaving them") and gruesomely unwilling to pay their former slaves a fair wage, even as their plantations were overgrown and their properties rotted, unmaintained.

Turns out that when almost half of your labor force up and leaves because you've been a piece of shit, and you're unwilling to stop being a piece of shit even to lure them back, the economy slumps. Who'd've thought?

The materialist analysis is really lacking on the Civil War. It really was a war of ideas. People, including demographics on a large-scale, do not always act rationally, but according to the values set by their societies.