Re: Shiloh 4/6/1862

Posted by JerryS on April 06, 2018 at 11:50:54 from (104.49.161.5):

In Reply to: Shiloh 4/6/1862 posted by Ultradog MN on April 06, 2018 at 04:43:10:

My great-grandpap was at Shiloh, and his Louisiana regiment was in the thick of things at the Hornet's Nest. He survived, and in fact served until the end of the war, with time-outs for a wound (Chickamauga) and a brief stint in a federal prison.

GGP was certainly not a slave owner. He was one of those who came into this world with nothing and left most of it to his descendants. I contend that he, like the vast majority of southern soldiers, were not fighting to preserve slavery. I am not so naive or uninformed as to suggest that slavery was not the underlying issue of the war, but it did not begin as a noble crusade to end slavery. Lincoln himself said, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not to either save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.....” The Emancipation Proclamation, issued in late 1862, had effect only in Union-held territory; it was a PR device Lincoln conceived as a means of providing a moral impetus to continue the bloody conflict.

I do not hold any regrets about the outcome of the war. In fact, I believe that if the South had won, poor southerners like my GGP might have found themselves as subjects of an aristocratic autocracy that would not have been to their liking. Horrible as it was, the war did serve notice to contemporary and future leaders that violent resistance to real or perceived tyranny is always a possibility.

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