I didn’t know this until now, but apparently many of the German immigrants in Virginia signed up for the Union during the Civil War — between 176,000 and 200,000 of them.

Now I wonder if a German ancestor of mine fought for the Union in Virginia.

So our Governor eventually admitted that the Civil War was about slavery, which almost makes Confederate History Month here in Virginia worth it.

Actually, a month where we focus on the Civil War, the Confederacy, and Virginia’s role in it doesn’t sound like that bad of an idea.

I posted quite a [...]

I haven’t had the time recently to give this the attention it deserves, but I’m struck by the similarities in the “honoring” of Jesse Helms and the “honoring” of the Confederacy; that is, he’s valued as being a proponent of individual liberty and states rights, but it’s fighting for the freedom to deny other people [...]

Or, in plain language, “black voting rights before the Civil War.”

A couple of folks have suggested here that Northern sentiment towards black civil rights was more or less one of convenience and self interest — that no one was actually interested in treating Black people as equals. Not knowing any better, I assumed this [...]

So, I’m up to about the election of 1856 in my Civil War history text and I’m still having difficulty wrapping my head around why the Southern states felt it was necessary to secede if it did not have anything to do with slavery. The line has been that the North was interfering with the [...]

If the Civil War was over slavery, why did some slave-owning states decide to stay in the Union? That would seem to be contrary to their interests and desires, right? As commenter “proud” suggests, it smacks of self-loathing.

But states, being democratic bodies themselves, do not have a self to loathe. A state’s [...]

This is one of the questions commenter “Proud” asked in the comments. Or, if Lee freed his slaves before the war, didn’t that mean he was against slavery and that slavery was therefore not the cause of the civil war? Gail Jarvis frames the claim this way:

Robert E. Lee vigorously opposed slavery and [...]

Slavery divided the United States long before the Civil War broke out. Many of the states in the North had already abolished slavery while those in the South maintained the institution. There was something of an uneasy compromise, but it was considerably strained by acquisition of new territory: would this new territory be slave-holding or [...]

I see from sources too numerous to mention—it’s one of those “throw a rock” situations again—that Dean has had another foot-in-mouth moment. He said he “wants to be to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.”

It’s the “flag debate” again. The arguments on both sides are so well-rehersed [...]

I had an interesting cultural experience yesterday evening and this morning. I submitted a photograph to waferbaby’s city project. Daniel asked readers to take a photograph of someplace in their city and send it to him along with a description. I sent him a picture of the inside of Union Station because, let’s face it, [...]