re: How do you feel about Mississippi's "Confederate Heritage Month"?

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Then again, I also recognize that it was a different world in the mid-1800s, and I could have just as easily found myself fighting alongside Confederate forces because I wouldn't know any better.

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I’m glad you went this far in your thinking at least. Yet your last sentence is short sighted.

You may have been like many Southerners and fighting not for slavery, as most Confederate soldiers didn’t own slaves, but simply because you believed you must defend your home, family, and friends. Or because you felt more loyalty to your state as was very common then.

I think it is very simplistic and wrong to judge swathes of people that lived long ago, especially in such turbulent situations. We can of course examine a specific person and his words, beliefs, etc. But not millions of common people.

I say this as someone whose great great grandfather Samuel, along with all four of his brothers, were officers in the Union army. They came from St Louis. Samuel met my great great grandmother in New Orleans during the war. He was wounded and in a hospital and she was a nurse. This was when the city was under federal occupation by the Union army.