re: On this day 157 years ago, William T. Sherman presented Savannah, GA to Lincoln...

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I guess the winners get to keep their statues.

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Oh really...

I think the grating part is the obsession with claiming absolute moral righteousness. “Woe to the vanquished” has always been the way of the world and always will be. It’s a tough lesson to accept, tougher still if you lost, but it’s no less true.

But in the more distant past, the conquerors let well enough alone once they did their will. Their superior might did all the talking. They didn’t spend 160 years after the fact self-righteously lecturing the vanquished, they didn’t deprive the vanquished of the dignity of having legitimate interests at stake, they didn’t reduce a valiant struggle between nations into a morality play fit for Saturday morning cartoons.

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They didn’t spend 160 years after the fact self-righteously lecturing the vanquished, they didn’t deprive the vanquished of the dignity of having legitimate interests at stake, they didn’t reduce a valiant struggle between nations into a morality play fit for Saturday morning cartoons.

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I think the grating part is the obsession with claiming absolute moral righteousness.

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See the post above yours to prove you 100% correct.

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One can simultaneously recognize the evils of slavery and also realize that the Union victory was the primary factor in the death of the American republic and the reason why our current federal government is a centralized leviathan which seeks to control and regulate every facet of our lives.

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All of this. Civil war destroyed states rights and the right to peacefully secede the union if the union no longer furthered the interests of the individual state

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North made the war about ending slavery

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*once they were losing ground to the south and public opinion in the north.

Fixed your statement for you. Lincoln pulled the defacto “let’s find those WMDs” card once people in the north started thinking about letting the Confederacy go. The Civil War was not about slavery until it needed to be.

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it takes a bit more critical thinking skills to understand that the civil war also put us on the path of federal government overreach on states rights.

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But all it takes is an unbiased understanding of History to realize that your statement is incorrect.

What put us on the path to a stronger federal government is our Founding Fathers' rejection of the original Articles of Confederation which were seen as creating a central government that was too weak.

The whole States' Rights claim is a fabrication of the supporters of the Lost Cause of the late 19th century. All you have to do is read the original Articles of Confederation, the US Constitution, the Fugitive Slave Acts (1793, 1850), the Missouri Compromise (1820), the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), and the Constitution of the Confederate States - specifically Article IV, Sec. 3, Part 3.:

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The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government...

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...to see that the "States' Rights" claim is a fraud.

Under the US Constitution, each State has the power to determine for itself whether slavery would be allowed or prohibited, but under the the Confederate Constitution the States had no such power. How in the world is this any kind of expansion of "States' Rights"?

And while we're on the subject, can anyone point out to me in the US Constitution anywhere that acknowledges ANY government entity as having any "rights" at all - much less "States' Rights"? In my reading, all I can find is that "Rights" are reserved for the People, and governments merely have (limited) "Powers".

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The North made the war about destroying the South.

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They should have just complied.

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This cannot be upvoted enough. Our desire to remake the world in our own image through war, death and destruction can be directly traced to the Puritan Yankee desire to have everyone think, act and behave just like them.

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I, Too, am a McClanahan enjoyer :)

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But in the more distant past, the conquerors let well enough alone once they did their will.

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lolwut. In the past, every single Confederate leader would have been publicly executed to cheering throngs of people. The US government was eminently forgiving of the treasonous South even after such a bitter war. So sorry if the worst the South has had to deal with is occasionally being reminded that the confederate leaders were wrong and lost. That doesn’t seem to bother any southerner who doesn’t have some romanticized view of the war or the confederacy.