Yeah, it was Stoneman's cavalry, all right. Baez sang "so much cavalry" and made a couple of other small errors in the lyrics...which is odd. She is usually so meticulous. As for her being a "fraud", ha! I laugh. I've seldom heard of anyone less fraudulent than Joan Baez, or more willing to take responsibility, or more dedicated to her ideals.

Along the same lines, I knew a kid back in high school (about 1966) who was into the Stones and the Beatles bigtime. He expressed the opinion that Bob Dylan was "a phony"...probably because he could not comprehend his songs at all. Dylan is now a music legend, who had a big influence on both the Stones and the Beatles, and formed musical friendships with them...and that kid has amounted to just about nothing in life. So there ya go. Talk's cheap when it comes from the cheap seats.

Now then, to associate Stonewall Jackson with the Union Army is downright sacrilegious!!! :-) He detested them, and made life hell for them till his untimely demise at the hands of jumpy Confederate pickets (who shot him by mistake at night...such things sometimes happened).

technission - There are any number of other reasons to look back to the prewar South as an era of glory...that have nothing whatever to do with slavery. Robert E. Lee was himself strongly opposed to slavery, but when Virginia seceded he felt that his loyalty to his home state overrode his allegiance to the Union. The majority of Southerners felt as he did about that, regardless of how they felt about slavery. They fought for their home territory and for sovereignty. Also, a great many of the Union citizenry had as low a regard for blacks as did the Southerners...but not as big an economic need for them.

It does not speak very well for America as a whole that they were far behind much of Europe in abandoning slavery. The British Empire abolished it in 1834, and the British Navy (being at peace at the time) was given much work to do suppressing the illegal (from Britain's point of view) slave trade in Africa and elsewhere. They captured and sank hundreds of slave ships on the open sea with efficiency and dedication, while slavery was "business as usual" in the USA.

I suspect that had slave plantations been a key factor in the northern economy, the last thing you would have seen raised as an issue between North and South would have been slavery, but there would still have probably been a Southern secession, leading to civil war...for powerful economic and political reasons.

The South was neither populous enough nor industrialized sufficiently to compete with the North economically...or politically. They became more and more marginalized and saw secession as the only way out to preserve their sovereignty and freedom of action.

This does not in any way deny the prejudices you observed while growing up, nor does it excuse them.

But the Old South did have a grace and beauty all its own, according to what I have read, and that was not necessarily tied to slavery. They were a more pastoral society, more traditional, more courtly, and brother they had style! So did their army. Always outnumbered, always outgunned, they had elan and esprit de corps to make up for it, and they had the most flamboyant and memorable commanders too.

They fought a war they had almost no chance of winning, fought magnificently, and went down to catastrophic defeat. How could they not feel nostalgic about it afterward?

The song "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" captures that nostalgia very well, along with the sense of regret and loss.

But if I'd grown up in your town, and seen what you did, it would probably bug me too...

I grew up in Canada, where slavery was ended long before the civil war...where the more prosaic issues of unequal economic and political clout in different regions have almost caused this country to fragment on a number of occasions...as America did in the 1860's.

- LH