Reply To: Fly the flag of the Confederate States of America?

Strega, while I grew up in the North (Ohio), I’ve been around on Earth 68 years and I don’t think I’ve heard “The War of Northern Aggression” until recently, even in movies or in TV dramas.

At the same time, I have to wonder how many of these people who claim to revere what they call The Confederate Flag (though it really isn’t that at all) really think they’d be better off today had the South seceded.

BTW, while not widely known or discussed, there was a strong anti-Confederate sentiment among southern white women, whose men were called up to fight the North:

In the spring of 1863, soldiers’ wives took direct action in a wave of spectacular food riots. Mobs of women—numbering from a dozen to more than 300 and armed with navy revolvers, pistols, repeaters, bowie knives and hatchets—carried out at least 12 violent attacks on stores, government warehouses, army convoys, railroad depots, saltworks and granaries. The attacks occurred in broad daylight, and were all perpetrated in the space of one month, between the middle of March and the middle of April 1863. It was truly a Confederate spring of soldiers’ wives’ discontent.

That wave of riots had a measurable impact on Confederate war policy, forcing revisions of conscription and tax policy. It also prompted the development of a massive welfare program by the states that, in allocating scarce funds and foodstuffs to the relief of soldiers’ wives and children, dwarfed anything undertaken in the North. In the heart of Confederate national territory, the mass of Southern women had emerged as formidable adversaries of the government in the long struggle over its military policies. By insisting that the state live up to its promises to protect and support them, even taking up arms to do so, these poor white women, who had never participated in politics before, stepped decisively into the making of history. (source)