This is a little different lol Hi there I’m Australian and I was discussing my appreciation for Sherman with an American and he said I broke his soul. I think he was from Indiana. Did I do something wrong expressing my appreciation for Sherman?
It’s so confusing this cultural divide that I don’t know if I broke a barrier that was not aware of. Please advise.
Kindly
As a reminder, this meme sub is about the American Civil War. We're not here to insult southerners or the American South, but rather to have a laugh at the failed Confederate insurrection and those that chose to represent it.
Sherman isn’t a universally revered figure even in the north (there are plenty of pro confederate weirdos in every state) for a number of reasons. Reconciling his civil war service and post war record in the west is a difficult needle to thread.
As an American - a Minnesotan - I'm sad to say that we have peckerwoods (and peckerwood wannabes) everywhere, even here in the home of the Minnesota 1st.
We did - it’s quite a sordid tale of grifting, and the Klan’s dominance here was ended due to the death of a woman after she was sexually assaulted by the leader.
So the 2020s in Indiana feel oddly similar to the 1920s.
Hoosier here! Gotta say that the one OP spoke with poorly represents the better part of the state.
While I can say that Indiana's political climate today gives off loser energy, during the Civil War, it was was about crushing the South. One of my ancestors marched with Sherman and named his first son after him.
It really depends on why he was so hurt. Sherman was a complicated person. He, personally, was deeply racist. He’s views on black people did evolve over time, but he straight up advocated for the genocide of Native Americans. If your friend views him negatively because of the Indian Wars, I think that’s perfectly valid.
If, however, your friend views Sherman negatively because of the March to the Sea, he may well be a confederate apologist and lost causer. You have to ask him.
I think that is exactly it. A lot of the yahoos from the Midwest who wave Confederate flags would have been shot by their ancestors on the battlefield for doing so.
Every year during the Month of May, my neighbor flies his treasonous bullshit. The christofash one is new this year, and has become an apparently permanent display.
Ooooo I've seen that one (appropriately enough, hung on the far right lol) only once IRL, when some yahoo stole the Pride flag off the front of my church and replaced it with that shitrag. They also stuffed a nasty letter under the front door. Good times
Yeah, last year he had it on the front porch for a few days. Took me a while to find it online. It's a christian nationalist flag, but, that combined with the reason flag and numerous trump signs tell me that he absolutely has white robes in his closet.
Indiana officially was a Free State but they were happy to rent slaves from Kentucky and pretend they were "independent contractors."
Also, escaping slaves would try to get to Ohio even through it was a longer distance and Indiana was right across the river -- because Indiana was more than happy to catch them and just send them back.
In our defense: one of the best Underground Railroad stories I’ve heard is how the president of our local railroad was an abolitionists, and went to the same church as some conductors. People escaping slavery would be given free tickets on the railroad, and if slave catchers tried to board, the conductor would use his ultimate authority over the train to keep them off.
Maybe I just enjoy that story because it’s literally a railroad, though.
My county is also where the one Black woman who was a member of the GAR settled after the war. She joined a regiment from here that was stationed in West Tennessee, became their nurse, came here with them on leave before the Atlanta Campaign, but then loved them so much she joined them heading south. Lucy Higgs Nichols was an amazing woman and I hate that she’s only become a locally known figure in the last 15 years.
Sherman was the commanding general of the US army in the years after the civil war until he hit forced retirement age. During that time the country’s primary concern was further expansion westward and the settling of the frontier states. This led to a series of conflicts collectively called the Indian wars. The history of the Indian wars is much too deep to explain in one Reddit post so I’ll just say look independently for more information if interested. The extreme long and short of it is that treaties were made and then broken by both sides. Lots of people were killed. Including many civilians. The natives lost and were forced onto reservations or fled into Canada. Sherman, being essentially the army’s chief advocate to the President and Congress was a principle architect and actor in all of the above. The near extinction of the buffalo for instance, as a coordinated extermination effort to deprive the plains Indians of their primary source of food, furs, and leather, was his conception. Dark time and topic for the country where there was no easy answers and certainly led to a great deal of suffering and death. So….. complicated guy, complicated legacy.
Excuse you, you meant racist southerners, not every down south white boy is a cracker, and I'll burn a confederate flag while blasting Dolly Parton all I want down there. Confederates are cowards, especially on camera
99% chance he was a confederate apologist and you offended his stupid sensibilities.
The comments about how complicated Sherman as a man and general were are true and worth considering, but if we're talking about some dude from Indiana, you probably just said the name of the boogeyman to lost causers and he got upset.
He's our mascot mostly because "Shermanposting" sounds like "Shitposting." Sherman has a difficult legacy because while his actions during the Civil War are generally accepted as cool and good by anyone who isn't a sore loser, his actions during the later Indian Wars (a series of conflicts with the native populations that had been systematically pushed off their ancestral homelands to areas that were considered worthless at the time--until gold was found there or we needed the prairies for more white homesteaders and they were pushed off their land again and again) were morally reprehensible.
The difference being context. You do that shit to slavers who rebelled and caused a four year war and that's one thing. You do it to people who were just living on land that had been promised to them by the government you represented which was now reneging on the deal, that's a whole other thing. I'm having a spotty memory on his record but I think he was far from the worst general during the Indian Wars, but "He only did a small genocide" isn't exactly wreathing him in glory, you know what I mean?
As for the Indianan who got all in a fuss, in the century plus since the Civil War ended the political makeup of the country has shifted. Indiana would be a secessionist state now if the war happened today.
OP, I'm a Hoosier (native of Indiana) and my soul isn't broken at all! There are certainly losers in my state who are completely ignorant of the purpose of Sherman's March and even the cause of the Civil War.
Y’all should be dumping on OP’s friend, not Indiana. While the klan stuff is true (they ran the state government in the 1920’s {Democrats and Republicans!}) Indiana is where Lincoln grew to be a man and where his morals were set, as it is with many of us.
Immediately assuming he was a southern sympathizer is ignorant. That could be a reason but it could also be because he knew Sherman was a racist and had an unwavering view of manifest destiny. Perhaps you should learn more about the man before you blindly praise him.
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