Southern Unionist

It has this sloganeering power to it that never gets much analysis.

Well, all right, now somewhere on this outline I Well, in the wake of the Civil War, of course, for that generation, there were Unionist and Confederate blame-laying interpretations of the war.

It's a fascinating collection of Many of it is score, much of it is score settling, of course.

It's vindication on the part of Southerners.

That sometimes is used now as a euphemism.

My favorite label, and it wasn't just Southern, but by the 1890s and turn of the twentieth century, a label that got into the press and people loved it as a throwaway joke line was, quote, You want to start dissolving conflict? We had some late unpleasantness here and slaughtered all these people, but never mind.

Now, I'll pass on examples of this Unionist and Confederate tradition, and perhaps we'll just revisit this at the end of the course, because that's perhaps where it But by the late nineteenth century, the 1890s to be exact, and into the early twentieth century, one historian named James Ford Rhodes, and this kind of nationalist tradition in which he wrote, had a tremendous impact on the way the vast majority of Americans would come to understand Civil War causation.

Rhodes was a gifted amateur, a gentleman scholar.

Andrew Johnson was his governor.

It took tremendous courage to be a Unionist in Tennessee during But there was a lot of Unionism in East Tennessee, and in 64 Lincoln needed a border state running mate, after who had been his running mate before? Totally forgettable, I realize.

No one ever remembers vice presidents from the 19th, anybody remember vice presidents from the twentieth century? Only those who get Nobel Prizes do we really remember, I guess.

But Hannibal Hamlin of New Hampshire had been Lincoln's running mate.