This country owes as much of its enviable martial heritage to Southern as Northern soldiers. Winston Churchill commented concerning American entry into WW II that victory was then assured, because our Civil War demonstrated the tenacity required to defeat the Nazis.
Now in subservience to an emerging popular morality, we must banish the Confederate battle flag, memorials, and the memory of those who served.
Responding to such assertions Ulysses Grant would repeat from Appomattox, “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us”.
When Joshua Chamberlain received the Confederate surrender he said, “Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond;—was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?”
The bloodiest conflict this country ever endured resolved the issues of states’ rights, secession, and slavery. Great men like Grant, Sherman, Lee, and Johnston and their soldiers ended this terrible war.
Because the Confederacy’s existence was never politically recognized, Andrew Johnson and Jefferson Davis never signed a surrender document. Military actions alone resolved these issues. These military actions were fought out to the last measure of human endurance. Military leaders and their soldiers resolved what should have been political issues. Monuments North and South testify to the sincerity of those few who endured the tragedy of that struggle.
Their involvement came after abolitionists and planters and their political allies failed to identify those positions outside their inflexible ideologies that would have brought peaceful agreement. Instead these fire-eating miscreants of both persuasions stumbled into the Civil War.
Now similar intellectual dwarfs would repudiate this history.
Personal Memoirs by Ulysses S. Grant
Joshua Chamberlain
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joshua_Chamberlain
Rewriting American History
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams061417.php3
Were Confederate Generals Traitors?
http://walterewilliams.com/were-confederate-generals-traitors/
The irony is that if Lee had commanded in 1862, he might have taken Richmond. The war might have ended much sooner, before the Emancipation Proclamation. Slavery would have been weakened and it's hard to see Lincoln forcing the runaway slaves ("contraband of war") who had escaped to Federal lines to return to slavery, but the final end of slavery might have been much delayed.