You don’t have to admire the Confederacy to admire the confederate soldier and how he fought against all odds and won victories that are taught in military colleges the world over. You don’t have to support slavery to answer the call when your militia is called to active service. And you aren’t a rebel when you want to form your own government. Your a free man with self determination- see how that works?
God bless Louisiana! And her Southern kin!
I had ancestors on both sides with my family being from Kentucky/Tennessee/Virginia area. Those in the Confederacy were dirt poor farmers and had no slaves. They were fighting as Shelby Foote put it, “because your(Yankees) are down here.” That being said I had relatives who fought for the Union cause just a vehemently. I had one relative who fought for the South, was captured and agreed to fight in the Union Army. Him and his brother in the Confederate Army never spoke again to each other after the war according to family stories. My great-great grandfather was a boy during the war and the story is told that he was on his way to the mill with his corn and ran into a Union patrol who seized it but let him keep his mule. To quote him, “them damn Yankees took my corn!”
The South is the only part of America to know total defeat in war, which I think hardened the survivors resolve to recover and retain parts of their history. I dated a girl in the 1990’s who was a Democrat and yet her family still in that time frame talked with disdain for General Sherman and what his army did to their ancestors. Yes we lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan but that was far away and not in our neck of the woods. To recover from total defeat, occupation, object poverty and overcome institutional racism-Democrats again, was a remarkable feat over 115 roughly years from April 1865.