I'm not sure how the word "antebellum" became exclusively associated with the Civil War in popular usage in the United States. But I'm assuming that most American readers anyone would automatically recognize a post about something "antebellum" as meaning pre-Civil War.
The Web site for Reconstruction: The Second Civil War has a page called "White Men Unite" (!?) that contain a mini-documentary called "White Southerners." It's actually referring to "postbellum" days (I don't know that ever heard anyone use that word), but the narrator opens:
In the spring of 1865, hundreds of thousands of defeated Southerners returned home after four years of bitter fighting.
Although the Confederacy had come to stand for the principles of the plantation South, many in its ranks had only reluctantly fought to defend that way of life.
In fact, before the war, only one-third of Southern whites had owned slaves.
This is a fact that sometimes comes up in the context of attempts by "Southern heritage" groups to claim that slavery had "nothing to do" with the Civil War, or some variation on that notion. That would have been an astonishing claim to any citizen in the Union or the Confederacy in 1861-65.
Because the fact that most white Southerners didn't own slaves does not mean that they didn't support the institution of slavery, or that they were unaware that the Confederacy was a slave power.
(Cont. in Part 2)
No comments:
Post a Comment