Kbg wrote: ↑Sat Nov 16, 2019 12:21 am
Grant was magnanimous at a personal level, but he had no love for the ideals of slavery or the people who favored them by the time the civil war ended. The war changed him and Lincoln, it made them LESS tolerant of slavery. The latter part of the quote was my intent for posting. Bad is bad and the stars and bars and nazi swastika represent bad.
Side note, he’s faring pretty well amongst more modern historians. All history is revisionist, but the modern consensus is that a lot of his bad rap was a deliberate reading/interpretation of history in order to rewrite the root cause of the civil war and depict reconstruction in a bad light.
Comparing the Confederate flag to the Nazi swastika is not really fair, IMO.
By the way, the Stars & Bars is a Confederate flag, but probably isn't the one you mean. This is the Stars & Bars:
It's often the selection of people who have to fly a Confederate flag but don't want people to know about it. It's common in "six flags over Texas" displays, for example. The Confederacy's first inclination was to use the Stars & Stripes, and make the federals choose a new flag, because they were the ones performing a revolution. But the Stars & Bars were adopted instead. That proved too similar on the battlefield, so a battle flag was designed (typically now known as "the Confederate flag"). That design was featured in the other two national flags, but was never itself the flag of the government: only of the soldiers serving in defense of their homes.
Regardless, the Confederate flag has flown everywhere that local people have gotten together to attempt to throw off know-everything, do-everything government. For example, at the fall of the Berlin Wall.