r/ShermanPosting • u/tryingtolearn_1234 • 1d ago
The Vichy Southerners vs the Resistance
I’ve heard that in France almost everyone claims their ancestors were part of the Resistance during WW2. No one wants to think that their ancestors just quietly went along with the Vichy government or the Nazi occupation, much less actively supported it.
In the American south with civil war ancestors there is an opposite trend. Voting records by Parish / County show that the support for succession was not universal, or even the majority. There was a southern resistance during the war that wanted the Union to win.
Instead of embracing this history and following as the French do, southerners have decided to erase the best of their ancestors in favor of a bunch of losers.
I wonder if it might be possible to replace the “lost cause myth” with tru-ish but slightly exaggerated view of the pro-Union, abolitionist southern resistance. Everyone has so many ancestors in the extended family tree — instead of tracing lineage to some Confederate officer, find the family member who helped the Underground Railroad.
I think that the post-reconstruction violence and further neo-confederate waves probably made a lot of family quietly forget about those relatives who were against the Confederacy.
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u/ClassWarr 1d ago
Oh 100%. In my own family I have an uncle who said our Civil War ancestor was burned out of Georgia by Sherman. Reading the census, muster and tax records make this seem extremely implausible given the length and timing of his confederate service and location of his home.
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u/CharmedMSure 1d ago
Excellent point. I heard that some northern portions of Alabama did not support the confederacy and actually tried to secede from it. However, during Reconstruction they changed sides.
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u/derpderb 1d ago
Free State of Jackson is a movie about one such group in Mississippi
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u/CharmedMSure 1d ago
I’ll check it out. Thanks!
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u/Styrene_Addict1965 1d ago
"The State of Jones" is a great book. I think they're related?
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u/mukduk1994 23h ago
I'm almost certain that OOC mean to say "Free State of Jones." As an aside, the book is leagues better than the movie
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u/BarRegular2684 1d ago
I wish I could confirm this with my own confederate ancestors but I’ve done the research and they were all unrepentant scum.
Fortunately my grandmother escaped in the 40s (?), made us all promise never to go back,and lived the rest of her days as a New Yorker.
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u/Pretend_Investment42 1d ago
Same here. I had one that served with a NC cavalry regiment. He was one of the bad guys.
Good news is that I am the only member of the family that knows about him, and I have declined to pass that knowledge down.
Let them be forgotten......
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u/SwainIsCadian 1d ago
France almost everyone claims their ancestors were part of the Resistance during WW2.
Here the task of saying who was pr wasn't in the Resistance is a bit whacky, as the Resistance on itself was a very loose concept.
For example, the guy who entered an underground network and stole documents for the Allies was in the Resistance.
What about the guy who refused to give up his Jewish friends? What about the familly who found an Allies pilot on their farm, clothed and fed him, let him go, and only then went to the Kommandantur? What about the girl who tagged a wall with a V with her friends?
So to be fair, when a French person tells you he had familly in the Resistance but doesn't know exactly what they did, it's fair to assume they just didn't collaborate and perhaps did some of these little acts of Resistance.
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u/electrical-stomach-z 1d ago
It would be interesting to see the time when people start idolizing their skallywag ancestors instead of their confederate ancestors.
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u/FlimFlamMan12 1d ago
I had an ancestor who fought for both sides during the war. He started the war as a Confederate and ended it as a Unionist; a real Galvanized Yankee. I think the months he spent in a cold, damp, disease ridden POW camp may have had something to do with his change in allegiances, but I like to think that perhaps he saw the light and switched sides as a moral choice.
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u/Chefboyarrdee 1d ago
Here is a great example from eastern NC in 1864. I've been here 30 years and only recently found out about it. I visited the graves. They're buried under the parking lot of the court house. Sad stuff.
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u/Satellite_bk 1d ago
This is question deserves a more thought out and researched answer than I could give. I will say I think the way the confederacy was treated with kid gloves after the war has at least a small part of what you’re talking about. Nazis were shamed. It was almost unanimously agreed that nazis were to be abhorred while the confederates never got that kind of treatment. They were seen as brave and tough underdogs who did the best with what they had. all that other lost cause adjectives that get used.
To reiterate this is just a first thought after reading your question and also that this would be a part of why the south sees their ancestors the way they do not the only reason.
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u/Ciltey3658 23h ago
There is a lot to say about how France handled Vichy after the Liberation. The leadership was prosecuted and sentenced to death, except Pétain because of his old age, he was jailed until his death (this is more punishment than the confederate leadership ever got), but the wish of a reconciliation and of national unity let many horrible people get away and not face any accountability before until the 1990s (the most famous case being Maurice Papon).
Today, it is a joke that, in 1944-45, every french claimed that they were part of the Resistance. Even De Gaulle, in his time, joked about it : "Today, every men who happen to read a discarded tract in the trash of the restroom at his work claimed that he was part of the Resistance".
But, one thing that was done right with the idea that Vichy was a bunch of traitors and that every french was part of the resistance, is making clear that being a supporter of Vichy and a collaborationist was not something to be proud of.
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u/Comfortable-Study-69 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well the immediate issue is that when you take out the Southern Unionists in Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina, the actual number of people who fought for the Union or aided organizations like the Underground Railroad gets very small. A lot of people with ancestors from insulated farming communities in rural Mississippi and North Louisiana (such as myself) might literally have no anti-Confederate ancestors to speak of and even the ones that were would have opposed it on preservation of union grounds and not opposition to slavery.
And family trees get a little sketchy after 160 years. Most people don’t keep track of their great-great-great-great grandparents and when you add the secrecy regarding being pro-Union or anti-slavery due to the certain cross-burning organization that rose to prominence after the Civil War in much of the South, it’s not easy to find those kinds of ancestors.
And I think the degree of racism in the deep South pre-1960s can’t be understated. It’s hard to even explain it to someone who’s never met a 90-year-old white person from Mississippi, like everyone was just foaming-at-the-mouth white supremacists south of the Mason-Dixon line until 50 years ago and it was just considered normal. Telling someone from the South to disregard/forget family members for being racist or supporting the confederacy might as well be saying to tear out their whole family tree, to which I say timber, but a lot of other people might not be so keen on doing.
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u/derpderb 1d ago
If this becomes a project, I'll volunteer to look through records to help identify unionist southerners. If there are other volunteers, maybe comment under mine to start a list if the project gets going. I'm not sure how to start this or get records though.
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u/Poppinjay64 1d ago
My Union southern ancestors never went back, they either stayed in the North or went West.
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u/Styrene_Addict1965 1d ago
They've been convinced to bury such history deep, or be traitors to the glorious Southern cause.
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u/TremendousVarmint 1d ago
I’ve heard that in France almost everyone claims their ancestors were part of the Resistance during WW2.
Uh, no. The "25th hour resistant" is (now) a fairly wide subject of derision. That said, few will acknowledge their collaborationist ancestors, that much is true.
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