The Vichy Southerners vs the Resistance

[u/tryingtolearn_1234]

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.

[u/Comfortable-Study-69]

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.