How did the Confederacy interpret George Washington? Who had a better claim to him, north or south? Would he have supported the Confederacy?
In the Cornerstone Speech, the Confederates explicitly reject the beliefs of the U S. Founding Fathers that slavery was an undesirable institution that should eventually somehow disappear.
>>17270256He would still be loyal to the Union
He was as close to a federalist as you can get without formally being a member of the Federalist party. You can't paint him as having Confederate ideals without insane mental gymnastics
>>17271105FPBP
>>17270256Washington and Madison would never allow the Union they fought so hard to create to crumble. Jefferson would join the Confederacy, however.
>>17270256While this doesn't necessarily mean anything, I would like to point out that Robert E Lee was married to Washington's great-granddaughter (through Washington's step-child, as he didn't have any biological children).>>17271114It's perfectly plausible for a Southern federalist to have sided with the Confederacy. After all, there were many Southern Whigs that did so-- Vice President Alexander Stephens was a Whig.
>>17272044Washington was increasingly skeptical of slavery as an institution as he grew older, and his prime concern was always the strength of the union. An organization which explicitly secedes from the union over slavery is almost antithetical to what Washington believed
>>17272071I don't entirely disagree with you actually, but I question if Washington would really place the Union and his concerns about slavery over his own state, his home, and his family/descendants. I think that complicates matters.
>>17270256If George Washington rose from his tomb in 1861, he would've worn grey and marched on DC to overthrow that tyrant Abraham Lincoln who makes King George the Third look like a schoolyard bully.Abraham Lincoln killed the Republic the founders had created. All because he wanted more tax dollars.
>>17270256The Confederates revered Washington of course.
They preferred Tommy Jeffs.
>>17272071Slavery doesn’t matter though. The south wasn’t fighting for slavery in the sense they were going to rebuild old Zanzibar. They were fighting for slavery as a southern institution because they were fighting for the South itself.Washington was a Southerner who took a Virginian army against other Americans.
>>17271114The only confederate ideal was being a Southerner. Robert E Lee and Jubal Early were staunchly pro Union until the war actually began. The civil war wasn’t a binary political event like we view it. It had multiple converging interests and clashes of interest. No one in the south really wanted secession as much as they found unity tolerable. They would have been more than happy to have the Union secede alongside them in a mass dissolution of the Federal Government. This wouldn’t even be an inditement of the government. They’d probably reform it. It’s not like the founders got rid of the parliament, they just preferred to have their own.We see the war differently because we are very polarized and think in revolutionary progressive terms.These people weren’t moving for revolutionary “change” as much as they were for a political course correction.
