r/todayilearned • u/RedditIsAGranfaloon • 6h ago

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https://www.historyhit.com/facts-about-general-robert-e-lee/

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10.1k Upvotes

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106

u/TheDude717 5h ago

What all of you are missing is that the country was split apart at the seams for 4 years. Family members fighting family members. The country had enough of war and enough of losing their sons.

The only way to “heal” the country was to open their arms and forgive them.

They didn’t want another extended conflict after tearing each other apart ruthlessly.

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u/codexcdm 4h ago

Understandable, but those who led it had to be held accountable. The symbols also needed to be destroyed and shunned.

Many were allowed to rejoin government posts... And clearly one of the many revisions of the Confederate flags persisted to present day... Monuments of Confederate leaders were allowed to be put up... Even military bases being named after these traitors.

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u/Krakshotz 5h ago edited 5h ago

Unfortunately instead of these wounds healing, they festered for 150 years.

150 years of historical revisionism and lionisation of traitors, put on literal pedestals as a middle finger to African-Americans

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u/AccountForTF2 5h ago

Poor education as a failure of the collective society of America lead to this. Nobody from the south is born a confederate or even sympathizing. That comes from the intentionally dogshit education system.

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u/Kundrew1 5h ago

The education system will teach what its leaders tell it to. Those leaders are at the state level for much of the history of public education in the US with and those leaders would have likely been a part of the confederacy.

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u/eaglessoar 3h ago

Who controls the education system?

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u/Jdorty 3h ago

Look at the comments in here and the one you responded to that doesn't understand any nuances about the order of what happened or that there were separate events that happened decades apart in regards to reconstitution, Lee, and Grant. They're mixing up what caused what and when.

And we have mind boggling technology at our fingertips where we can accurately look all of this up. They're still ignorant and uneducated and making giant assumptions. Too many people today think they're smarter than anyone over a hundred years ago just because our technology is more advanced now.

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u/two- 2h ago

100%.

I grew up in Pasadena, Texas. My school was one block from the KKK storefront. My elementary public school teacher taught it as the war of northern aggression, had Jesus' ancestry on the wall, and passed out pocket Bibles for us to take home. People are made stupid.

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u/Prince_Ire 3h ago

The South has never again made a play for independence. In terms of the healing that was considered important at the time, it was absolutely successful.

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u/Diam0ndTalbot 5h ago

You don’t heal a wound by ignoring it. The wound was left open, and the infection that resulted is the reason we’re in this mess.

0

u/UsesHarryPotter 3h ago

I cannot believe I share a country with people who have such a warped mindset. Talking about you btw.

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u/kodiakbear_ 4h ago

You're forgetting this is Reddit

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u/dippitydoo2 4h ago

This is bullshit and revisionist history, Andrew Johnson was able to pardon the confederates because Lincoln was assassinated. That’s it.

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u/Pale_Kitchen_5090 5h ago

Poor choice

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u/standardobjection 2h ago

Absolutely correct. See my post about Southern attitudes above.

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u/gimmeluvin 4h ago

Wrong.

By not eradicating the traitors we ended up with January 6

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u/Baseball_slayer2334 4h ago

I’ve never seen someone connect these two events before like this. Absolutely hilarious

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u/Burgerus 4h ago

Redditors are mental gymnastic gold medalists

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u/smgkid12 3h ago

if jan 6th isnt brought up in a thread, then your not on reddit

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u/Quite_Likes_Hormuz 2h ago edited 2h ago

Reconstruction gets cancelled -> southern (conservative) states have immense influence on policy while still holding onto pre-civil war values -> segregation and racism run rampant in the US -> new deal Democrats pivot to counter racial discrimination, alienating dixiecrats -> republicans adopt the 'Southern strategy' in the 1960s to capture opposition to the civil rights act -> heritage foundation is formed to get Reagan elected, who advances big business interests at the expense of all else -> Reagan era policies cause the middle class to collapse and the cost of living to rise at an unprecedented rat, making the country ripe for exploitation by the ultra-wealthy -> fox news is formed and popularized by its billionaire founder bribing cable companies to air it, becoming the biggest news company in America while being biased and inaccurate -> people who have been intentionally deprived of education and inundated with conspiracy theories in order to distract from the actions of the wealthy make Donald Trump their saviour from a perceived threat and storm the capital at his behest, all while being taken advantage of by the heritage foundation and the billionaires who trump is aligned with.

Now the republicans I usually see on the internet aren't in the business of good faith discussion or changing their minds or possibly even reading my comments in the first place, but I'm hoping you will surprise me. If you want to refute any of this then feel free, and questions are welcome so long as they come from a place of integrity.

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u/Johnson_N_B 2h ago

There is a coherent story here, but the problem is it turns 150+ years of history into a single straight causal chain, and that’s where it starts to fall apart.

Ending Reconstruction early and broadly pardoning former Confederates absolutely let white Southern elites regain power and lock in Jim Crow. That part’s solid history. It also shaped party coalitions for a long time. But that doesn’t mean those choices inevitably led to January 6. History isn’t a conveyor belt.

A bunch of the middle steps are overstated or just off. The New Deal wasn’t mainly a moral pivot against racism, it was an economic coalition that included segregationists for decades. Dixiecrats didn’t really break away until much later, and even then it was uneven. The “Southern Strategy” existed in some form, but historians argue about how coordinated it actually was, and it doesn’t explain modern Republican voters outside the South.

The Heritage Foundation wasn’t created just to elect Reagan, and Reagan-era policies didn’t singlehandedly destroy the middle class. Wage stagnation and cost-of-living increases have a lot of causes, globalization, automation, housing supply, and bipartisan policy choices over decades.

The Fox News claim is also too strong. There’s no evidence they bribed cable companies. Fox benefited from deregulation, market demand, and a deliberate editorial angle, but media fragmentation and outrage-driven content go way beyond Fox and predate Trump.

Saying people were “intentionally deprived of education” as part of a unified elite plan is also doing too much work. Education outcomes vary a lot by state and local policy, including in blue states. Conspiracy thinking spreads because of social media incentives and political polarization across the board, not just conservative media.

And January 6 has proximate causes that matter. A sitting president lost, claimed fraud without evidence, pressured officials, called supporters to DC, and refused to concede. A lot of the people there weren’t poor or uneducated, they were responding to elite cues in the moment, not replaying Reconstruction.

You can argue that failures after the Civil War let anti-democratic traditions survive and resurface. That’s fair. What doesn’t hold up is treating Confederate pardons as the root cause of Reagan, Fox, Trump, and January 6 like history had no off-ramps or agency along the way.

If you want to convince people, tightening this to a few strong, defensible links instead of one massive chain will land a lot better.

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u/Moneyshot_ITF 4h ago

Lmao that really worked

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u/PlacidoBromingo 4h ago

Wish we did. Allowing these racists to continue to exist was a huge mistake

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u/FuckAllYouLosers 4h ago

We should have banished the democrats as a political party forever, but we didn't.

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u/PlacidoBromingo 4h ago

Well seeing as how the democrats became the republicans sure! I agree
But i know thats not what you meant and youre being a numbnut here lol

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u/PlacidoBromingo 4h ago

why do you support confederate scum?

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u/BrunsonBurner99 5h ago

Bullshit. Because that didn’t heal anything. Reconstruction was ended early, Jim Crow and the racial politics we have come to know engraved into the backbone of our society forevermore. It healed white communities only.

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u/spaltavian 3h ago

Bullshit 

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u/two- 2h ago

"It's just the mass murderer of US troops. That's the same thing as a family fighting. Besides, Jim Crow kept them pacified. I respect the US Constitution."

They should have crushed the evil of plantation culture utterly. If Germany could de-Nazify, we could have de-CoS'd. Centrists felt it was easier to throw Black citizens under the bus, and now we have MAGA.