The Civil War

I'm reading the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant right now, so my thoughts lately have been on the Civil War, Grant and Lee. I used to wonder about the people who fought in the war-did they know what it was going to mean? And I've hear the revisionist thinking on the war-that the South wasn't fighting for slavery but for States Rights. I read a book called For Cause and Comrades by James McPherson and it was enlightening, to say the least. The men of South knew full well they were fighting for slavery and their way of life-they came right out and said it in their letters back home. And the men of the North knew full well that the Union was still a fragile thing that they were fighting to preserve-and they were tenacious in doing so. My father has done some genealogical work on his side of the family-and he told me the story of my great great grandfather who fought in the Civil War (I'm from Michigan, so it was the Union Army). He was wounded in battle and sent home to recover-he recovered and went back into battle. This time he was wounded so badly that he was sent home and mustered out of the Army. He recovered on the farm back in Grand Rapids-and once he had recovered enough, he joined the Navy and finished out the war there. And I used to wonder "why?" Was Michigan that bad? Did he need to get away from it? Was war so glorious that he needed it, like a drug? These things may have been true for him (my Dad still hasn't given me an explanation) but for other men serving in the War, the Union cause was enough. This was as true (if not more so) for the South-but the South fought to preserve its way of life and it seems many historians don't seem to believe the Union had the same zeal in fighting for its ideals, but I've come to believe that isn't true-read For Cause and Comrades and see what you think. Also, I've been doing a little bit of reading about Robert E Lee and I'm tired of this "Hero of the South" stuff. Yes, he was a great general-if he'd had more men, better supplies and factories, he probably would have won. But where I come from, he was a traitor of the worst sort. He was second in his class at West Point andhe was Commandant of West Point for two years. Lee said he did not want to fight against the United States-and yet, when the State of Virginia asked, he resigned his commission in the Army in which he had served for 36 years and took over command of the Army of Northern Virginia. When full hostilities broke out and he became one of only five full generals on the Confederate Army, he refused the wear the insignia of a Confederate general, in deference, he said, to his rank as a Colonel in the United States Army. This strikes me as a way for him to salve his conscience and not say that he had actually taken up arms against his country-and is really quite hypocritical. I mean, he was fighting against the Union Army-he might as well have worn the insignia-as it represented exactly what he was doing. I'm just tired of people defending him as a hero-he was no hero. He was a traitor to the United States and his his proven loyalty was to the State of Virginia and the Confederacy. Grant, on the other hand, fought and fought and fought to preserve the Union. "I cannot get rid of this man, Lincoln said. He fights". And he and his men fought against slavery and for the Union-which side had a more noble cause?