Well, first of all, when I made my original post, I made it on a site that only had posts from members of my own extended family; I had no idea that the entire internet community would read my comments. And so to clarify, I was specifically speaking to a member of my family who continues to extol one of our common ancestors with "Confederate glory", when that ancestor was clearly not proud of his Confederate experience.

I'm not a fan of the "Confederate cause", I think what they were fighting to preserve was not something we can be particularly proud of in 2012. But that's not to say that I'm not proud of my ancestors who did what they thought was right at the time. But what individual people did in the Civil War era, sometimes when they weren't even given a choice, is very different from what our state governments did. Those are two very different things.

Again, in the end, my original post was referring to the fact that many men in our home area had no interest in fighting in the War, either for the Confederates or the Union. In fact, we have a few surviving letters that those men wrote at the time in which they stated that fact. But that doesn't mean those men were "heroes" or "cowards"; they were simply dirt-poor farmers desperately trying to survive and to feed their families. They had little interest in or knowledge of the larger national picture of a Civil War.