You're absolutely correct on your first point.

Your 3rd point, in a way, contradicts your 2nd point.

During the war there was no 'solid south' but that has changed since. Why do not Southerners promote their old Union affiliation? It has to do with how the South, as a whole, was treated since that war. My proof is in politics, look at all the presidential elections since the Civil War, especially in the last forty years; the South is solid, although ironically it is now solidly Republican.

With the rape of the Southern economy and basic rights of Southerners in all the slave owning south, ex-Confederate and pro-Union Southern states came together to celebrate their true kin-ship and rebellious side and have done so for over a century. Even in the historic boarder states the feelings towards the Deep South and its fight against the 'North' grew into a strong empathy and even sympathy until it's hard to determine where and actually the Southern 'Yankees' came from and who they were. But memories are strong, especially in Tennessee, and you still hear "Oh, we don't have anything with that side of the mountain; they fought for the other side."

Well, I think that many of us Southerners have on this board, in days past, admitted having ancestors who fought for the Union. I know I have. Bragging would not be the right term for their feelings towards them, but in my case, half of my Union fighting family ancestors were 'galvanized' types and the others were Irish immigrants who just happened to land in Massachusetts about the time the war started. To the latter I have some pride in them, to former, mixed feelings.

Bragging about our ancestors actions is a personal issue for all of us to content with, and maybe is not important to the bulk of Americans, but it is a very strong emotional power in the South and to those of Southern birth and heritage throughout the world to show our solidarity with those that died, as young men, defending their kin. And as humans tend to do, we of the here and now, have transformed what they were fighting against then, into the evils of the world as it relates to us today; and what they were fighting for, our idea of the best of what we would die for now.

________________________
David Upton