[lbo-talk] The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com
Wed Jan 11 23:14:47 PST 2006



>
> it's _the_ Robert E. Lee in the song. That's a
> _ship_ (a riverboat),
> not a Southern General that the song is referring
> to.

Right. The General didn't leave Virginia, except for Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Certainly he didn't spend time in Tennessee.

Poor southern whites weren't fighting to defend slavery or a Gone With the Wind way of living that they never enjoyed anyway. They fought, as one Southern prisoner told his Yankee captor, "because you're here."

The song is not a celebration of slavery or the Old South. It is about loss and destruction and living in the ruins of war.

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