I remember being stunned when I came across that monument in a Capitol Hill cemetery. So much for that old adage that it's the winners who write the history. I suppose "War Between the States" is marginally better than the other one I've heard down South - "The War of Northern Aggression".

I can go with War of Rebellion, but Civil War is appropriate.

I found this explanation opaque and misleading.
The name "Civil War" has also been widely accepted, no doubt because it is short. Actually the term "Civil War" is misleading and inexact. The war was not a class struggle, but a sectional combat, having its roots in such complex political, economic, social and psychological elements that it is difficult for historians to agree on all its basic causes.

But a "civil war" need not be about "class struggle"; it's a war between citizens of the same country, which is what the Civil War was--you don't have the right to secede.

@1

We can call that the "Traitor's Memorial in Lakeview Cemetery."

The south at the time called it the "war of northern aggression."

What a hideous waste of space, all in the name of slavery.

http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons…

And the claim that the confederacy was recognized as an independent nation world wide is simply a lie. One of CGPGrey's excellent videos about how many countries there are (answer: it's complicated) brings up that issue specifically. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AivEQmfP…

Wow, confederates in the northwest. That will suffice as my morning dose of WTF. I couldn't resist and had to click through the gallery of their centennial ball. Damn, white people be crazy.

Ah, good old 1926. The Supreme Court affirmed the legality of restrictive covenants, and segregation-minded Capitol Hillers soon launched into a campaign that got homeowners to sign deed restrictions for a huge percentage of Hill blocks, declaring that “no part of the lands…shall ever be used or occupied by or sold, conveyed, leased, rented or given to Negroes, or any person or persons of the Negro blood.” When those covenants expired In 1948 the Capitol Hill Community Club renewed the effort but was outmatched by organized effort civil rights groups (and the Supreme Court, which that year ruled covenants unenforceable). Here’s a great link to show us how much of Seattle was restricted, and then redlined, until very recently. https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/cove…

The memorial reminds us brutally how little time has passed since that barbarism on Capitol Hill. It is uncomfortable to see, but we need reminders like this.

If you walk a few feet north from Lake View Cemetery you will find the Grand Army of the Republic Cemetery Park. The final resting place of 500 union war soldiers who moved to Seattle after the war and wanted to be buried together. There are black soldiers, Medal of Honor winners and representatives of many regiments. It is a historic and special place in Seattle history.

Maybe the same guys would like to put up a memorial to the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11.

@9,
Indeed, I've been there. There are even some "Unknowns" buried there. I'll have to check out that Memorial.

Thanks for that reminder of what 1926 really means in Seattle. Unless you live in the CD, your own property deed probably bears that restriction to this day, though it hasn't been enforceable since 1968. In my neck of the woods, the formulation often referred to "Ethiope, Hebrew, or Mongol races" as being disallowed.

Just in case anyone is still confused, the Civil War was about slavery, and the Daughters of the Confederacy are so full of shit their eyes are brown. (To be strictly fair, so are the mostly-Northern Daughters of the American Revolution).

Let me just quote Dr. James McPherson, the leading historian of the Civil War, from his recent Ask Me Anything on Reddit:

I suppose the myth I find most frustrating is that the main motive for secession was "state rights" rather than the protection of slavery. State rights (or state sovereignty, as it was usually called at the time) was a means, not an end; a means to justify secession for the purpose of protecting slavery against the perceived antislavery threat of the incoming Lincoln administration.

The full AMA is at http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/co…

As with most topics, the answers to the complex questions of history are rarely short and simple. But the "not about slavery" answer, like the phrase "states' rights" and the relatively recent appearance of the Confederate Battle Flag on trucks and tattoos, is 100% about opposition to civil rights, not an honest attempt to explicate the central event of US history.

One of the many obscenities about the Civil War is that one of its causes was how valuable slaves were in monetary terms. It was not uncommon for a slave to cost $500 in money of that time. To many Southerners, their view was that the Northerners wanted to take away that value without paying for it. The obscenity in all that, of course, is that these were human beings that were being sold like livestock. Why should anyone pay to compensate for something that should never have existed in the first place? But it's a bit of a peek into the mind of Southerners at the time, warped as it was.

On the other hand, some people did try to organize schemes to simply buy the freedom of the slaves and these attempts were generally rebuffed by the slaveowners. "Fair" monetary compensation, obscene as it may have been, was not enough to entice them to give up slavery.