When southerners wore the blue uniform and other taboo subjects
As much as I am fascinated by Civil War history and movies, GODS AND GENERALS should not have surprised me the way it did when at the beginning of the movie it depicted so many southern soldiers and officers still wearing the U.S. Army blue uniform. (It would be called the Union Army during the war)
But it made obvious sense of course. The future Confederate generals were still in the U.S. Army and still wearing with pride their U.S. Army blue uniforms and rank insignia.
I wonder in all sincerity, how do Southern Americans feel about seeing their famous Confederate officers and generals wearing U.S. Army (Union yankee) uniforms, even if it was historically accurate at the very start of the war? I thought to myself, it must be a blasphemous sacriledge to portray famous Confederate officers and generals still in yankee uniforms. But it was all true.
Even General Wheeler, Confederate cavalry general, wore the blue uniform twice! Wheeler re-entered the U.S. Army briefly during the Spanish American war as a major general. When he passed away, his body was dressed in a magnificent, general's blue uniform that was strongly reminiscent of the Civil War Union general's uniform. This reputedly shocked elderly Civil War Confederate veterans who visited his open coffin to pay their last respects.
Some American Civil War subjects are by tacit agreement taboo. You won't hear or see these in movies, or if so, just alluded towards.
1) Southern men who joined the Union army as enlisted and officers. You have to be a deep reader of Civil War history to come across names of high ranking Union officers who originated from the South or from border states where the people spoke with southern accents.
2) There were supposed to have been northern men sympathetic to the South who joined the Confederate Army. It's even harder to find information on this topic.
3) At the eleventh hour, when all was lost, in the last three to four months of the war, Confederate President Jeff Davis and his political supporters finally forced through against ferocious opposition the enlisting of negroes in the Confederate Army, albeit in separate formations, much as the Union Army had. There is very little information on this topic and everyone prefers not to discuss it even though it is clearly stated in all American history books. That this even happened and there were numbers of negroes marching under Confederate battle colors and possibly wearing Confederate uniforms - if any uniforms were available at all by this final stage of the lost war - remains a shameful memory to today's Afro-American people. At least there is the consolation that it was far too late to properly train and equip these black formations and few opportunities to commit them effectively to combat. Going up against trained, battle-experiened and well-equipped Union armies which vastly outnumbered them would have meant slaughter.
4) Other minorities fought in the war, on both sides. History records there were Chinese men enlisted in the Union Army. There was supposed to be a Chinese corporal serving in the Confederate artillery. A number of Native American tribes from the Five Civilized Indian Nations opted to side with the Confederacy, as it turns out, a very bad decision. This is perhaps the only legitimate justification the U.S. government had after the war for abrogating its treaties and siezing their lands. Losers tend to lose everything.