Those are just Southern terms of endearment The Ken Burns series which most everyone has seen has really been a wonderful tool at getting people to look at the civil war differently than the platitudes people were raised with before he made that documentary. Before 1990 I would say most everyone's view of what the war meant was clouded in simple little paragraphs when it really was nearly a half century of events before that which really brought it about, especially the final 10 years before the first shots were fired.