I strongly suspect they would have, particularly as there were and still are a great many racists all over (unquestionably ire, by proportion, and more virulent then than now, though). If the southern states had really wanted to preserve the institution of slavery (and they did), then secession was the dumbest thing they could have done. There were enough slave-holding states (fifteen in all) to stave off anything like even the 13th amendment into the present day, even without expansion. By unlawfully attempting to secede, they gave those “radical Republicans” the window needed to build an anti-slavery consensus in the North, and then out in place puppet governments as southern governments were defeated, ensuring they could ram through whatever “wild, crazy, downright dangerous” legislation or amendments they desired.
I mean, can you imagine it, giving slaves and the like not only their freedom, but citizenship and the right to vote? Horror!
And yet the blundering of incompetent southern politicians led directly to it. I suppose we should be grateful to them, in a perverse sort of way, for their fomenting a bloody rebellion. Their actions, though horribly wrong, were as integral to the salvation of the soul of United States as Judas’s betrayal of Jesus is supposed to have been to the salvation of all mankind according to most Christian ideologies.
Poe died a good 12 years before the Confederacy started, so his place in the Confederate south is kind of irrelevant. They owned slaves and were south of the actual Mason-Dixon line. As for their wartime sympathies, my Baltimore-native uncle pointed out to me (a Virginian) that “Maryland didn’t have a river to hide behind.”
Enlist enough propagandists, and ANY place can seem interesting. Frame your image and go. I can make a sewage line sound and look quaint or futuristic from the right angle(s).
During the War of Southern Treason, the United States extended out to my California mountain mining community. Union vs Traitor fights raged in the main streets. The vast scope of the United States made it more interesting than the Traitor states, with fewer lies needed.
I’d say it’s very relevant to whether the Confederacy gets to claim him for their side.
Doesn’t matter, fought on the Union side.
That and half Maryland’s Blacks were Free, and the city wasn’t beholden to the plantations, having moved to industrialization well before the war. Like - when Poe lived there. Like I said, they weren’t really part of the same Southern culture by then.
And Poe wasn’t a Southern writer. When he wasn’t in Baltimore or Richmond, he was in New York, or Philly, or Boston. His first published work was as “A Bostonian”.
The March family was struggling middle class. They had a home and a servant as opposed to the March girls working as servants like the girls from families that were truly as poor as churchmice had to do.
Underdogs are artistically more interesting. By no statistical rational measure should the South have won. And they didn’t. Artistically at least there’s sympathy for those fighting a lost cause.
Artistic representation of the Southern struggle FOR Southerners has been cheaply written about though.
So many that fought never owned a slave and would never be able to afford one. So why preserve the institution with your life? Racism? Hardly. Abolitionists abounded in the North and South that never cared about black lives, it was a ruling aristocracy they wanted to prevent. The poor white southern sharecropper was a misguided fool who clung to notions of local identity rather than national. The shame is racism helped divide poor white people from poor black people so rich white people stay in power and do to this day.
