Southern pride: Why?

Great Debates
201

What? Southerners don’t celebrate the war? Maybe you have a different word for it but whatever you call it, southerners do it.

Well, I’m basing my guesses at what’s on their minds on their observable actions. When you see a grown man running around in a gray uniform, waving a Confederate flag, yelling he’s a rebel and the south will rise again, and showing off his tattoos of Jeff Davis and Bobby Lee, you can make a reasonable surmise he’s thinking about the civil war.

And I know that many Southerners are black. And I’m sure you know. But don’t deny that it was a realization that took a long time to sink in. In my lifetime, there were still a majority of people who weren’t talking about black southerners when they were talking about defending the southern way of life. It’s great that we’ve finally got a generation of black southerners who’ve been able to grow up without a boot in their face. But don’t forget the dozens of generations that went before them. And don’t be surprised when they give you a look when you talk about how great things used to be.

202

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I’m basing my guesses at what’s on their minds on their observable actions. When you see a grown man running around in a gray uniform, waving a Confederate flag, yelling he’s a rebel and the south will rise again, and showing off his tattoos of Jeff Davis and Bobby Lee, you can make a reasonable surmise he’s thinking about the civil war.
[/QUOTE]

And what percentage of Southerners do you suppose that comprises?

203

Maybe the North should do some remembering too:

Old North: Recalling the Real Slaves of New York

Slaves built the walls of Wall Street, the first city hall and Trinity Church. Slaves accounted for 20 percent of the population of Colonial New York, compared with 6 percent in Philadelphia and 2 percent in Boston. Forty percent of New York households owned slaves. Slaves dredged ponds, cleared Harlem woods and constructed Fraunces Tavern, which was owned by “Black Sam” Fraunces, a West Indian. George Washington, a slaveholder, bade farewell to his lieutenants at that tavern.

[…snip…]

“More New Yorkers owned slaves than whites in the antebellum South,” says Leslie Harris, a professor of history at Emory University, who edited a book on the exhibit. “We need to acknowledge that our history is much more complicated than a benighted racist South and a free North.”

Nor was urbanized slavery necessarily more benign. Blacks in New York worked from dawn to well after dark. They could not own property and could not meet in groups of more than three. Any hint of defiance was met with unyielding violence. One reads of rebellious blacks burned, stretched on racks and run through.

204

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
What? Southerners don’t celebrate the war? Maybe you have a different word for it but whatever you call it, southerners do it.
[/QUOTE]

Not so much a word as a phrase: “Fergit, Hell!” (Seen on a bumper-sticker with a Confederate soldier about to fire a tied-up Union soldier out of a cannon.)

205

[QUOTE=Zoe]
We have reenactments of battles. The battlegrounds are right here. So are some of the very trees. The lay of the land is the same. And in many cases, the family names remain. It is also a good way to learn or teach history, meet friends, explore an interest.

Having reenactments is not uncommon. There are reenactments of life at a fort, life on a farm, life in the MIddle Ages. I wouldn’t call them celebrations either.
[/QUOTE]

Plus, the reenactments are fought with- guess who? NORTHERN reenactors. It never occurred to me that they were celebrating killing southerners, but based on the logic in some of the posts on this thread apparently I’m wrong.

On the subject of reenactment, as Zoe mentioned there’s an 18th century French fort 20 miles from where I live that has reenactments of Indian and soldier life at least once a month- evidently they’re celebrating French imperialism.

As for moving south for culture, it’s probably true that most don’t- when has anybody moved anywhere primarily for culture? We migrate for work and other factors. That said, how many non-northerners can say, as I can, that they have one of thelargest Shakespearean theaters in the world literally adjoining his or her back yard (I walk my dogs there)?

206

Who’s denying it? There was slavery throughout the country at one point. The big difference is that most people voluntarily ended it - the southern states were one of the few places on Earth that had to be forced to give it up at gunpoint. And then they spend a hundred years talking about how much they missed it and wishing the “good old days” would come back. And not just talk - southerners (the white ones) spent a hundred years making sure the law kept down other southerners (the black ones) as close to slavery as they could get away with.

This isn’t just history. There are tens of thousands of black southerners who are still alive who grew up under this system. They were told that in the town they were born in they couldn’t choose where to eat or sleep or walk or sit down. They couldn’t vote or go to school. But they could watch their friends and family members being dragged into public parks and publically murdered while hundreds of their fellow townspeople stood around and cheered and their mayor and police chief posed next to the corpses for the cameras.

Because alongside those tens of thousands of black southerners there were tens of thousands of white southerners who were the ones passing those laws and cheering on the killers. Those white people are still alive too. They’re not as powerful as they used to be and they can’t get away with the things they used to do. But they’re still talking about how much they miss the good old days.

So have all the southern pride you want. But balance it out with a little southern shame.

207

Who celebrates losing a war? Maybe “commemorates.”

208

So who’s denying the shameful aspects of our history, Little Nemo?

But that’s just it: it’s history. Nothing we can do about it beyond regretting it and doing what we can to prevent it happening again. I’m not sure what you else you expect from us. You want us to wear hair shirts and self-flagellate over it?

Piss on that.

Northern media worked for over 100 years to make white Southerners feel ashamed and inferior. Northern historians did their damnedest to write the South out of the nation’s history books. No holiday to celebrate Jamestown. American history seemed to begin at Plymouth. The pivotal role of South Carolina in the Revolution was ignored entirely in the history books produced by northern publishers, while the patriots of Boston were glorified. (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry and George Washington were Southerners? You’d never have known it from the midwest standard accents they sported in the movies.) America was defined by the “Puritan work ethic,” we were told, even though our colonial ancestors were Anglicans. Books, TV, and radio told us we were inbred hicks: barefoot, stupid and violent. (Hell, some folks in this thread are still trying to tell us that.) A Southern accent on TV or in the movies was a sure mark of a moron.

And you think we didn’t get a large enough dose of shame? God damn!

None of the negative history changes the positive aspects of our culture, which transcend race, and in which we take pride. So we choose to celebrate those aspects of our culture. You don’t like it? We don’t care.

209

[QUOTE=spoke-]
You don’t like it? We don’t care.
[/QUOTE]

I think that sums up far more concisely and effectively the Southern position than anything written in this thread.

Now if y’all’ll excuse me, I’ve got some some possum kabobs marinating to roast over the next cross burning.

210

[QUOTE=spoke-]
No holiday to celebrate Jamestown. American history seemed to begin at Plymouth.
[/QUOTE]

This omission is one of my ultimate U.S. History pet-peeves. Hell- the Pilgrims (and those unimportant other 2/3 of the people on the Mayflower) were going to Virginia even- they’d bought land from The Virginia Company in Jamestown (it’s still debated why they changed course and settled in Massachusetts instead) yet U.S. history (the white part) began at Plymouth Rock.

And again and again and again, the North ended slavery not because of any great moral indignation but because it wasn’t profitable. They didn’t have plantations and immigrants were a lot cheaper for the factories and mills and as domestics. (A huge number of Southerners came to Philadelphia and other northern ports before migrating south- most of the Scots Irish in fact- Philadelphia was in the 17th/18th centuries what Ellis Island became in the 19th and 20th.)
While the free workers of the north weren’t enslaved they were treated like shit (NO DOGS NO BLACKS NO IRISH and later NO UNIONS EITHER).

As mentioned before, pride has different meanings. Southern pride is more an appreciation of what is good and even what is not so good in southern culture; it’s not hubris and it’s not a (no racial meaning intended) whitewashing. There’s a lot to appreciate about southern culture (much of which became the basis for modern American culture). No human being alive today had jack to do with slavery, those who had any power during Jim Crow are few and ancient (and not all Southern- do people not realize just how much racism there was outside the South? It’s an insult to black history to think that those who left Alabama for Michigan and California and Boston somehow went from hell-on-earth to milk-and-honey- just as immigrants fleeing poverty often found themselves worse off in American slums than in their native villages many blacks found things more different than better in the north.
I would never scratch my head and wonder “How can anybody feel pride of having ancestry rooted in those hellholes Boston and NYC with their Irish gangs and corrupt politicians and racial violence and endless slums, etc.”. Instead I think Boston and NYC are places with fascinating history, unique cultures and distinct regional eccentricities and identities. I’d have no problem if the OP asked “Regional pride: why?”- I’d think it was a somewhat silly question, but I wouldn’t take umbrage- but what is unique about the “shame” of Southerners that they should be denied the right to have the same sense of cultural appreciation and distinct regional identity as residents of NYC and Boston and Omaha and [INSERT NON-SOUTHERN U.S. REGION HERE] seem to have?

211

Do you think that is an accurate portrayal of how most white Southerners feel about the Civil War, Northerners, the issues fought over including slavery and blacks? Or do you think that is an illustration of what the moron driving that particular car thought was funny?

Many people from other countries get their impressions of Americans from movies and television. Are you getting your impression of Southerners from a bumper sticker? Should I get my impression of New Jersey from Tony Soprano or the New Jersey Turnpike?

Have you seen anyone here from the South who seems the least bit interested in forgetting anything in our history? Has any Southerner in this thread denied the horrors of slavery or the Jim Crow years? Who do you think you are educating?

Gee. I’ll try to think of something good and useful I can do during my lifetime to help repay the harm done to African-Americans during those long years of abuse.

Could you be more specific? How great things used to be before the war? Something I said? Cite? My memory doesn’t go back quite that far. And my memories of the way things used to be in my own childhood are a mixture because we were isolated from most blacks except at my father’s store.

I can remember watching a black child sleeping in a car once and wishing that she would wake up so that we could play. And there was a young black woman that came to my grandmother’s house one day who played with the children. Her name was Shine and I thought she was named that because she smiled so much. We didn’t get a chance to be with blacks. We too were segregated.

The grownups didn’t talk around the children about the problems in the world and we didn’t notice because it wasn’t part of our daily lives. For a long time we didn’t have television and when we finally did, there were no black people on it. It’s hard to imagine how unreal our view of the world was.

(It’s almost the same way now in movies. The ratio of males to females is very unrealistic. I think that women notice that but men don’t too much. I have to tell my husband to pick a movie that “has girls in it.”)

But I don’t think I talked much about how “great” things used to be. I was an abused child. And I did live in a world where women were treated like second class citizens.

For so many reasons, there is great irony that you should lecture me.

212

Sampiro, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival was one of the first things I thought of. My mother-in-law took a lot of pride in that.

This is what first came to my mind:

Thorncrown Chapel, Eureaka Springs, Arkansas. It is listed fourth on the American Institute of Architects’ Top Ten Buildings of the 20th Century. Their list includes buildings from all over the world.

Click on the thumbnails. Each one has a really different feeling.

213

[QUOTE=spoke-]
Northern media worked for over 100 years to make white Southerners feel ashamed and inferior. Northern historians did their damnedest to write the South out of the nation’s history books. No holiday to celebrate Jamestown. American history seemed to begin at Plymouth. The pivotal role of South Carolina in the Revolution was ignored entirely in the history books produced by northern publishers, while the patriots of Boston were glorified. (Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry and George Washington were Southerners? You’d never have known it from the midwest standard accents they sported in the movies.) America was defined by the “Puritan work ethic,” we were told, even though our colonial ancestors were Anglicans. Books, TV, and radio told us we were inbred hicks: barefoot, stupid and violent. (Hell, some folks in this thread are still trying to tell us that.) A Southern accent on TV or in the movies was a sure mark of a moron.
[/QUOTE]
While I do not support the “South should be ashamed” motif that has run through several of the posts in this thread, you’re stretching it, a bit, here.

I’ve never read a history book that tried to “write out” the South. Washington, Madison, Henry, Daniel Boone, (Oglethorpe and Raleigh), and dozens of others appeared in my school texts as well as general histories. I have known about King’s Mountain and Cowpens and Yorktown and Francis Marion since I was in grade school. Anyone who read about the push West read about Kentucky, Davy Crockett, and so on, and Jackson, Clay, Calhoun and their compatriots showed up on my history tests in high school.

Plymouth gets more play than Jamestown because people in Massachusetts made a bigger deal about their town than people in Virginia (not Northerners) made about their town. Jamestown is a swamp while Plymouth Rock sits out on a windswept beach. Williamsburg had deteriorated into a dilapidated jumble of nineteenth century secondary housing and shops before it was rescued by the dream of a local man–but funded by a Northerner. And what are the stories that are told about each community? The Plymouth crowd gets the Mayflower Compact (that early attempt at theocracy that has been converted into a paean to representative government) and good relations with the indigenous people resulting in a thanksgiving feast. Jamestown gets John Smith being rescued by an indian maiden and John Smith telling a bunch of layabout gentility hoping to find gold on the ground “no work, no eat.” Those stories arose and were promulgated by the descendants of each group and nothing prevented anyone from another region from either finding better stories about their own history or from debunking the tales of the other region. (Aside from the somewhat distorted view of the Compact, I am not sure where you (and Sampiro) are getting the idea that Jamestown gets ignored. In terms of settlements, I always hear about each equally (and almost nothing about Nieuw Amsterdam or Baltimore or other locations) and nothing came out of Jamestown that provides the myth building seed of the Mayflower Compact. For that matter, Plymouth gets rolled, in most minds, in with Puritan Boston that was a separate creation and history rarely parades the Protestant raids from Virginia against the Catholics of Maryland, so that works to your favor.)

Accents in older movies were “Chicago school” for everyone, not just the Founding fathers from Virginia. That movie accent was never spoken by Ben Franklin, John or Sam Adams, Paul Revere, or the other patriots of Boston, either.

The “Puritan work ethic” is one defining cultural characteristic distinguishing New England from the South–one that the Southern aristocracy played up to the hilt, so I am not sure what your complaint was on that score. (There were enough scornful remarks from Southerners about those “Puritans” over the years.)

Books, TV, and radio also played up the great Southern Mystique in such productions as Gone With the Wind. I will grant that you are on stronger ground on the claim of later Southern culture being the butt of “dumb” jokes, in that it is far easier to find references to Tobacco Road or Ma and Pa Kettle than to any Northern counterparts, but it is not as though the Southern aristocracy did not get a lot of generally favorable publicity in various media.

214

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
The big difference is that most people voluntarily ended it - the southern states were one of the few places on Earth that had to be forced to give it up at gunpoint.
[/quote]
One of the gun toters for the North was U. Grant, who did not give up his wife’s slaves until 1863. Lee, the man he was shooting at, freed all the slaves of the Custis Estate (his father-in-law) in 1862. (Cites: 1, 2).

You mean like the law in New Jersey?

New Jersey, like other northern states, replaced outright slavery with stricter controls of free blacks. Black voters were disenfranchsed by an 1807 state law that limited the franchise to “free, white male” citizens.

In 1830, of the 3,568 Northern blacks who remained slaves, more than two-thirds were in New Jersey. The institution was rapidly declining in the 1830s, but not until 1846 was slavery permanently abolished. At the start of the Civil War, New Jersey citizens owned 18 “apprentices for life” (the federal census listed them as “slaves”) – legal slaves by any name.

"New Jersey’s emancipation law carefully protected existing property rights. No one lost a single slave, and the right to the services of young Negroes was fully protected. Moreover, the courts ruled that the right was a ‘species of property,’ transferable ‘from one citizen to another like other personal property.’ "[10]

Thus “New Jersey retained slaveholding without technically remaining a slave state.”[11] (Cite).

Part of the pride I have is how we’ve overcome what still lingers in the North. We’re moving forward.

Migration patterns of the 1990s indicate a return to the South of huge numbers of blacks whose parents and grandparents had left the region in earlier decades. The region is now home to almost 55 percent of the country’s blacks, compared with less than one-third of the U.S. Hispanic population and less than one-fifth of Asian Americans. The return to the South of blacks, along with the Sunbelt-directed migration of whites, is reinforcing the South’s white-black profile, but in a booming new economy and with improved race relations.(Cite).

It wouldn’t hurt you to educate yourself about your own shame.

215

Why does the Mayflower get any play at all? It wasn’t the first English colony. Hell, it came 13 years after Jamestown. So why the emphasis?

Why does the Mayflower Compact get any attention at all? We had a representative government already in place in Virginia a year before the goofballs on the Mayflower went off course and landed in Massachusetts.

Let’s face it: The Plymouth Colony is emphasized because history was largely written in Boston and New Haven.

And Tom, I didn’t say northern historians were successful in writing the South out of history; I said they tried their damnedest. Of course you can’t write Jamestown out entirely. What you can do is de-emphasize it and marginalize it. (By focusing on the Mayflower Compact for example, while ignoring Virginia’s House of Burgesses.) You can’t ignore George Washington, but you can de-emphasize his Southern-ness (to the extent that the thread I started many years ago on this board suggesting that George Washington had a Southern accent was met with astonished denial by several posters).

You can’t ignore Cowpens, or King’s Mountain, but you can gloss over them on the way to a detailed analysis of Saratoga or the crossing of the Delaware. Did your high school history books detail the fall of Savannah, or the fall of Charleston (which was the largest colonial city)? I’ll bet they covered in obsessive detail the fall of of Manhattan. Did your history books tell you that hicks in South Carolina and North Carolina turned the tide of war? Was there any mention in your textbooks of William Campbell or John Sevier? Or was the focus rather on Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys in Vermont? Did your books mention the Tryon Resolves?

As for Hollywood and the New York TV studios, they had no problem finding actors to deliver Southern accents when they needed a hick or a rube in their productions. But those accents were not deemed fit to put in the mouths of the heroes of the Revolution.

216

And don’t forget the Lost Colony. :slight_smile:

217

[QUOTE=Liberal]
And don’t forget the Lost Colony. :slight_smile:
[/QUOTE]

I had some notes on it, but I misplaced them.

218

[QUOTE=spoke-]
Did your high school history books detail . . .the fall of Charleston (which was the largest colonial city)?
[/QUOTE]

No it wasn’t. Maybe by land area, I don’t know, but not by population. The largest colonial city by the time of the Revolutionary War was Philadelphia, with a population of about 25,000. New York was second, followed by Boston, and Charleston was fourth.

219

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
The largest colonial city by the time of the Revolutionary War was Philadelphia, with a population of about 25,000. New York was second, followed by Boston, and Charleston was fourth.
[/QUOTE]

Or so Yankee propagandists would have you believe. :dubious:

Seriously, I should know better than to work from memory. :smack:

I may have conflated South Carolina with Virginia, which was the most populous colony.

220

Well, Charleston was the largest city in the south, so you might have been thinking of that, too.