I’m old enough to remember when Detroit was the nation’s fifth largest city. Philadelphia was fourth then, I think. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles topped out the list in that order.
I would agree that Southern culture provides one with much to be proud of, but the Confederacy isn’t one of those things. If the Confederacy weren’t tied directly and inescapably to slavery, it would be viewed differently, I think. Sometimes I think that the only difference between New Englanders’ pride in their ancestors’ rebellion against England and southern pride in the Confederacy is that the Confederates lost. Both were technically treasonous armed uprisings against a legitimate government.
Perhaps southern pride is so fierce out of defiance. Having lost a bid for independence can inspire as much pride (or more) as having won it.
We here in the West have tremendous regional pride, but no flag under which to rally other than the U.S. flag. Most of us understand that there’s a lot of mythology in our self-image, and we tend to ignore what was done to other people in the “winning” of the West. We’re not proud of Wounded Knee or Sand Creek or the Trail of Tears; we acknowledge that it was as wrong then as it would be today.
Well, what exactly is distinctive about southern pride? What aspects of Southern culture are unique to the South?
Let’s consider some of the things that have been mentioned as part of “Southern” pride.
*Southerners love their families. Northerners do that too.
*Southerners take pride in their local community. Northerners do that do.
*Southerners take pride in their history as Americans. Northerners do that too.
*Southerners have a strong literary tradition. Northerners have one too.
*Southerners have a Shakespeare theatre. Northerners have those too.
So I guess all these things are part of American culture not just Southern culture. Southerners need to stop acting like they own all these things.
What’s unique about the South that isn’t part of Northern culture?
*Southerners refused to give up their slaves until they were forced to by outsiders.
*Southerners refused to treat black people as citizens until they were forced to by outsiders.
*Southerners declared war on the United States.
*Southerners like grits.
I’ll send out the memo. However, the OP asked Southern pride: Why?, which (just a hunch) is one reason so many people are explaining why Southerners have pride in their home.
Every one of those is a lot more debatable than you might think. The abstracts- not the whole argument-
*Most southerners did not own slaves, many HAD given up their slaves, the last states in which slavery was legal were northern, and more than a few northern generals were slaveowners (Sherman wasn’t to my knowledge, but have you ever read his “enlightened” views on the blacks he liberated?)
*Oh gimme a break- are you really and truly that ignorant of U.S. sociological history that you think blacks were treated as second class citizens ONLY in the south (and I’m talking early to mid 20th century, as late as Rosa Parks)?
*To say “Southerners declared war on the United States” is to acknowledge we had the right to secede for you’re making a distinction between the South and the USA, and once again that war was just a teensy weensy bit complex than you seem to realize. (Though I do wonder where people who lived so close in time to the Revolutionary War that there were still veterans of it receiving pensions got the idea that if you don’t like a presiding government you can band together with other semi-autonomous states and secede to form a new nation?)
*I know southerners who don’t and northerners who do like grits.)
Actually historian James Loewen, who spent two years researching U.S. history textbooks for a scholarly project before writing the popular Lies My Teacher Told Me, devotes most of a chapter to the subject- the majority of American students believe that (white) America began with the Mayflower. The Cole Porter lyrics that were later reincarnated into a Malcolm X speech are indicative of Plymouth Rock (or the Mayflower, or the Pilgrims [who again weren’t even the majority of the Mayflower) being the beginning of the nation in popular culture.
As far as the “no work/no eat” (which is accurate), a large part of the colony’s disasters in early years was beyond their control- they landed in the worst drought in a millennium. That said, by 1620 Virginia, which was no longer just Jamestown but dozens of settlements (Henricus an Martin’s Hundred and others being larger than Jamestown by then) they had long since learned the regional agriculture, while the Pilgrims (known for their work ethic) starved and died in great numbers, so both had their disasters.
Trivia: the year before the Lost Colony there was a lesser disaster that resulted in about three “lost colonists” who were left behind by Ralegh when the first colony failed, then twenty years before that there were the Huguenot colonies the Spanish wiped out, and as Lumbee Indians can tell you there were the Spanish African slaves left behind in 1526 in what’s now the Carolinas who joined with local tribes.
Something an appalling lack of Americans realize about the slave trade was that by the time the first slave ship accidentally limped into Jamestown (1619) the transAtlantic trade had been going on for more than a century and well over 1 million Africans had already been brought to the New World. Thereafter, far more slaves went to South and Central America than to North America (and as an irony slavery began in Massachusetts- the first Africans in Virginia were regarded as indentured servants- didn’t last long obviously). America was not the last nation in the New World to illegalize it, yet Brazil and Cuba and the South American nations don’t catch near as much hell for the practice.
As documented above, Lee freed his father-in-law’s slaves before Grant freed his wife’s slaves. Most Southerners didn’t own slaves anyway.
As documented above, New Jersey had slaves in everything but name only until they all died. They remained legal “property” all their lives.
That’s like saying “Americans planned the invasion of Iraq.” A few did.
Some do. Some don’t.
Now, what’s unique about the North that isn’t part of Southern culture?
*Northern blacks are moving South in record numbers as whole cities shrink dramatically in size
*Northerners live in the Rustbelt
*The North has lost an average 1 electoral vote per year since 1952
*Northerners put relish on their hotdogs
My, Little Nemo, but you are all het up. Here, sit down and have a nice glass of iced tea. You’ll feel better.
Good post overall, I have to take issue with this quote though.
I’d be curious to hear your rationale for this. If I remember correctly, there were actually more non-separatists on the Mayflower than there were separatists. The Mayflower Compact was pushed by the non-separatists specifically to prevent the separatists from enacting a theocracy.
The South has risen up and completely transformed the world’s artistic climate in the last 100 years. Blues, jazz, country, and rock and roll. These exclusively evolved in the South and were then exported to the rest of the world, where they have had the profoundest possible effects on other cultures.
Little Nemo is acting like a angry little kid in this thread. It’s pretty incredible.
Yeah, I’m beginning to wonder if Little Nemo just had a bad bunch of grits. (If there was cream and sugar in them, that’s the problem.)
To show that I do have a sense of humor where the South is concerned (and in fact I find Southern inconsistencies and eccentricities in and out of my family often hysterical), one of the funniest things I’ve read in the last few months was in The Onion’s Our Dumb Earth. Alabama’s entry was (paraphrase rather than exact) “their legislature quietly relegalized slavery in 1988 by a landslide vote of 232 to 3 3/5”.
Bless his heart.
PS- Another “nobody’s fault” factor re Jamestown is that until the past few decades it was believed the site of James Fort had been taken back by the James River. It’s now known that this is not the case and it’s one of the most fruitful archaeological digs in the country. It’s always amazing how much archaeology can confirms, elaborate, and refute about official accounts and the mysteries it unearths (why an able bodied man had his leg shot off during “The Starving Time” for example, or just who was buried in that elaborate outside-the-fort grave with his captain’s staff, etc.).
As for the Lost Colony, I heard on the news that the Dare Tombstones (those rocks with names and “histories” of the colonists carved on them found in S.C. and north GA, always presumed to be hoaxes) are being reexamined with some new kind of testing. I can’t find verification of this online yet though, though when the results are in there probably will be. IIRC, the claims include the widowed Eleanor Dare marrying a Creek chief and having children and her daughters Virginia and [one born after the colony was lost] doing likewise and generally a bit too ‘historical romancy’ to be taken seriously.
Hey, no personal attacks outside the Pit! 
(Southerners will get it.)
I remember as a boy in SC that some people who looked different than everyone else were referred to as “Nigger Indians”. Are these descendants of these people you talk about here? Do you know/remember the term (as offensive as it is)?
I think a lot of the things said in this thread are pretty incredible. Couching nasty words in faux sweetness doesn’t make them less childish.
In other words, how’s the view past that plank?
Well, stop then. 
No we all get it and it is pretty damn infuriating as was intended.
Probably the lamest turn of a phrase in any regional vernacular.
Gee, I dunno. “Youse guys” has got to be there somewhere.
I don’t find it infuriating; I find it tiresome.
Well, you have got a point, but that is just dumb, not infuriating. It would qualify as tiresome however, seeing jsgoddess post.
Jim
You want to know what’s tiresome? Being constantly thought of as a hick or an idiot or a gun-totin’ yee-haw toothless hood-wearing negro-hater just because of where you live. Being told you have nothing to be proud of because of what people did 150 years ago. Being asked why you aren’t dousing yourself with gasoline and sitting on a pile of dung by people who know nothing not only about your culture, but their own. That’s all pretty damn tiresome.