I think this wins the thread. Yeah, I know it was refuted. I don’t care.
silenus, do you agree that in common parlance the Confederate Flag = The Battle Flag of the Confederacy?
I thought this was common enough, not to need to be specific.
Jim
See what I mean? There was no “Battle Flag of the Confederacy!” There was a battle flag that was used by some regiments that is being touted as the BFC, but no such thing existed. There were over 100 battle flags. To say that it did shows ignorance of the subject, and makes Southerners question how much you know about anything to do with the South.
It’s like equating the word “Yankee” to overpaid, over-hyped, cheating clowns who try to buy their way into the Series because they can’t do it any other way. Stings, don’t it? And if anyone ever presented that as a serious argument on baseball, you would seriously question their grasp of the subject, and indeed their grip on reality.
The same goes with the flag thing. We get a bit defensive when people tell us their views on something they don’t even know the proper name of, or history of, or relevance (or lack thereof) of.
ETA: Yes, I realize I used the generic term as Jim described in my very first post of this thread. My bad. But it annoys me when outsiders do it. I’m Southern, I’m entitled. 
Yeah. I think “things that I wish were true” are funny.
Okay, a picture is worth a thousand words: File:Confederate Rebel Flag.svg - Wikipedia is the flag commonly refereed to as the Confederate Flag, please get off you [del]cross[/del] jack already.
This is the one that is sold as a “Confederate Flag”. This is the one the jokes are about. This is the one that some African American find as offensive as I find the Nazi Swastika. This is the one that the KKK seemed to like so much.
Did I manage in my ignorance to make my use of the phrase Confederate Flag understandable?
Jim
As someone who stepped out (and risked losing my Southern card) in favor of New Jersey, let me see if I can smooth the waters here.
It isn’t that we don’t know exactly what you’re talking about. It’s that we refer to it differently down here. When you ask us about the “Confederate Flag”, you’re using a term that we typically don’t. I’m not sure what I can equate it to, but try to imagine someone who flubs an unknown jargon just a little bit. It’s like referring to burgers on the grill as “barbeque” in Georgia, or referring to the American version as “football” in London.
Plus, there are some other reasons, some of which are explained above, why that one catch-all term is a tad inaccurate.
I think you’re just taking it a little harder than they intended. Not a huge deal, really.
Oh, and Go Dawgs.
LD, when your guesting period is up, I’d like to pay for your membership.
Why? You don’t like uppity Southerners?
Let’s not romanticize the compact too much, shall we? It was not the product of idealism, but was simply a practical way to settle the squabbling among a starving and disorganized rabble stranded on an alien shore (and beyond the aid or governance of the Virginia colony).
As for the House of Burgesses, it was a representative assembly pre-dating the Compact. Voting was open to any landowning male over the age of 17. And I think you may not understand how the term “plantation” is used with respect to the House of Burgesses. They were essentially just voting districts encompassing the various settled areas (or “plantations”). The House first convened in 1919, a year before the Mayflower passengers straggled ashore.
And yet, the Virginia assembly got no play in secondary school texts.
Look at any secondary school history text prior to 1988 or so. Can’t speak to the ones after that.
Perhaps we’re talking past each other. I’m talking primarily about secondary school history texts. (Where most people get their knowledge of US history.) And yes, Cowpens and King’s Mountain were given little to no attention there. On the other hand, there was always an image of Washington crossing the Delaware, and a description of the action.
Fair point, but the Southern Campaign was glossed over entirely in my old texts. No credit was given to Southern partisans for their aid in driving the British to Yorktowne.
And how much treatment did the fall of the Southern capitals and initial success of the Southern Strategy get? We weren’t taught about that at all in grade school. We were taught (wrongly) that the Southern colonies were pretty much just nests of Tories. (Southerners reading this thread, raise your hand if this is your recollection of what you were taught in grade school.)
Well, you’re right about that. They weren’t actually Southern accents at all. Just horrible mush-mouthed dialects found only in Hollywood, which we came to understand were intended to represent Southern accents. The fine distinctions you are trying to make between different regions of the South were lost entirely on Hollywood.
No, not 400 years of history. Just the 120 years or so following the Civil War. Is it really so hard to imagine that in the wake of the Civil War the role of the Confederate states in American history was de-emphasized by spite-filled Northern historians? Are you unaware of the venom toward the South emanating from the Northeast in those days?
They really didn’t begin to re-emerge as a serious force until the 1940s, beginning with C. Vann Woodward. Prior to that (and even after that, with respect to high school texts), our history was pretty much controlled by the historians and publishers in the Boston-New York corridor.
Well, you are simply wrong. I can’t tell you how many Southerners I have surprised by telling them of the role of Georgia and the Carolinas in the Revolution. Simply wasn’t taught in school.
And Sampiro has already pointed out that most Americans believe the Pilgrims were the first colonists. Pretty good evidence of the way history is presented.
Wow, those are some logistical problems there. 
Between you and Southern Yankee, maybe we found our interpreters between North & South. Now I think I understand **Silenus’ ** complaint. Silenus, as pointed out very well, this is a two-way miscommunication. If I use the phrase IRL I never have a problem with comprehension of what I am talking about. I would indeed make the same mistake of using BBQ interchangeably with Grill.
It was, however, an effort to settle squabbling that originated among the people who conceived and signed it rather than a system of lawmaking that was sent by courier from a bunch of guys 3700+ miles away.
You really did have a crappy history text. My text (mid-1960s) made a pretty big deal about Kings Mountain and Cowpens. ::: shrug :::
Again it looks like you had pretty bad texts. The only Tories we specifically learned about were the ones who held New York City and the guys out in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania with vague references to the 1/3 - 1/3 -1/3 split among the pro- and anti- independence factions and the “I just want to be left alone” crowd (as estimated at the time). I was never taught that the South was a haven for Tories.
So, it was not true of the four score and seven years prior to the Civil War? It was not true of the histories of Jamestown and other places?
Actually, few Americans can identify much of anything, North or South, regarding the entire period from colonization through the Civil War (or 2007). I suspect that it indicates the American feelings, typified by Henry Ford, that history is bunk rather than any actual poor presentation in hgh school classes. (Not that the classes and texts are not typically junk, but the history you describe was certainly not the history I was taught or the history that was in my high school text.)
I’ve heard the term, though more often I’ve heard “Black Indians”. (Not being p.c.- I certainly heard the N bomb when I was growing up, just not about that one, but then I’m not South Carolinian.) They probably were the same people. When some of the settlers from Virginia began to move south they were surprised to find so many Indians with dark skin and, more racially specific, wooly hair, and they were almost certainly descendants of those who rebelled against the Spanish in 1526.
There were lots of racial anomalies over the years. One of the Indians encountered by the Jamestown settlers was Mosco who considered himself a white man because he had fairer skin than most Indians and a thick beard. My theory is he was an illegitimate son of one of the Spanish soldiers or priests who settled on the Eastern Shore around 1570 and were wiped out by the Pamunkey (possibly commanded by Opechancanough, who when he was ancient in 1644 led the last great offensive).
There were also Indians encountered in the 18th century before major settlement by whites who had red hair and green/blue/grey eyes, though there are only theories as to why. One is of course that de Soto’s party probably left a lot of bastards scattered through the southeast and these were their descendants. For that matter, they could have been descended from Norsemen who wandered (or whose descendants wandered) steadily south, or just had a pigmentation problem.
The oral legend in Alabama is of the “Maddog Indians” who were supposedly descendants of the Welsh nobleman Madoc and hsi party in the 12th century. According to the myths, there was a Welsh trader who could speak with some of the Maddogs and there were forts and houses from Mobile to Minnesota in the West and New Hampshire in the east that resembled Welsh structures (i.e. made out of stone and wood and stuff 
), and some credit them with the mounds built around that time. Unlike the Lumbee’s claims it’s pretty much agreed that the Maddogs were a myth.
*Part of the Maddog myths and other white-Injuns is indicative of the [nationwide] 19th century notion that American Indians were obviously not sophisticiated and intelligent enough to build elaborate structures.
Thanks, Sampiro, and I believe you are right. I was an 8 year old boy in Myrtle Beach, and my dad hired a guy to help put up the drywall as we were building our house.
The foreman was a white guy and he had a crew led by “James”. James and his crew had the face of an American Indian, but a dark complexion like a black man, and “wooly” hair as you said so we don’t use the Don Imus term.
As an eight year old, I had the job of spending 25 minutes trying to hammer one nail. James walked over and I told him he looked funny.
The foreman said (and I remember this verbatem) “Son, James here, is one of them nigger Indians. You see 'em up the coast sometimes. James is a good boy and his people might look funny, but they work.”
I remember later that night my Dad told me that the N-word was bad, and that all people were the same, even though we might look different.
I still wonder about how James is doing…
Not sure what point you’re making here. How else could the compact have originated but among the squabblers? Color me unimpressed. Democratic government tends to be the default position among small squabbling groups, wouldn’t you agree? Who could have imposed their will in the absence of a consensus, do you suppose?
It was strictly an ad hoc response to anarchy, and not the product of any idealism or utopian vision. If they had planned it out that way before leaving England, I’d be more impressed.
The Virginia House of Burgesses was a representative assembly, in place a year before the Mayflower landed, and it governed (at the time) upwards of 1,000 citizens (not just a few straggling arrivals). Its subsequent history stretched to the Revolution, when Patrick Henry addressed the body with his “Liberty or Death” speech. It was not merely a pro forma body, as you seem to suggest, but actually carried out the wishes of the voting public. (Its first act was to set prices for tobacco and to lay plans for the colony’s first iron works.) It was a working legislature, the first in the colonies. It deserves at least equal attention to the Mayflower Compact, but it gets none.
I’m not sure what point you think you’re making here, but judging from the grinning smiley, you seem proud of it.
The point I’m making (and which you seem to insist on missing) is that the scholars the North (and particularly in New England) harbored a grudge after the Civil War, which manifested itself in diminished attention to the role of the Southern colonies in the establishment of the nation. Yes, of course there were histories predating the war. I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about which parts of our history got emphasized after the war.
Let’s take one part of that at a time. Do you deny that there were hard feelings in the North following the war? And particularly in New England, the seat of the abolitionist movement before the war, and (notably for purposes of this discussion) the seat of historical scholarship in the years following the war?
The point is that in terms of looking for a tradition that would result in the Constitution, which explicitly states that the covenant is one that arises from the consent of the governed, the Compact sets a clear precedent to that end. (I don’t know that there is any evidence that the concept continued in the popular awareness or that the writers of the Constitution looked to the Compact, but in the sort of heroic mythbuilding we find in text books, it is that sort of thing that tends to capture the imagination of the authors–as opposed to a vindictive need to suppress the history of another region.) In contrast, the House of Burgesses represented a government that was bestowed upon those bound by it by a distant power with a top-down structure that assumed that the powers vested in it were derived from the grace of the superior authority. There is a philosophical difference between the two. Rather than democracy being a default position for small groups, I suspect that authoritarianism is the default position, with a single despot or a tiny oligarchy making decisions for the group.
I would never make any claim for the Compact’s “vision” or “idealism.” I simply note that a number of historians have pointed out its interesting alteration of direction from the more typical forms of governance at the time and note that they perceive a thread that leads directly from it to the Constitution.
The House of Burgesses was certainly a step up from the autocratic governors of French and Spanish settlements, but it broke no new ground, being a shadow of the British Parliament from which it was derived.
(And your whole year of precedence is not much more than happenstance at a time when communications were measured in months.)
I was amused by your syntax that suggested that only the period following the Civil War has been ignored rather than indicating that the histories written following the Civil War have been incomplete. The smiley was to indicate that I recognized the flawed syntax as such and did not consider it a serious point of dispute.
I am not missing anything except your evidence that your claim has a basis in reality. The way you have expressed it, here, would seem to suggest that there was only hostility in one direction. I am perfectly willing to believe that there were people in the Northeast who were hostile to the South following the Civil War. I see no reason to believe that only that group was able to produce historians or that the attitude was so pervasive that no other histories were written or published and that nothing emanated from the South. I am fairly confident that there were also hard feelings toward the North on the part of Southernersand I know that Atlanta (at minimum) had a publishing company.
You have cited Loewen. I would point out that his grand thesis is that the history texts make an effort to be bland and tend to omit massive amounts of information. They also tend to engage heavily in (re-)creating the American myth. A focus on the “consent of the governed” found in the Compact supports the myth of that “unique” understanding of Americans better than the junior parliament that occurred in Virginia. I suspect that that bit of shoddy historiography rather than antipathy for the South is at the base of the short shrift given to the early Virgina settlement. Such histories only vaguely mention the Dutch, generally ignore the Swedes, give scant mention to the settling of Maryland, give a footnote to William Penn, make no distinction between the “Pilgrims”/Separatists of Plymouth and the Puritans of Boston, and basically pretend that the Spanish were all located in Central and South America (and none of them participated in the Civil War).
Then you should have little difficulty naming, say, five of them that existed prior to Plymouth. Go ahead.
I’ve been sitting on the fence about that, but I think your post did the trick. Not that I want to take your money, but I really appreciate the sentiment.
Just curious, are you currently in Georgia or New Jersey? I couldn’t tell from your post versus your location.
If you care, I hope you choose to stick around. I also like your user name.
Jim