Yeah, but even West Virginia got out of the South when it could. 
Your link reminds me of a Thai kid here who spent a year in West Virginia as an exchange student in high school. He loved the place! Could not talk about anything but West Virginia. Usually wore some sort of West Virginia T-shirt, of which he had many. Wanted to go to university in West Virginia. Was horrified when I suggested there were better universities outside of West Virginia and he might want to consider some of those.
If I’ve learned anything from this thread it is that there is such a thing as “Northern Pride”. It manifests itself as Northerners exclaiming that they are superior to Southerners in every way.
Mark Twain noted this 120 years ago. He could never understand how the poor white southerners took up arms to defend a system (plantation slavery) that had kept them poor and ignorant all of their lives! :eek:
Interesting conclusion from a thread in which that claim was not expressed even once.
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I would be interested in seeing any concrete evidence for these assertions. I suspect that it is much more a case that the people near the lower end of the economic spectrum are desperate to make sure that they are not the very bottom of the pile and are willing to grasp at any distinction to give themselves the feeling of superiority over someone. I do not think this requires any manipulation from the powers (whoever they are) to accomplish.
I am not denying that various economic classes exist in the country, but the idea that they are created and manipulated by the top tier to prevent threats to the top tier are pretty much extensions of outdated and discredited Marxist philosophy.
While I haven’t been involved in here, Tomndebb, your blanket statements reveal a profound ignorance of the Civil War.
Not true. Large and important sections of the north did in fact fight to destroy slavery from the start, and by the end of the conflict most of the north had agreed that it was findamentally a crusade (in every sense of the word) to destroy slavery.
This is accurate as far as it goes. But it also conceals many motives, such as punishing the South for decades of obnoxious, undemocratic, and selfish behavior.
This is true but simplified. The South had whipped itself into a very weird ferver. First they were they were terrified that Republicans would try to end slavery by force (which was never true until the Civil War). Then, they used this fear to justify starting brutal, armed secession militias and the Rape of Kansas. They furthermore decided that all Northerners were against them… so they started a campaign of hate, lies, blackmail, and instransigence against the North.
What’s odd is that I detect no animosity the other way, at least initially. The South made it’s own enemy in this case. Without the constant insults and furor, the South probably would have continued unmolested. Indded, they criple the Democrats and literall destroyed the Whigs, both of which had been national parties until them. Thereafter, the Democrats became two seperate sectional parties (a rift which to this day has never toally healed) plus the Republican Northern party.
I’ve never understood this. It seems to have been some sort of private mental masturbation on the part of the South’s collective opinion makers.
Again, grossly simplified. It was not just a tactic. Or “just” anything else. It was first of all an ideological level, a declaration to Americans of what the war had become and what it had to become. Second, it was a sign to Europeans (who intially were incapable of understanding it or the legal/Constitutional system which produced) that the Union was serious about ending slavery. Third, it was a very serious signal to the south that their ways were going to be destroyed; that their entire way of life was simply no longer acceptable, and that the North would from now on free any slave it came across. This represented a major change in the purpose of the war. Until then, the Union might have accepted slavery now in exchange for Union and hope of manumitance later.
It did signal a change in tactics, but the the Proclamation itself was not really a tactic and initially produced no gains. The North thought it overly vacillitating or likely to incite more resistance, the South thought it laughable, and the Europeans thought it pointless. But then (and now), people simply didn’t understand that the President’s powers were limited. Lincoln could punish areas in rebellion (stretching if not breaking the Constitution) but had no leverage over those who weren’t. Behind the scenes, he worked to end slavery, and eventually did so successfully (IIRC, it took almost two years and some political logrolling). People also forget that until that time, Union armies hadn’t fought against slavery. Early in the war, they would often even turn over escaped slaves to their owners, because no law against slavery had yet been issued, and the legal staus of rebels and their property and state governments hadn’t been looked at.
Actually, this is… totally correct.
What’s sad is that during the war the Freedman’s bureau, if not perfectly a model of freedom itself, was highly successful in organizing former slaves and getting work done while educating them and helping them get on their feet. I think perhaps that people were simply exhausted mentally and emotionally by the end of the war and preferred to forget the ugly realities around it.
Well, I’m not a Southerner by birth or by culture. And even now I actually live near Knoxville, which was probably the most un-Southern city in the South. During the Civil War, East Tennessee was a huge anti-Southern guerrilla center, and Knoxville was only lukewarm towards the south (downtown on S. Gay Street, there were two recruiting stations - one Union and one Southern, half a block from each other). The region provided thousands of troops for the north, along with Admiral Farragut.
While Abolition was a moderately strong and growing movement in the North, I have never seen any evidence that anyone outside the explicit Abolition movement fought “to destroy slavery from the start.” It is true that freeing the slaves took on a larger motive as the war progressed , (draft riots notwithstanding), but the idea that the original calls to arms included any “free the slaves” rhetoric in 1861 is vastly overblown. You can find some such rhetoric in the writings of Henry Ward Beecher, for example, but he had been promoting Abolition for years. I find no similar texts in January to June of 1861 from the likes of Horace Greeley–who argued strongly against the secessionist movement, condemning its leaders, but who did not resume calls for Abolition until the war had bogged down in earnest after the summer of 1861–or the calls to arms among the various Northern states.
My statments were simplistic, but I was trying to respond to false assertions without hijacking the thread into a completely new direction.
War is often more than just what history says. Sometimes, the leaders fight a war for one reason, and the people fight it for another.
Fair enough. My response was actually more copnfrontational than it should have been.
In this particular case, I think you may be underestimating the abolition movement. They formed a large part of the early recruits, and were very influential in politics, and because of that they tended to have a larger influence than the raw numbers.
Jesus Christ. It’s taking so much longer than we thought.
Are you expecting some special ceremony to occur at Obama’s inauguration where he’ll have his race changed? Because otherwise what you’re saying is a complete non-sequitur.
This is very true. People generally fight a war because their government tells them to. So the real issue is why governments go to war.
And that’s very relevant to the secession crisis of 1860. Many people make the claim that it wasn’t about slavery because the majority of people in the south didn’t own slaves. This is true. But the decision to secede was made by a smaller group of people - and the overwhelming majority of these people were slave owners.
I’m going to come out and lay my prejudices on the table and say that I don’t like the South. In fact, I wish that when the Civil War ended the North didn’t let the Deep South states back in, as they’ve been pretty much a drag on the rest of the country.
For some reason Southerners passionately love the South. Look at all the songs extolling its virtues (Sweet Home Alabama, Georgia on My Mind, etc.). Yet, we are talking about a place that to this day ranks at or near the bottom of the country in just about every quality of life measurement. Go look up statistics on life expectancy, education, violent crime, incarceration rate, and income. Even granting that the Deep South has improved quite a bit over the last 60 or so years, its still by numerous objective measurements the worst place in the United States to live today.
Now that you have laid your prejudices in the middle of the Great Debates Forum, I suggest that that entire line of discussion drop out of this thread.
The question is why people take pride in their place of origin and why is it particularly apparent among those from the U.S. South. It is not a display of prejudices.
Take it to the Pit or open a serious discussion (with references to facts) in a separate thread. (The other thread might also not survive in GD, but it will not be a hjack of this thread.)
Stick to the topic, folks.
[ /Modding ]
My goal was only to point out that irony that by many statistical measures the South is not a particularly great place to live and yet it seems to engender a surprising amount of pride in its residents. If I did so an inflammatory manner I apologize. I only included my own opinions in the interest of intellectual honesty.
According to Joel Garreau’s “Nine Nations of North America” analysis, West Texas is culturally part of the Southwest (“Mexamerica”), East Texas is part of the South (“Dixie”), and North Texas is part of the Midwest (“Breadbasket”).
But the South has a traditionally martial culture that distinguishes it from other regions. Southerners have always been more ready to enthusiastically support a war than Americans from other regions – no matter what the war is about. They predominate in the U.S. armed forces, and not just because military service offers economic opportunities. Southerners are also more prone to tolerate the settling of personal disputes through violence, especially where it involves a matter of “honor.” (This also explains the violent, macho street culture of inner-city African-Americans all over the country, whose cultural roots are really more in Dixie than in Africa.) David Hackett Fischer attributes this to the “hearth culture” of the effective first settlers – the Tidewater South was colonized by Cavalier aristocrats, the Highland South by Scotch-Irish, both very martial regional cultures back in the British Isles. See also Vietnam: The Necessary War, by Michael Lind, Chapter 4, “The Fall of Washington”:
In short: “Southern pride” exists, not because of anything in particular the South has to be proud of, but because Southern culture, to a far greater degree than other regional American cultures, is based on pride.
I grew up in West Virginia, and you are right. I remember a PBS special that called West Virginia a place of “terrible beauty” which is a very good description. And wonderful place, with wonderful people, who have been screwed over in the past 200 years, in some cases due to greed, and other cases due to ignorance.
Anyone can make all of the jokes you want, but travel through WV and break down outside of cell phone range, and see if you aren’t helped with a ride, a tow truck, a meal, and 12 invitations for overnight lodging.
How long ago has it been that you check into a hotel, and they give you a room key and tell you to pay before you leave in the morning? It was 2005 for me on a trip home…
Your location lists you as being in Connecticut. The last time I checked it had the highest per capita income in the nation yet there is Hartford and New Haven which are shitholes by all accounts. The reason is that the resident black population was never assimilated. They don’t have such people in Greenwich.
Believe it or not, the South is much more integrated than New England but in its own way. That is why you find so much cultural diversity there. People in Connecticut can treat the resident blacks like cute little pets all they want because there simply aren’t that many. Cities like New Orleans that spawned defining musical styles like Jazz through Louis Armstrong and world class cuisine are often majority black and are proud of it. The same can be said for Northern Mississippi which invented both the Blues and much of Rock and Roll through people such as Elvis.
Connecticut is a disgusting example of tisk tisk tisk by playing lip service to the minorities that are unfortunate enough to live there. Connecticut is firmly a white man’s world and some people like you don’t choose to think that it should be any other way elsewhere in the nation.
OTOH, I have never heard any references to “Connecticut Pride”.