Sometimes I tell my students that we used to have “Christmas Break” but we had to change it to “Winter Break.” After all, separation of church and state wouldn’t allow us to celebrate a religious holiday.
How serendipitous that we always have winter break right at that time of year!
But if someone lost their mind and declared that we would have school on December 25, just how many would show up for school?
My question, in a roundabout way, is whether Robt E Lee’s bday is something you’d automatically expect most people from these locales to observe, like Christmas, or is it something not many thought about till someone put it on the calendar?
What about Columbus Day? How’s a federal holiday honoring a man who enslaved Indians and set in motion the rape of their wealth and cultures not analogous to a state holiday honoring a watershed moment in Southern history?
That’s mighty white o’ ya, there, and I thank ya.
Oh Jeezus… I don’t really mean any offense by this when I ask, were you born this stupid or did you take private lessons from Terry Schiavo? Which of these scenarios do you really truly honestly sincerely believe is the scenario:
1- One day in the late 18th/early 19th century, dawn broke across the nation, and those who lived above the Mason Dixon line all suddenly said “You know, slavery is just… wrong. It’s wretched and evil and I don’t know what we were thinking. The black people are our brothers and sisters, and from now on they are free and we’ll give them reparations and let’s all live together in love and harmony!” And they did, and there were no hard feelings anywhere, and that night all the black people, no longer slaves, and all the white people, who now saw the errors of their ways, all sat together for a meal of Yankee Pot Roast, Cream of Wheat, and assorted flavors of pop.
Meanwhile their mean nasty counterparts in the south woke up, and those who had the same thoughts hardly got the “wrong. It’s wretched and…” out of their mouths before they were, as one, choked to death on 3-day old cornbread by the evil ones who constituted 90% of the southerners, and so great was their indignation that they said “Ye shall no more give the slaves straw to make brick, as heretofore: let them go and gather straw for themselves!”, whence did the black people in the field cry out as one, “Oh motherfucker! He wants us to make bricks now too! This here’s some bullshit!”, and one among them named Nat Turner addressed his grievances through the chain of command and was slaughtered, but his son Ike would remember the injustice and take it out on his wife.
or
Slavery withered in the north because it was never as integrated into the economy because the northern economy was due to many reasons focused almost from the settling of the continent by Europeans upon manufacture (Scots-Irish:Pennsylvania linen trade/distilleries/furniture/mills/etc.) as the climate and soil were on the whole not as predisposed to cash crop plantation economy but to family farms. In the south however, where the climate was warmer and manufactories were not as feasible due to heat and a shortage of labor, the plantation economy worked better as it brought in huge revenues initially from the already extant European tobacco market (previously dominated by the Spanish) and blackseed cotton on the coasts. When there was no way to grow blackseed cotton more than 100 miles from the coast and green seed cotton was too interwoven with seeds to be profitable, slavery essentially stopped expanding. The slave populations south of the tobacco belt and west of the rice/indigo/blackseed cotton belts were essentially non-existent until the early 19th century, when the cotton gin made green seed cotton easy to separate and, the fields of the western territories being well disposed to its growing, made slavery explode as for the first time plantation economy was feasible and lucrative west of the Appalachians.
In the north, the never ending influx of immigrants from Scotland/Ireland/Britain/Germany (the vast majority of whom came to Philadelphia because 1- it was the leading trade partner of their region and thus where most of the ships were heading [and passengers were only an ancillary means of income for the ships- the big money was export of manufactured goods and import of raw materials] 2- Pennsylvania was a major haven for German immigrants 3- Boston was [well etc etc etc]
all provided a source of free labor that was a lot cheaper than purchasing slaves. Thus, most slaves held in the north were mainly used as domestics and as general farm and warehouse/dock workers, and in fact in NYC and NJ and CT the practice thrived for long after it did in most other places where families were generally doing well enough without slaves to support their own needs and did not have huge cash crops as an economic focal point.
Thus, a hypothetical Scots Irish immigrant named Dick C. McEveryman who settled in the south (either because the ship he booked passage on was headed to Savannah with a load of velvet or because he got to Pennsylvania and heard of free land down south on the Great Wagon Road) would, once settled in the south, seek to support himself by tapping into the already existing markets for agricultural raw materials and thus sought slaves to provide more labor to produce more raw material as it was the best available source of labor. Meanwhile, Dick C.'s identical twin brother, also Scot’s Irish but with the oddly Chinese name of Yan Kee McEveryman, boards a linen ship bound to Ulster’s main trading port partner of Philadelphia, eventually winds up in Scranton, and goes to work in the mills for a while and eventually buys a small apple farm for extra revenue but his main source of income is making chairs which he does well enough at that he one day has a factory, where rather than spend $100,000 to buy 100 slaves to work he hires penniless immigrants for less than a quarter of that amount per year and gets rich, and buys his wife a cook and a maid.
Consequently, not through any innate racism (though racism was pretty innate) the southern McEveryman’s becomes rich through slave labor because that’s the market where he lives while his northern twin becomes rich through free labor, because that’s the market where he lives. And that’s why by the early 1800s it wasn’t that big of a deal to northern McEveryman to free his maid and cook as they’re not really an economic necessity, while to southern McEverymans to free their slaves would have been economically ruinous.
Which scenario is the more logical for why the north ended slavery sooner?
How is this consistent? If you have moral objections to putting Jackson on the $20 bill because of how he treated your ancestors, how can you object when someone says it is loathesome to celebrate generals who fought to preserve the institution of slavery?
Lee was fighting to preserve Virginia. This was still a fairly loose federation of states at that time. (See Wiki or something for “federalism”.) People still drew inspiration from the Declaration of Independence — particulary this section. (Adding emphasis.)
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
Other than the issue of slavery, the issue of secession and the defederalization of the US was the preeminent issue the war addressed.
Add to the bio of Lee (what most southerners certainly know and I’d assume most northerners do as well) that his father was a Revolutionary War hero and his father-in-law was the adopted son of George Washington. He was that close in time and in space and familially to people who had committed “treason”, won, and been hailed as great heroes (and yet he himself was a Unionist until, as mentioned, the war was literally in his own front yard and could not bring himself to 1- not defend Virginia 2- take up arms against his friends/sons/neighbors/kinsmen. (His sister Anne was a Unionist in Maryland whose son and husband fought for the north, yet they remained close until the day he died, even exchanging letters during the war.)
Isn’t this like saying “Other than the whole Native American thing, Jackson was a great guy”? I’m not trying to be a dick; I’m really trying to figure out what our attitude toward people like Lee should be.
I really don’t understand why you need to have an attitude towards him at all. Do you have an attitude on Benjamin Harrison or Franklin Pierce? Outside of things like this, just how often does he even come up?
The attitude should be this:
Southerners acknowledge past injustices of, yet are not and will not be ashamed of, their region and in fact they have (as a general rule) a very strong interest in/identification with/fondness for the region and its history and its culture(s), the “melting pot and the salad” as it were, and warts and all (and it’s not all warts). This is okay. We will call it “Southern pride” as a matter of simplification.
Now, *Americans in general * if they have any understanding of history and politics can acknowledge that as a nation the USA has been responsible for some very bad things from before 1787 and all the way through to our present day domestic and international “not good very bad” issues, and yet at the same time the same Americans can still be- and justifiably so- very proud of America as a place, as a nation, as a concept, its history and its people, warts and all (and it’s not all warts). We’ll call this “American Pride”.
Southerners do not have a problem with anybody feeling “American Pride” and, in fact, feel immense American Pride theirselves. Their Southern Pride is not a contradiction, it’s just a regional extension of and addition to American Pride. It would be very difficult to prove that such manifestations of Southern Pride as admittedly antiquated holidays still being observed measurably detract in any way from anybody’s quality of life.
Southerner Thomas Jefferson observed of the polytheism/atheism of his hypothetical neighbor, “It neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket”, while non-Southerner Jeremy Bentham observed when asked why he hopped instead of walked “Because I enjoy it and it hurts nobody”, and this is in a nutshell the attitude that should be observed of regional pride. If residents of Wisconsin wish to celebrate the surrenders of Lee and Johnston then more power to them and if the state of Oregon wants to have a week long paid vacation for all state employees to honor native girl Sally Struthers, as an Alabamian it neither breaks my leg or picks my pocket. Now if Wisconsin and Oregon decide to celebrate Sally Struthers birthday by banning all TV series DVDs other than ALL IN THE FAMILY or Wisconsinites want to celebrate the surrenders by beating up southerners and taking their guns and horses, that’s a problem worth being outraged about and should be addressed accordingly, but otherwise let us be (in the word of (Virginian) Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, copacetic.
I’m not sure I agree with your sentiment, Sampiro. If someone’s primary impact on the world was a morally odious one, then decent people can and should object to a political entity’s celebration of this person. If Illinois decided to have John Wayne Gacy day, people would be justifiably outraged, even if it neither broke their leg nor picked their pocket, because it would be morally indecent. A moral message is sent by our choices to honor certain people.
I think I see where you’re confused. The bodies they found in John Wayne Gacy’s basement- yes, he really killed them and put them there. The bodies found in Robert E. Lee’s yard— those weren’t really his kills.
That said, how the south’s primary impact on the world was a morally odious one is something I’d like to read. Or, assuming you’re speaking exclusively of the Confederacy, how they’re likened to a rapist and serial murderer might also be compelling.
I used Gacy as an extreme example to illustrate my point, not to say the Confederacy was the moral equivalent of rapists and serial killers. As I said above, I am genuinely interested in how we ought to regard people like Lee. My point was if Lee’s significance was primarily that he fought in a morally wicked cause, then it is legitimate to criticize the celebration of his legacy. If someone wants to argue that his legacy is morally praiseworthy, then do so, and I would agree that it is legitimate to honor him. Otherwise, why should we honor someone who fought in large part to keep blacks the property of whites? And the holiday honors the part he played in that particular war, not, I suspect, his other contributions to Southern culture.
Zoe ma’am, I will take your word for it. I have trouble seeing it that way, but your honesty has always impressed me, and I trust your judgment. I just wish there were a way of doing it without making it a paid state holiday. shrug
Why thank you, darlin’. I didn’t know I had one, but you made my night.