Jesus, Till was in 1955 in Mississippi. So we are judged for 54 years for that. Even if you go with something a lot more recent- let’s go with Memphis '68 perhaps- only 41 years- how many hate crimes have happened all over the nation in that same time? If you’re a historian by training (as am I incidentally) you must also know that most people’s concepts of history involve Hollywood and catchphrases and the occasional tricorn; do you really think it’s historical analysis on part of the masses?
Not rhetorical but may as well be as this thread has gotten boring as all hell. Nothing personal to you, just an observation in general.
The South has a legacy which it earned by trying to maintain a society predicated on racial superiority through legal and extralegal means for more than a century after the Civil War ended.
How is this relevant? I’m not being a douche here I’m just not sure where your going with this.
I have, but it’s been awhile, and I admit that I’m fuzzy on the details.
The fact remains that he led a horrifyingly bloody revolt to enable the continued systematic dehumanization of millions of people for no better reason than (at best) crass avarice. I don’t see anything in his pre-or-post-secession career that comes anywhere near atoning for that.
So since I can’t see a reason, perhaps you could enlighten me. What makes Jefferson Davis so awesome that he deserves to have public works projects named after him?
While you’re at it, please explain the continued boner for Nathan Bedford Forrest, because that one really raises a Yankee eyebrow.
There have been comparisons to others who have been honored and are also flowed (MLK etc.), but the difference is that while MLK and the others mayh have had some serious flaws, that isn’t why they are being honored. In the case of Davis & other Confederate honorees, they aren’t being honored for their DC boosterism etc. They’re being honored for this:
It’s their participation in fighting to keep slaves that has led to the honors. Without their Civil War fame, they’re not getting bridges named after them. This is revolting.
Far be it from me to challenge views expressed in ALL CAPS, but the cite I provided did not refer to William King as a “gentle slaveowner” but (mockery intended?) as a “gentle slavemonger” - a monger being someone who peddles or promotes something. How much King may have been involved traffic in slaves I do not know, but a gushingly complimentary bio of his says the following:
*"Between 1815-1830, there was a great migration of North Carolina families
to the newly opened territories of Alabama and Mississippi. In 1819, the
Honorable William R. King…moved to Dallas and
Marengo Counties in Alabama. One of his sisters, Margaret King had married
John Beck of Faison, and another sister, Tabitha King had married Basil
Kornegay of Mount Olive (Mr. and Mrs. Robert P. Holmes now own the old
Basil Kornegay plantation near Mount Olive). They sold their lands in North
Carolina, and carried their slaves with them. They bought rich farm land in
Alabama, and established prosperous plantations.
There was a growing demand for cotton on the domestic and foreign markets.
William R. King founded the town of Selma, owned a plantation called King’s
Bend, directly across the Alabama River from Selma. Later be built a home
called “Chestnut Hill” in the pine hills near Selma. When he died in 1859,
his estate consisted of several plantations and 159 slaves"*.
I guess he’d forgotten to free those 159 slaves. And I’m sure those slaves he brought with him from North Carolina to Alabama enjoyed the new freedom of working on a cotton plantation.
But as Sampiro tells us, he wasn’t as bad as some other plantation owners and he did popularize guayabera shirts. :dubious: Somehow these weren’t sufficiently mitigating factors in the Washington decision to rename King County for a more illustrious King.
We’re not mocking the South, just the fossilized attitudes of a few who can’t let go of destructive myths.
This is at least the second time you’ve seceded from this thread.
Despite your attacks on logic and history, no forceful attempts at reunification will be made.
Sampiro You really don’t know why the South is disparaged? They have fought tooth and nail against every piece of progress in civil rights. If it weren’t for the introduction of Federal troops, southern school might still be legally segregated to this day. You still have elected officials that say things like “Obama is just popular because he’s black”. The south is votes more conservative than the rest of the country; we can thank disasters like W on them. The south is behind on every scale of progress you can think of: wealth, health, education, and obesity among them. And as much as you whine about not being respected, it seems that the south is always happy to dump on the north: carpet baggers, ivy tower intellectuals, New Yorkers (code for Jewish). In my daily life I almost never hear anyone talk about the south. The north is not obsessed with hatred of the south like the south is for the north. We don’t dwell on the Civil War. My grandfathers uncle was held in a Confederate prison and he never once mentioned that fact; we only found out later doing genealogy.
There is a fine line between “holding the Confederacy in contempt” and hating everything the white South has ever represented or continues to represent. Conflation of the two ideas is as much the fault of Southerners as it is Northerners. If you hold the Confederacy in contempt, you also hold in contempt all those in the North who favored a negotiated peace. You hold in contempt the thousands responsible for the New York Draft Riots. You hold in contempt the Democratic Party. You do not hold in contempt the many Southerners, especially in the border states, who never held slaves, never benefited from slavery, and headed for the hills or the nearest Union regiment when war came. There is some subtlety here that people are increasingly ignorant of.
Not to minimize the very real disparities that exist, but the north appears more segregated because the cities are smaller. For example, Hartford, CT, which got cited a while back as the poorest city in the country, is 18 square miles. Syracuse, NY is 25 square miles. Majority minority Central Falls, RI is 1.29 square miles. Compare that with a place like Jacksonville (885 square miles) or Houston (601 square miles). If the city boundaries in the northeast included suburban areas like they do in most of the rest of the country, I don’t think they would be significantly more segregated.
I have some sympathy to those who resented the way the draft was implemented, with provisions to allow the rich to buy their way out of serving. But I certainly “hold in contempt” those who reacted to the injustices of the draft, real or imagined, by having a race riot and lynching black people.
Well, the Democratic Party of 1860, or certainly most of it. The Democratic and Republican Parties of 2009 both bear little resemblance to the parties of those names from 150 years ago.
And just to add to the above, and repeat what I’ve said before–I have no use for the cause of the Confederacy, and for the Confederate States as a political institution; and little patience with those who try to whitewash the “Lost Cause”. But even among the men who did fight for the South (instead of joining up with the Union forces, or just trying to sit the whole thing out), I’m sure they had many reasons. Some of them were vicous racists, some were ignorant and misled, and some were just trying to make the best of a bad situation.
I’ve gradually been brought around to thinking that, although the root cause of the war was slavery, which is more clear the more one reads the actual words of the actual secessionists, that an exacerbating influence (what caused the war to happen when it did, as opposed to earlier or later) was that the election of Lincoln signaled to the South that its old, long-term dominance in national politics was fading away. The South had for a long time gotten its way in almost everything (3/5ths compromise, anyone?), and the war was almost a burst of fury at seeing that undue advantage slipping away.
The tariff reduction of 1857 benefited the South but was passed not in interest of sectional fairness but near necessity to placate Europe into buying U.S. state and Federal bonds because our economy (like, not at all coincidentally, the economies of many other nations) was on the verge of collapse for many reasons. Very similar to today in some ways- a worldwide recession following a period of prosperity and due largely to overspeculation, though this being when the U.S. economy was lashed to European economies more than the other way around.
The wiki is good but concise and doesn’t really convey the literal “panic” of the Panic or how global it was. I’ve often read that it was caused by the loss of the as seen on TV SS Central America, which while most certainly not helpful (destroyed the ship’s insurers which caused dominoes to fall) that was in some ways the least of it; the damage done to the North Carolina coast (a region less reliant on tobacco [and cotton not at all] but a major supplier of wood [previously naval stores but that was going down as more ships were made of steel, which is another thing…] for the U.S. and Europe) was actually worse than the Central America, though the main roots were in the Crimean War, but that’s getting off course a bit. Suffice it to say that we were tottering on the verge of collapse and actually aside from the hit regions of the Carolinas the south (which had it been separated at that time would have been the fifth largest economy in the world by some counts) was doing better than the north. Many banking houses (some tied to the insurers of the Central America and many with ties to European banking houses) were in danger of closing and in an ancestor of the bailouts the state and Federal governments began selling bonds to European bankers and governments and private speculators, and lowering tariffs of European import-export duties (because the same bankers had major investments in European factories and shipping that needed the boost) was a backscratch. Again, all due respect to MEBuckner, this was not a placation of the South but was to help northern capitalism.
The Morill Tariff Act was deliberately to undo the 1857 acts as the recession itself receded a bit and northern industrialists (particularly the iron and steel industry) were having absolute fits due to British steel being sold so cheaply in American ports and tossing money around like it was water to get the tariffs put back in place. While it’s true that the Morill Act was not passed until after secession, it was literally one month after secession and it would have passed with or without the southern consent, and by this time the southern economy was having problems due to cotton prices wavering.
As to “why would anybody go so crazy over 7% increase in tariffs”, keep in mind that tariffs to southern planters were essentially the same as an income tax. For every $10,000 you made last year subtract $700 in addition to the taxes and other deductions that you already make, so that if you made $50,000 last year and paid $12,000 in various deductions you’re now paying $15,500 in various deductions; that $3,500 would be a lot of money and could be float or sink money. So while slavery was the main focus of the war, the tariff was infuriating to southerners (who again paid 90% of the import tariffs [and tariffs were a major source of revenue to the government]) and yet they had little control over them, and again while Lincoln was not an abolitionist (anti-expansionism and abolitionism were quite different in intent and perception) the tariff act and Lincoln’s election both showed that if he ever should decide to end slavery by decree or even if a bill introduced to end slavery got traction, it would not be a stretch to imagine it passing even if the south voted in lockstep to impede it.
Absolutely, though this wasn’t a sudden thing. It had been eroding for years. That was the cause of the secession- the knowledge they could legally lose their slaves by mandate and their economy would be ruined. Slavery had existed for 242 years by the time of Sumter and many presidents starting with Adams Sr. had been anti-slavery, but it was the tariff measures and the erosion of Southern power due to immigration and annexation of other states that was what caused secession- for the first time they could win in an abolition effort. It really wasn’t because, as many seem to believe (not naming names) Southerners suddenly getting paranoid for no real reason (a hemp fire from Mexico maybe?) and starting to lob cannon balls because Lincoln’s beard was spooking them out.
Returning to the 1857 tariff reforms for the benefit of anybody still interested in financial history, it answers the question that’s been asked as to why the UK never came to the aid of the CSA in spite of their mills needing southern cotton; the short answer is that while they had a vested interest in southern victory by far their greater interest was in northern victory due to these bonds. The fact that more Europeans had invested in the federal bonds and northern bonds than in the southern was a major reason for not taking an interest in the Confederate cause. An exception was Erlanger et Co. which was up to its throat in Louisiana interests (Erlanger fils was married to the daughter of John Slidell [of Trent Affair fame and had offices in New Orleans, Mobile, Charleston, etc. [mentioned for trivia sake: one of Louisiana’s richest men, John Elgee, uncle of Oscar Wilde, earned much of his fortune as their rep) and a major family rift was caused when Erlange fils loaned the CSA $15 million; it was not that it was loaned to the Confederacy but it was that it was such a relatively puny amount- Erlange pere pleaded with Davis “PLEASE… give back the $15 million or let me loan you $150 million, either one I will be glad to do”. His logic was that $150 million would have enabled the CSA to win the war (and there’s a very good chance it would have) while $15 million would just be enough to piss away and the war would be lost and the south unable to pay back the loan (which of course is what happened). Davis certainly exercised bad judgment in his life but not in this - he was all about taking the $150 million credit line- but his Congress was not, arguing it would damn the nation into eternal debt and refusing to consider that without it there would be no nation.
After the war of course Erlange had to swallow that $15 million (which wasn’t easy) and many European houses lost their shirts in the money they’d spent on antebellum state bonds in the southern and border states. Many more made fortunes from both sides of course.
A nitpick to my own post above- upon checking the wiki link I noticed it’s to the later Erlanger and Co., founded in 1864 by Emile Erlanger. The one that loaned Davis/CSA money was an earlier incarnation run during the war by his father Frederic. (No relation- or at least not close- to the Erlanger Theater chain founder for those familiar with him.)
What states did the U.S. annex? Are you referring to territories, or part of Mexico, or what (must be that hemp smoke again)?
I see - the motives weren’t pure enough. :rolleyes:
My favorite Civil War-era take on sectionalism/states’ rights is General Pap Thomas’ comment after the battle of Missionary Ridge, when a chaplain asked him if the Union dead should be buried according to state. He replied “No, mix 'em up, mix ‘em up. I’m tired of states’ rights.”
Won’tcha come with me to Alabammy,
Back to the arms of my dear ol’ Mammy,
Her cooking’s lousy and her hands are clammy,
But what the hell, it’s home.
Which isn’t terribly different from blacks who can’t face the fact that their ancestors sold each other into slavery quite happily. Knowing that Africans had at least as much responsibility for the African slave trade as Arabs and Europeans should make them ecstatic with joy that they no longer belong to such backward, savage peoples, instead of yearning for the Motherland and emphasizing their Africaness.
I don’t know of any black person who has a hard time accepting the role of Africans in the slave trade. At least not to extent that they actually celebrate the cause of those tribes who rounded up their people for European sale.
Can I have Apple to Apple Comparisons for $1000, please.
I have yet to meet a black person who accepts the fact that Africans bear a huge part of the responsibility for the slave trade. Instead, they want to blame it all on Europeans and Americans. They talk about the slaves who died on the Atlantic crossing, but ignore the vastly greater number who died en route to the coast before they ever saw a white face.
Black Americans sentimentalize and romanticize Africa. Billy Bob romanticizes the antebellum South. I fail to see how one is better than the other, except perhaps that Southerners didn’t sell each other into slavery and weren’t still practicing ritual cannibalism and human sacrifice in the nineteenth century.
I do get rather tired of unreconstructed Southerners who seem to think the antebellum South was some kind of heaven on earth. Flag waving gets tiresome very quickly, no matter what flag is being waved. But I see no reason why Southerners should hang our heads in shame about our ancestors.
I considered continuing in this thread, but Sampiro is so hateful to any attempt to argue anything, that although I can, I refuse to continue debating him in this context. And then of course, there are the disgusting rantings of **DanBlather **against him, which basically makes me just walk away.
Short version: Sampiro, your twisted little ideology is so utterly one-sided there’s simply no common ground. I don’t think the South was evil; I think the South was wrong, period, end of story. And I would love to talk to you in person when you are likely to be calmer. But I will not debate this on a board which has obviously upset you so much. Suffice it to say that your interpretation of events in horrendously skewed. You start from the assumption that Seccession was a noble defense of the South, which is… debatable. To say the absolute least. But ti also prevents you from seeing anything else.
I am somewhat historically conditioned to be about as neutral in the fight as anyone. I come from the most southern section of the least “northern” state which was definitely in the north (Indiana, and really only Kentucky or Missouri beat us out at all). The people living in my homeland were southern by ancestry and not very willing to join up or fight, but not interested in seccession. I am pretty sure I have ancestors on all sides of almost everything (Republican and Democrat, Catholic and Protestant, North and South), although our records don’t really go back that far. In many ways I admire the South, but their political leadership int he antebellum era is not one of those ways.
