Has there ever been anywhere and at any time in history a place that willing collapsed its economy in the name of morality? Or a place that would not go to war to stop its economy from being collapsed?
But slavery was a drain on the southern economy. Had economic concerns been paramount, then the sensible thing would have been a (reasonably rapid) phasing out of slavery.
I myself don’t like Wiki being the go-to that it’s become, but I’m familiar with the size of slave populations, so 25% didn’t seem at all out of whack to me. For the record, I just typed ‘Tennessee’ and ‘Slavery’ into Google and took the first hit, which is The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture
The free white people of Tennessee and the South in general were mostly poor small farmers. The small numbers of plantation owners were however extremely wealthy in comparison and owned huge numbers of human beings as chattel slaves. Personally I think one of the worst things about the war was that by whipping up jingoistic attitudes this very small percentage of wealthy slave owners was able to convince the masses of the poor whites to fight for them to preserve slavery.
To take it one stage further than my last answer… yes. The Confederacy, in its obsession with slavery, willingly collapsed its own economy.
With the legacy continuing to this day with the failure to develop any sense of class solidarity, and the use of racism to fragment the working class.
[QUOTE=Zoe]
Why is the North not worthy of contempt?
[/QUOTE]
Because the South is the great boogeyman where the sins of the fathers (or the great-great-great-grandfathers) can never be washed clean. The industrial slums of New England, Old England (does anybody else love the irony of an English person preaching the evils of government supported racism a century and a half ago?), and the northern reliance on southern slave labor- irrelevant. The child brothels that stretched for whole brothels in NYC a generation after the Civil War, the works of Jacob Riis, the writings of de Toqueville and even of the not-exactly-unbiased-Beecher siblings about how racism was stronger in the north than in the South (the very reason Harriet Beecher Stowe made Simon Legree a northerner was to remind her audiences of this)- these things are trivia (defined here as “facts that support an argument that is not yours”). The fact that race riots occurred everywhere in the country, that the KKK was stronger outside the south than in it, that the largest Klan rally ever was held in Long Island (nor surprising considering that at least 80,000 New Yorkers were members in the 1920s)? Trivia. That England was effing up the Middle East and oppressing brown people everywhere they went decades after Lee and Davis and Longstreet were dead and decomposed? That the north waited longer than any other region of the country to provide social relief even though they had the greatest poverty in the nation? An eccentricity. That when slavery was gradually abolished in the northern states many of the slaves simply got sold south or taken there when their owners relocated (often illegally) to avoid this? Nothing of note.
It is the South that must atone.
My dog is currently having a major surgery that he may not live through and, while it makes me racist and a lost cause apologist I’m sure, I care more about that than arguing with people whose prejudice and ignorance exceeds in fanaticism that of any racist I’ve ever known, so this time I really do withdraw from the thread. Say what you will about my arguments, about my sources, about the South, I promise not to respond because “Frankly my dears, I don’t give a damn”, and of course I’ll leave with a song.
(Since it costs nothing I will ask even though I don’t believe it is the least affective for any praying types to put in a word for my dog.)
I’m not a praying person, but my thoughts are with you both. Good luck, Sampiro.
All worthy of condemnation. And good thoughts for the hound.
Slavery was a drain on the economy, but it was an insidious one. The southern states before the Civil War were dominated economically and politically by a small plantation elite who had all their wealth tied up in slavery and slaveholding.
Abolition would likely have destroyed them, even if some sort of compensation was possible.
Oh I agree - but I would argue it was more their social position that was propped up by slavery rather than their economic one. The plantations could have been run more efficiently with wage labor, I’d argue.
Abolition would certainly have destroyed the social structure; not that that would have been a bad thing.
The hilarious thing about this thread was that Samprio was often right, but he’s so utterly obsessed with arguing and defending his position he walked into all kinds of idiocy. I never bothered to respond after he I realized he was simply twisting any sentence arbitrarily into any way he wished so as to “argue” better. it is not a trait I find admirable, although several other posters here responded exactly the same.
Of course they are. They are also taught, correctly, that slavery in the north was never particularly widespread (with a few notable exceptions - New York City, some plantations in southern RI, etc.) compared to the South , that it tended to be of a more humane form (to the extent that there is such a thing - most slaves in the north were “house slaves”), that the Northern states all voluntarily ended slavery, that the North fought a war in which hundreds of thousands of its own citizens died and which was largely for the purpose of ending slavery, and that after said war the North (again, for the most part) never had draconian laws designed to keep black people slaves in everything but name.
Of course, you can understand why Northerners might consider themselves to be somewhat superior to Southerners in this regard.
For good data on historical populations in the United States, the University of Virginia Library maintains the Historical Census Browser, which does indeed confirm that in 1860 the total population of Tennessee was 1,109,801, of whom 275,719 (24.84%) were slaves. I’m sure it’s true that in parts of Tennessee the people were small farmers and not plantation owners; but West Tennessee, the area at the Memphis end of the state, was much more like the Deep South. In 1860 Shelby County (where Memphis is) had a population that was 35% slave–and Fayette County, right next door, was a whopping 63.6% slave. Johnson County, all the way at the other end of the state, had less than 5% slaves; and Scott County, on the Kentucky border, though not as far west as Johnson Co., had only 1.68% slaves. Not suprisingly, East Tennessee was something of a bastion of Unionism within the Confederacy–why should those small famers, most of whom owned no slaves, secede and fight a war over the interests of the big plantation owners in Memphis?
Why is the North not worthy of contempt?
But the title of the thread isn’t Why is the South not worthy of contempt?, it’s Why is the Confederacy not worthy of contempt? Everybody on both (all) sides needs to keep in mind that the South does not reduce to the Confederacy; the South includes the Confederacy as part of its history, but the South goes all the way back to Jamestown, and up to the present day. The insistence of too many Southerners in using the symbols of the Confederacy to symbolize the region in general does nothing to dispell this.
Given the extent to which the history of the South, as a distinct region, is bound up with slavery, the Confederacy, and the War, it may not be possible to have a “Southern” identity that doesn’t raise hackles. Americans may also claim to be Virginians or Tennesseans or (natch) Texans, as distinct identities within the broader “American” identity, but an identity that unites people from Virginia and Texas and Tennessee, but doesn’t include people from Pennsylvania and Iowa and Colorado, will likely always come back around to slavery and the Confederacy and war. I’m not insisting that this must be true, but threads like this don’t fill me with much hope for a “Southern” identity which doesn’t boil down to “Confederate” (and that in turn boils down to “slavery”). Personally, I don’t have any problem with just identifying as an American, but I do realize that other people (in many parts of the country, not just the South) desire some more particular identity for themselves.
[QUOTE=MEBuckner]
Why is the North not worthy of contempt?
But the title of the thread isn’t Why is the South not worthy of contempt?, it’s Why is the Confederacy not worthy of contempt?
[/QUOTE]
My penultimate post to the thread, I promise: There will be a thread if not of that title then of that subject once my dog is more recovered and preferably home. Currently I’m too pregnant nun jittery and nervous and more inclined to make a point by cutting a throat than by engaging in debate. (If you think I’m passionate on the south my regard for my dogs would make you hide under a bed; the little guy is on prayer lists and I’m an atheist and the only reason I’m not spending the night at the vet’s office is that the night time orderly wouldn’t accept a bribe.)
My ultimate post will be a link when it’s up, unless somebody else would like to start it (in which case I’ll put in the request to please put clearer parameters in the OP and be more participatory than the deistic Mr. Excellent).
Well, I do hope your dog gets better, Sampiro.
This remains garbage, regardless of the condition of Sampiro’s dog (which I hope improves rapidly - I’m pulling for the beast).
Not only was the economy of the South not under threat of collapse by the North at the time the South launched the Civil War, one wonders how far the South would have sunk into feudal depravity and poverty had the Union not been preserved.
As to your supposedly unbiased sources (which you list but have been remiss about specifically quoting), a rather high percentage (excluding the undoubtedly impeccable sonofthesouth.net :dubious:) are either by Jefferson Davis or from sources that apparently revere him (i.e. “Jefferson Davis, American”). And no newspaper of the Civil War era is, in itself, a reliable source of information. Newspapers are often derided these days for supposed biases - at the time of the Civil War they were pretty much a joke.
While we’re waiting for the Ultimate Sampiro Post that will presumably sweep away all doubters of Confederate virtues, much like the flood at the end of O Brother, Where Art Thou??, as well as hopefully good news about the dog, a historical note from the N.Y. Times - two separate columns on the 150th anniversary of John Brown’s execution, one presenting him in a relatively dim light as a terrorist, the other rather praiseworthy and urging a Presidential pardon for him. Despite the worthiness of his cause and his personal courage, he was responsible for the deaths of innocents (though comparable to the outrages of pro-slavery forces in the Border states and not remotely on the scale of Jefferson Davis), and I find the idea of a posthumous pardon repugnant. At a time when we’re battling other terrorists, pardoning Brown would send exactly the wrong message.
Not to be a drama queen but I really don’t feel like debating this further, yet I can’t let this slide.
Will somebody else, preferably somebody who is in the “condemn the Confederacy” side of the fence, please explain to Jackmanni what “primary sources” are?
Or that as for Jefferson Davis, American the following reviews carry a bit more weight than that of somebody who hasn’t read it but doesn’t like the title.
LIBRARY JOURNAL (previously known as “The League for Relegalization of Slavery”):
James McPherson(North Dakota born Pulitzer Prize winning Civil War historian at two Ivy League universities, probably the single most respected living Civil War historian, but secretly a senior member of the revenant Knights of the Golden Circle):
–Los Angeles Times Book Review (mouthpiece of "Sons of Confederate Veterans: NAMBLA Chapter
)
–The New York Times Book Review (previously LADIES HOME DEATH TO THE UNION WEEKLY REVIEW OF YET MORE WONDERFUL REVELATIONS ABOUT THE CAUSE GLORIOUS AND FILTHY YANKEE PROPAGANDA
Trust me, my current self imposed exile is not to be taken as reluctance to argue this all day. Just not today. I promise I’ll be back.
I’m not exactly on the condemn the Confederacy side simply because they’re below my contempt for reasons I’ve already explained in this long long thread. However, I do consider myself to be a good Union man and firmly believe the right side won the war.
When researching history a primary source is (typically) a document of some sort that is close to the person, event, or whatever the subject is. So a newspaper article produced in 1865 would be considered a primary source document. However, an interview with a Civil War soldier in 1895 would also be considered a primary source.
List of primary sources (by no means complete): Personal letters, newspaper articles, magazines, artwork, a furlough pass, a sales receipt for a slave, tax records, census reports, and so on and so forth.
Obviously these are going to have some bias in them. What a historian does is gather a lot of primary sources. If he does a good job he gathers a lot of different primary sources with different perspectives on the subject at hand. He then uses these primary sources and comes up with an interpretation of the past. The historian then writes his interpretation and that becomes a secondary source.
Good historians also reference specific portions of their source material. They do not make claims, then list a bunch of sources and say “See, this proves my point!”.
In regard to “Jefferson Davis, American” and Sampiro’s cut-and-paste review excerpts, in addition to them not legitimitizing anything Sampiro had to say about Jefferson Davis, he apparently missed out on the irony of one reviewer noting that the book “casts (italics added) Davis as the “true patriot” who left the Union reluctantly but believed the South must do so to preserve the legacy of the Founding Fathers regarding slavery and states’ rights.”. There is nothing there to demonstrate that the reviewer buys into the idea of Davis as a “true patriot” (and I suspect the Library Journal would be a bit uncomfortable with the idea that it views going to war to preserve slavery as “true patriotism”. Another explicitly refers to Davis “professing” to fight for American institutions and ideals (not that he actually did or even believed that he did).
And I suspect that both the New York Times and L.A. Times’ reviewers were not endorsing the idea of Confederate apologists taking little snippets of Davis’ professed patriotic views and using them to prop up their own imaginative and highly colorized versions of Civil War history.
I’d take John Brown over Jefferson Davis any day. At least he was an honest terrorist.
I suggest you use these lines as the subtitle for your book Ad Nauseam: A Post-Confederate Regurgitation.
And if no book is forthcoming, “Not to be a drama queen…yet I can’t let this slide” makes a swell motto for Confederate apologism in general.
I asked you specifically what you would like me to document. My offer still stands. Believe it or not, not everything’s on the Internet, I’ll give you a hyperlink if available and source and page number when it’s not. Meanwhile, you are embarassing yourself.