Posted on 04/21/2005 8:17:08 PM PDT by stainlessbanner
The defining moment of my visit to New Orleans a year ago occurred in a gift shop. I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit this, but at least it wasn't the kind that sells feather boas and t-shirts with jazz-playing lobsters. I wasn't a sorority girl nursing my hangover at Café Du Monde during Mardi Gras; I was a tourist visiting what used to be a sprawling, stately slave plantation.
I was busy mulling over that subtly troubling experience, browsing through the gift shop's bookshelves, when I came to a curious array of volumes. The title The South Was Right! jumped out at me first, and it took me a few minutes of thumbing through it to convince myself that it wasn't actually a joke. Stunned, I went down the line, looking in disbelief as each title lamented the once-great Confederacy and the common values it stood for. My favorite item was The Jefferson Davis Coloring Book, which I suspect is perfect for young Dixiecrats of all ages. I bought it just to remind myself that it exists.
I wonder how many parents in Louisiana are reading their children bedtime stories about their heroic ex-president.
It is this experience and others that have made me curious about a sliver of the South that -- apparently -- exists right here in upstate New York. Plenty of students coming back from breaks, sometimes along with their bubbly parents, have driven past a specific abode that has one memorable defining feature. On Route 79, that country road that often takes us home, there boasts a large, proud Confederate flag on the front wall of this particular house. You've probably seen it.
Why here, 200 miles north of the Mason-Dixon Line? That was the question that ricocheted in my mind one night as I drove past; so to find my answer, I pulled over and knocked on the door. Since that moment last semester, I've been chronicling the lives of the family that lives there with a video camera.
I dove in without knowing what to expect. I wasn't the only one, of course. No less than three different professors I pitched this to warned me to "be careful." They all said -- some more jokingly than others -- that I should bring a gun.
It was at this point I realized that I wasn't dealing merely with an outdated symbol of the Confederacy; I was dealing with a powerful and common conception, even among us Ivy League educated, that we are a shining City on a Hill among barren fields of hicks with mullets who watch NASCAR all day and grill roadkill venison on their pickup truck radiators. I finally wanted to find out if these cartoons that we've come to accept as "the other America" really exist.
My grand project to get behind the stereotypes of rural America wasn't off to a great start when the door opened and I came face to face with a man, a mullet and the vicious guard dog he was holding back (but no shotgun). I realized this was going to be a bit more difficult than I'd envisioned.
No matter: He directed me to the house next door, which happened to be the residence of his entire family. Not one of the Cornell professors or friends I'd spoken to would have predicted what happened next -- that I'd be greeted warmly; that I'd be invited in, even as an unexpected guest; that the family would listen to my pitch to follow them around with a video camera; and that they'd send me off, wishing me well.
These people are not white supremacists who love Jefferson Davis and hate minorities, who want to send the all-American middle finger to people with dark skin by putting up the rebel flag. I've spent too much time with them to believe it's true. Otherwise, the daughter of the family -- art school, anti-Bush, dyed hair, goth -- would have been booted onto the street long ago.
At the same time, I've spent enough of my life in Southern states to know that the racist sentiments interpreted as the meaning behind the rebel flag are still alive in some places, even if they are pushed underground. That's true of an enlightened city like New York as much as rural Pennsylvania or Jackson, Mississippi.
But instead of trying to argue that this is not a family of true racists -- which the film will do better than words, and which would rely entirely on my subjective experience -- I return to the question I began with: Why do they have that rebel flag hanging there for all the passing cars to see?
I spoke to them, as well as many people who share their view -- that the Confederate flag symbolizes not slavery but a rebellious spirit, an identity of a people who merely sought to defend their homeland as it was being invaded by a Yankee army. This view was the one I'd stumbled upon in a Louisiana gift shop, peddled by historians far out of the mainstream of academic life.
Yet this view is prevalent among a minority of rural white Americans. They don't care that the big-city elites say it's a symbol of slavery -- and by most scholarly accounts, that's exactly what it is. They've taken the symbol back, as an identity for themselves. Not an identity of hatred, but one of self-assertion.
Even if misguided, I came to respect their choice of home decoration. After all, they'd been told for generations that it was a symbol entirely separate from the question of slavery, without the corrective influence of a Cornell history professor to intervene.
Even so, I can't help but feel a bit off guard whenever I drive past. Not because I know what the flag means, but because I know who lives behind it.
Andy Guess is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at guess@cornell.edu. The Last Boy Scout usually appears alternate Fridays.
In 1861 the Mississippi River was the interstate highway system of its day. The federal government spent a lot of money and effort making transportation up and down it as safe as possible. It carried huge amounts of goods to midwestern states like Illinois and Iowa and, via the Ohio River, to Ohio and Pennsylvania as well. If formed the only outlet for those states to the export markets of Europe. After secession one of the first acts of the governor of Mississippi, John Jones Petts, was to announce that the river was closed to Northern traffic and mounted cannon near Vicksburg. On January 11, 1861 he fired on a steamboat passing by.
Don't try and pitch that crap that an independent Confederacy posed no threat when their first act was an economic act of war on the midwest states remaining in the US.
There is no specific authorization within the Constitution for states seceding, either.
Sorry to bust your bubble, but Grant never said that. And all Grant/Dent family slaves had beed freed long before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Some people might find those facts intersting as well.
And the losers write the myths, as we all know all too well.
OTOH- Some of the biggest Yankee haters are reduced to regurgitating their trash over at the LePer colony. Go figure.
You don't mind if I post the rest of the quote, do you? Lincoln went on to say, " I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."
Please present to me a quote from any southern leader, civilian or military, that indicates that they believed that the black man was their equal in any respect whatsoever. Please give us a quote that indicates that any southern leader, civilian or military, believed that the black man had any rights at all that the white man was bound to respect. Surely you can do that, can't you?
When I was growing up, we had one car and title was in my father's name. So only 20% of our family owned a car. But 100% of the family benefitted from car ownership. Likewise in the south. Some small percentage actually owned slaves, but they had families and the families benefitted. In some states, like Mississippi or South Carolina, close to half of all families owned slaves. And countless other non-slave owining families derived benefits from the afluence of the slave owners. So slavery was deeply ingrained in southern society and was the pillar of their economic well-being.
To be honest with you, it was the first time in my academic history that anyone had said this, not to mention that he taught us that the WBTS was the result of tariffs on cotton.
You might want to get a new professor. Cotton was exported. There has never been a tariff levied on exports. The Constitution prevents it.
The Confederacy was "founded...its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, moral truth." --Alexander Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, March 21, 1861
Well either you're full of it or Lincoln just flip-flopped during a speech.
Honest Abe huh?
I'd say the answer is A) You're full of it.
You are correct sir!
Interesting. I'd never seen that before. I will correct you though that firing on the steamboat would have been the independent act of Mississippi, not the Confederacy. Mississippi didn't join the Confederacy until February 4, 1861. The Confederate Congress passed the following act on February 25, 1861. Free river transport posed no economic threat to states that depended on the Mississippi River system.
The Congress of the Confederate States of America do enact, That the peaceful navigation of the Mississippi river is hereby declared free to the citizens of any of the States upon its borders, or upon the borders of its navigable tributaries; and all ships, boats, rafts or vessels may navigate the same, under such regulations as may be established by authority of law, or under such police regulations as may be established by the States within their several jurisdictions.
SEC. 2. Be it further enacted, All ships, boats, or vessels, which may enter the waters of the said river within the limits of this Confederacy, from any port or place beyond the said limits, may freely pass with their cargoes to any other port or place beyond the limits of this Confederacy without any duty or hindrance, except light money, pilotage, and other like charges; ...
P.S. You messed up, non-seq. You capitalized Confederacy in your post.
Had you even bothered to read the quote in context you would know better than to say that. But like the vast majority of your southron bretheren you find research too taxing.
How about answers to my questions?
Sure, and firing on the Star of the West was an act of an independent South Carolina. But both acts indicate the basic lack of interest in living peacefully with the United States, and the intent of the states along the Mississippi to cut off the US from the sea.
You messed up, non-seq. You capitalized Confederacy in your post.
I'll have to watch that.
How tall are you?
What questions?
Great! A holier than thou Yankee.
So what? Are you suggesting that equates to prohibiting it?
Name a single southern leader who's views on the races were more...enlightened than Lincoln's. After all if you are going to condemn him for racism then you should also take after other's with equal or worse views, shouldn't you?
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