Uncle Remus and his tales of Br’er Rabbit, the whole “Song of the South” popularized in the Disney film, was something of a prettification and romantic gloss-over of the what made up much of “the rest of the story”, as it related to the daily lives of the “non-voting” residents of what was once known as “the Confederacy”.
The “South” had a pretty diverse population at the time, perhaps more so than any of the Northern states, as there was also a large and fairly well integrated Indian population (the Cherokee, the Creeks, the Choctaw, the Seminole, and the Chickasaw tribes), considered to be the “five civilized tribes”. And many of these contributed manpower to the war effort of the South, being excellent scouts and guerrilla fighters in the wilderness areas.
The North, on the other hand, treated many of the other Indian tribes rather shabbily, before and after the Civil War, relocating a number of tribes forcibly out of New York and Pennsylvania, and waging open warfare with almost every one of the Plains and Western tribes.
You know, the black slaves had it a lot less rough in most instances, even for the freed slaves after Reconstruction. While there may have been individual persecutions of blacks, there was nothing like the genocide that had been practiced against many of the Indians, as they were removed again and again to places remote from their ancestral homes.
And no, I am not Ward Churchill, or even Elizabeth Warren.
Don’t you think using the term “genocide” is a little harsh to describe the undeniably unfair treatment of native people? There was never any official policy of genocide as with the Nazi policy toward Jews, and it seems to me that conflating the two serves the leftist goal of discrediting the country and whites in general.
You got ‘em that right!