Posted on 12/02/2008 6:57:32 AM PST by prplhze2000
came across an article from an old issue of U.S. News & World Report commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Civil War. What was interesting was that it compared the treatment of the South for decades after the war's end to the millions of dollars and additional support given to Germany and other European countries through the Marshall plan and concluded the South's fate was a drag on the rest of the country as it remained the poorest section of America by far.....
U.S Treasury agents streamed through the South in 1865 grabbing cotton, land, anything that they claimed to have been the property of the Confederacy. They took cotton valued at $30 million. Behind them came hordes of carpetbaggers (With the Wall Street Journal's blessing I'm sure. They'll invent some economic theory to justify it while professing to hate the looters in Atlas Shrugged) from the North to drain away any Southern Capital they could lay hands on..."
The Southern steel industry, doing a booming business in 1900, was virtually stopped in its track, Southerners said, by a rate structure imposed by the North. The rates required payment of price differentials so sharp that it became cheaper for an industry in New Orleans to buy steel from Pittsburgh than from Birmingham. Not until World War II were changes made in this system."
Such policies created a region so poor and under-educated that FDR called the South the "nations number one economic problem" in 1938...
(Excerpt) Read more at kingfish1935.blogspot.com ...
“Say what you will, no other rebellious people was welcomed back into the body politic and returned to power faster than those in the Southern U.S. In any other country their actions would have brought a much more severe punishment down upon them.”
True, to a point. Many were singled out and punished for years by the Union. My grgrgrandfather (a Cherokee was tried for treason for serving with the Confederacy 10 years after the war. Their lands were taken for settlement. They were exempt from tabacco/liquor taxes, so congress imposed a new law and confiscated their assets, bankrupting them.
Read about it.
http://jesusweptanamericanstory.blogspot.com/
You mean like the 'truth' listed in reply 14? Those kind of sources? Madam, if the winners write the history then it's equally true that the losers write the myths. And reply 14 is a prime example.
This article explains why the South has an inbred distrust of the Federal government and Big Government in general.
The scars of War and Occupation are still there to see...
If you would have read the article, it was the Republican Party and it’s croney capitalism that conspired to keep the South down.
That said, it is capalism that has raised the South out of poverty and the new Republican Party that nourishes it.
The Founding Fathers knew what they were getting into when they declared independence. They did not whine when the British decided to actually fight a war against them.
If they lost the war for independence, the FF knew their fate would be a short rope and a long drop. They made sure to fight hard enough to prevent that from happening.
In that light, Southern complaints about the treatment they received after the Civil War come off as whining.
Sherman's army treated the civilian populace remarkably well, by historic standards. His campaign was meant to destroy infrastructure and prevent the South from supplying its armies. It was not a campaign of slaughter. Did some rapes and murder occur? Of course. But Sherman brutally punished any soldiers engaging in such conduct.
This distrust in Big Government is rooted in the large Scots-Irish population of the South. The Scots-Irish were characterized by poverty, family ties that extended both linearly across generations and collaterally to many degrees of cousins, strongly protestant beliefs, independence, distrust of governments in general, and a readiness to fight both individually as part of a local militia. The Scots-Irish provided the bulk of the Confederate Army although few held any slaves. During the decades following the Civil War, their poverty was worse than before the war, reaching a nadir during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This poverty prompted another mass migration to other parts of America which was accelerated by the mobilization for World War II. As a consequence, the Scots-Irish have been distributed through most of America, except perhaps New England.
Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America
http://www.amazon.com/Born-Fighting-Scots-Irish-Shaped-America/dp/0767916883
Subvert the Constitution? How is wanting to leave and be LEFT IN PEACE subverting the Constitution???
How is bombarding the crap out of a federal fort wanting to leave and be left if peace?
I could care less what you forgive and forget. Just remember that the war, and all the death and destruction that the South suffered, was self inflicted. Bear that in mind and you'll find it easy to understand why I have no sympathy for you. Any more than I have for the Iraqis or the Germans or the Japanese.
It's a BS argument that even the author of the piece doesn't buy, given that "southerners said" part of the sentence. The history of railroad rates is a whole subject in and of itself, with the railroad companies stopping any attempt at the federal level to regulate rates and playing favorites with large shippers. States made some efforts, but they could only effect rates within their borders, not interstate, and even that was limited. This was the age of "robber baron" capitalism. Look up Munn v. Illinois, Wabash, Saint Louis and Pacific Railroad Company v. Illinois, the Elkins Act and the origins of the Interstate Commerce Commission.
What southerners were actually calling for was government intervention in the private sector and more government regulation of business. In other words, the Democrat agenda.
Live one.
They left and formed their own nation. The federal fort should have been abandoned by the now-then foreign USA.
lets start by kicking out northern liberal , ah I mean all liberals first.
send them north to do their agenda and then we’ll have a wall to protect us from the hordes of carpetbaggers.
nearly forgot and if they don’t like the accents, the food, and the flags then leave the south
It’s been a while. We haven’t had a good Civil War thread in months.
I have that book and it is very interesting.
shame the proper history is not taught in schools and it is a big shame most northerners(and I have lived up there) do not have any idea about the war of the causes, they actually think it was all over slavery and the north came down to the rescue of the blacks
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