I am a Southerner

I won't apologize I won't be reconstructed. I will not surrender My identity, my heritage. I believe in the Constitution, In States' Rights, That the government should be the Servant, not the Master of the people. I believe in the right to bear arms, The right to be left alone. I am a Southerner... The spirit of my Confederate ancestors Boils in my blood. They fought Not for what they thought was right, But for what was right. Not for slavery, But to resist tyranny, Machiavellian laws, Oppressive taxation, invasion of his land, For the right to be left alone. I am a Southerner... A rebel, Seldom politically correct, At times belligerent. I don't like Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Or modern neocon politicians like them. I like hunting and fishing, The Bonnie Blue and "Dixie" I still believe in chivalry and civility. I am a face in the Southern collage of Gentlemen and scholars, belles and writers, Soldiers and sharecroppers, Cajuns and Creoles, Celts and Germans, freedmen and slaves. We are all the South. The South...My home, my beautiful home. My culture, my destiny, my heart. I am a Southerner...

Pelham: "Moderate and conservative Republicans of the civil war era regarded the Radical Republicans as villains, and particularly dangerous ones."

So-called Radical Republicans drove and passed the 13th (1865), 14th (1868) and 15th (1870) Amendments, and tried to impeach Eastern Tennessee Democrat President Andrew Johnson (1868) because, basically, he was thought way too lenient on former Confederates.

Curious that most of our radical pro-Confederates these days consider Johnson just another Northern devil.
Many people say that somehow Lincoln would have been more forgiving than Johnson, had he lived.

Regardless, that period from Appomattox in April 1865 until the presidential election of 1876 is pretty murky and misunderstood.
Certainly I'm no expert on it, and am disinclined to defend one particular group or another.

Radical Republicans tried to impeach Johnson and had considered running someone against Lincoln in 1864. Their own plans for Reconstruction resembled something that the Bolsheviks would try later. An extremely vengeful crowd who would have tried and executed Davis, Lee, and whole passel of Confederates. They lost much of their power when Grant took office. Grant and Sherman and most the Union command had no use for them.

Maverick68: "...the narrative is that Southerners hated blacks whilst the White Knights up North embraced them with open arms."

As a Northerner, I don't think anyone on Free Republic is seriously confused about this, excepting possibly our pro-Confederates.
Everybody knows that Southerners generally loved their blacks, just as the Bible commands, they treated them as members of their own families, which quite often they really were.
Yes, Southerners loved blacks, in their place, and as long as they stayed there, it was just one big happy family.

The only problem was, those uppity blacks, you know, the trouble makers, the agitators, the ones who somehow got mixed up with northern Communistjews & such.
Those required special... ahem... attention, shall we say?
You know, sometimes visitations... at night, you understand, right?

Northerners are a very different subject.
During the 1850s, when the South had around four million slaves, every year a few thousand (one tenth of one percent) would escape north, to be, as you said, "embraced with open arms" and helped onto the "underground railroad" for transportation to... Canada.

The simple truth is: even by 1860, still most Northerners had no problems with Africans or slavery in the South, just so long as they stayed in the South.
But very few wanted, and President Lincoln in 1864 was at pains to reassure them that it wouldn't happen: for huge numbers of former slaves to leave the South and move North.
That's the reality, and nobody here or anywhere else I've ever seen has tried to sugar coat it.

So where in the world is all this endless caterwauling, complaining pro-Confederate nonsense coming from?
Why is there never an end to it?
What exactly is the burr under your saddles that keeps you jumping around, never settling down to life again?

I have many friends from around the country who have become naturalized Southerners who laugh at the notion of racism being more rampant in the South than anywhere else in the country.

Depends on what you mean by racism.

In the South they don't mind how close I get, so long as I don't get too big. In the North they don't mind how big I get, so long as I don't get too close. Dick Gregory

Lighten up, Francis.....
Any “burrs” under our lil’ ole saddles is really just fatigue.
We get a little tired of some of you Northerners with the “my ship don’t stink” complex when we dare have a little pride and try to shed some truth on the lies that are perpetually being offered up against the South.

Your passive-agressive obsession with putting people with a little “Confederate pride” in their place suggests perhaps YOU need to settle down to life.
Have a nice day, and I still prefer a Conservative Yankee to a Liberal Confederate.....

Maverick68: "We get a little tired of some of you Northerners with the 'my ship don’t stink' complex when we dare have a little pride and try to shed some truth on the lies that are perpetually being offered up against the South."

But that's not at all what you do, since nobody on Free Republic except pro-Confederates posts "my ship don't stink" threads.
And your pro-Confederate threads are all about telling whopper lies on "the North" or "Ape Lincoln" or anything & anybody to divert attention from the "stink" coming out of your own ships.

Nobody posts "northern pride" threads, or "eastern pride" or "western pride" or "fly-over pride" or anything else, except your pro-Confederate "southern pride".
And the only thing the rest of us do is try to correct endless myth & nonsense coming out of our pro-Confederate "southern pride" community.

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