Posted on 11/13/2004 11:12:00 AM PST by LouAvul
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Based on Margaret Mitchell's hugely popular novel, producer David O. Selznick's four-hour epic tale of the American South during slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction is the all-time box-office champion.
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Considering its financial success and critical acclaim, "Gone With the Wind" may be the most famous movie ever made.
It's also a lie.
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Along with D.W. Griffith's technically innovative but ethically reprehensible "The Birth of a Nation" (from 1915), which portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroic, "GWTW" presents a picture of the pre-Civil War South in which slavery is a noble institution and slaves are content with their status.
Furthermore, it puts forth an image of Reconstruction as one in which freed blacks, the occupying Union army, Southern "scalawags" and Northern "carpetbaggers" inflict great harm on the defeated South, which is saved - along with the honor of Southern womanhood - by the bravery of KKK-like vigilantes.
To his credit, Selznick did eliminate some of the most egregious racism in Mitchell's novel, including the frequent use of the N-word, and downplayed the role of the KKK, compared with "Birth of a Nation," by showing no hooded vigilantes.
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One can say that "GWTW" was a product of its times, when racial segregation was still the law of the South and a common practice in the North, and shouldn't be judged by today's political and moral standards. And it's true that most historical scholarship prior to the 1950s, like the movie, also portrayed slavery as a relatively benign institution and Reconstruction as unequivocally evil.
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Or as William L. Patterson of the Chicago Defender succinctly wrote: "('Gone With the Wind' is a) weapon of terror against black America."
(Excerpt) Read more at sacticket.com ...
chattel slavery was DYING an UNlamented death. agricultural mechanization would have killed the system off with a decade or LESS.
a MILLION lives, needlessly lost (especially given that MANY THOUSANDS of those lives lost were "persons of colour"), in a war of damnyankee aggression against the new CSA republic was a VERY high price to pay to hasten the demise of slavery by 6 or less years.
the WBTS was NEEDLESS, provided that lincoln & his coven of radicals were smart enough to let the southland go in PEACE. SADLY, they were too power-hungry & too STUPID to do that.
free dixie,sw
the free blacks, who fought for dixie liberty, were FREEMEN already in almost every case studied.
MOST were born as FREE MEN!
free dixie,sw
seems appropriate for "trailerpark trash"!
free dixie,sw
Damn, it really is, isn't it?!
What a maroon!
"Lookit, ma, yonder comes a tornado!!!" -- LOL!
All I need to do is read one of your posts.
Well, that's the whole point, isn't it?
And yet the other side insists on arguing -- though they know better, they've read our posts ad infinitum going back two or three years -- that we are a) advocating slavery, b) apologizing for the institution of slavery as if we wanted it resuscitated, c) arguing and apologizing for institutionalized racism, and d) arguing for the sundering of the United States, like those chuzzlewits up in New England who are sulking in their tents after Bush's convincing reelection victory. (I've still got 'Rat friends sending me breathless accounts of original voting-machine records found in trash dumpsters in Florida.)
In so arguing, they are construing a gigantic argumentum ad hominem against both the original secessionists and us, that they and we are wicked, mismotivated people who want to do badly by black people -- by putting them on a raft for Cuba or something, or putting them back in service on big farms somewhere with chains around their necks.
The substantive argument they offer is the same one articulated by Lincoln, and their problem is that we can now evaluate his contemporary political claims at leisure and in detail, with copious documentary evidence not then available to public opinion -- such as his correspondence with Gustavus Fox, e.g., that someone posted here a couple of days ago, and a more-or-less complete record of his negotiations with the government of South Carolina in the days leading up to the cannonading of Fort Sumter, which can be profitably read side-by-side with his simultaneous orders and communiques to Fox and other players in the business about Sumter and Fort Pickens.
When one begins to survey all this activity and to put together a large-scale, macro picture of Lincoln's policy toward the South, that is when the Lincoln apologists begin to start feeling a little tender -- and that is when the ad hominem stuff starts.
Your constitutional argument is one I agree with, and returning to Lincoln, we can now begin, as H.L. Mencken did independently in an earlier generation, to compare Lincoln's claims about constitutional theory with what the Framers committed to paper, and also with various theories offered by consolidation-minded Federalists that were forerunners of Lincoln's own, and see where Lincoln, Hamilton, Jay, and Marshall embroidered and fictionalized the nature of the Union and the American theory of government as established, not by the authors of the Federalist (who were pleaders ex parte in a political forum, after all), but by the Framers in constitutional convention assembled.
In short, what the People ratified and agreed to in 1789-91 and what Lincoln and Marshall said they did, were two different things entirely.
And on this difference, Lincoln hung over 600,000 battlefield deaths and many score of thousands of other entailed civilian deaths, just to have his way on policy.
We'll have a better country when more people openly reject the idea of certain "protected from offense" groups that demand "walking on eggs" and prior restraint, thereby preventing the truthful skewering of the nastiest of them. A play called "The Mfume Done Gone Kweisi" could be done at that wonderful time.
As capitan_refugio pointed out to you about Dred Scott, and nolu chan posted the relevant text to you from the decision itself condemning the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850, the import of Dred Scott was what Lincoln and the freesoilers feared that it was, to-wit that federal law banning slavery from the Territories (including presumably the original Northwest Ordinance forbidding it in the Old Northwest, viz., Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, etc.) would not stand up in court.
As I posted to capitan, however, the reach of the Supreme Court only went so far (remember Andrew Jackson's defiance of Chief Justice Marshall in the matter of his deportation of the Cherokees and other southeastern tribes and his taking of their territories for white settlement), and in the event, Dred Scott did not forestall Californian and Kansan freesoilers from using the Kansas Nebraska Act to forestall slavery in their territories and exclude slaveowners -- notwithstanding that the slaveowners had had their own convention in Kansas, the Lecompton convention, and tried to establish a territorial government of their own.
So my point to capitan and you is that, on the ground "where the rubber meets the road", Dred Scott didn't stand up, but freesoil sentiment carried the day. In fact, you can't point to a single State or territory where Dred Scott caused freesoilers to give way and accept bond slavery on their ground.
How is that Watie, given that the first practical cotton picker didn't come along until the late 1930s and the chemicals that eliminated the need for labor-intensive chopping didn't come along until the 1940s? (Hey, don't argue with me, argue with the agricultural curator at the Smithsonian. Do you need his e-mail address?)
I've read somewhere that this was a very sore point with the elder MacArthur until the day he died. There was some sort of sordid little backstory to this, of the "he done him wrong" nature, about someone's personal vendetta or something like that.
Such laws were common in the South.
The salient point, as our friend has pointed out, is that free States also had such laws, which would seem to be absurd on the face of it.
The fact is that such laws weren't about slavery so much as race. Slavery was the background, but race was on the point of the legislation.
Thanks for the rave. And thanks for the demonstration of "higher law" reasoning, which was common among the antebellum Abolitionists. You start talking about natural law and God immediately. But the Constitution was the social compact among the Peoples who made up the States of the Union. That is the law that governs here -- that, and the laws of the States made under their own sovereignty.
If one believes, like I do, that rights are from God rather than, like you do, that rights come from the power of an individual then there is no possible way I can believe God gave us the right to enslave our fellows merely because we have the power to do so.
Here is where you fall into difficulty. I appreciate that you are committed to the idea of rights, but I think you are falling victim to your own propaganda here.
In the first place, all rights are natural rights that may or may not be recognized by humanity. Free speech was a very iffy proposition in, e.g., seventeeth-century England. Samuel Johnson once remarked, a few years before the American Revolution, that everyone was sovereign in his own mind and free to think what he pleased, even if he weren't free to say it. So saying, he conceded that he might not be free to say what he thought in contemporary English society -- something we are also aware of through the existence of English nursery rhymes like "Little Jack Horner" and "Georgie Porgie", which were loaded with political meaning.
But the fact of the matter, your appeal to "higher law" notwithstanding, was that in Jacksonian America, people not only had the right to an opinion, and to express it, but also to hold persons as property. The desirability of this arrangement inclines strongly toward your side of the argument, just as the existence of latifundia in both Rome and America (we called them "plantations" once, and now "corporate farms") is problematic and probably bad for society. But you can't bark at the right of those people to hold human property in the context of their own laws and society.
This is what I talk about when I accuse people on your side of snarking at people's rights and invoking "higher law" and other appeals to deity to truncate them, for reasons that had nothing to do with deus vult, the Bible, Biblical morality, or anything else.
I could do the same thing to you by insisting that your views are an affront to heaven, and that I am justified in calling down the Mods on your posts, just because your posts are uncongenial to me. I would have given you the same justice Lincoln gave the South if I furthermore sent an army to ravage your home state and burn your place to the ground, for daring to contradict me.
I've posted previously the dozens of terms the Spanish used to locate people genealogically in the racial-composition spectrum. They included persons of mixed ancestry descended from Indians as well as blacks and Europeans, and included such terms familiar from American geography and history (shorn of most of their meaning) as chino, cholo, zambo, lobo, ladino, coyote, marron, cimarron, and negro fino (the last being a person 3/4 African, 1/4 European, what English speakers called "griff", from "griffin", a term used in India, however, to mean Englishmen new to the country), as well as more exotic combinations like cambur, cambujo, chamizo, pardo, cuatrero, and torna atras. Some of the terms are synonyms: zambo is a synonym for negro fino (although the definition of zambo was different in South America); and what Louisianians called "octoroon" was called in Spanish albino, ochavado, or quinteron. There were also two words for persons who were 1/16th black, who would have been called "statutory whites" in the British West Indies: requinteron and salta atras.
This Spanish terminology would have been recorded on baptismal or birth certificates and served to locate the person in society.
The Constitution was the creation of the American people designed to solidfy the Union. It papered over the contradiction slavery posed to it with the understanding that slavery would eventually fade away. That understanding was abrogated by the Slaver leadership which began to defend it at all cost. It loved Slavery more than the Union and its attempt to destroy that Union and that Constitution cost the South immense suffering and I will never excuse, accept or defend it.
There was never any Right to hold slaves only the POWER to do so. Given the existence of those who studied ancient history in the South the example of the latifundia should have been sufficient to change. That was the destruction of Rome since it destroyed the basis of its Republican army when the farms of the soldiers were bought out from under them while on campaign. They returned from the Punic War to find their land worked by slaves. The region's subsequent decline still plagues Italy over two millenia late.
Of course I can criticize any era I am not a multiculturalist believing that all cultures and societies are equal.
Lincoln was not there to give justice to the South but to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and Union. He did give Justice to the Slaverocracy, Thank God.
In the South the protection of slavery was the first consideration of every law and none would be passed if they endangered it.
Census data show that the number of slaves was increasing no matter what you want to believe. And there is NO evidence indicating any southern leader attempted to deal with this growth. In fact slaves were still illegally being imported from Africa almost up to the eve of the War.
Of course, there was no WBTS. This is a total misnomer since it wasn't Va. vs Mass, or NY vs La, Minn vs Tenn. The most accurate name is the RAT Rebellion.
A cowardly craven like Bill Clinton would have allowed the Slavers to destroy the Union and maybe a Buchanan. But even Douglas was too much for the Slavers to accept since he believed that the people of a territory or state had the right to decide if slavery was to be allowed there. Fortunately Lincoln took his oath seriously or you would be speaking German or Russian.
Regarding your purportedly "well known" but undocumented "FACT" there is the much better known and very well documented fact of the CENSUS of 1860. The TOTAL Black population in the FREE states was 221,224. If runaway slaves were as great a problem as you purport, WHERE WERE THEY????
The FREE states had a TOTAL FREE BLACK population of 221,224 as of 1860.
CA 4,086 CT 8,627 IL 7,628 IN 11,428 IA 1,069 ME 1,327 MA 9,602 MI 6,799 MN 259 NH 494 NJ 25,318 NY 45,005 OH 36,673 OR 128 PA 56,949 RI 3,952 VT 709 WI 1,171 TL 221,224
I accept that you have not read what I posted and responded in ignorance.
I will take your LIBERAL dissent to be one of ignorance rather than intent.
[nc #385] I provided maps showing state-by-state black population in 1860 and 1990.
[jsuati #416] "Lol. And I presume you believe those maps prove something. Hilarious."
The maps show where the blacks were in 1860 and that they are largely in the same place in 1990.
They demonstrate the Clintonian aspect of your #368.
What a marvelous theory. Let us see how it works in practice.
There is nothing to get. There was never any right for any woman to have an abortion, no matter what the laws might say about it. As I am sure you are opposed to infanticide, and surely you could not just sit idly by and watch 40 million innocent children be murdered, do you march on abortion clinics and close them down, rise up in revolt against the abortion clinics, or do you just sit and spew crap about that issue as well.
[jsuati #408] If one believes, like I do, that rights are from God....
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