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 ...
In 1860 Illinois claimed 7,628 free blacks. Lincoln thought that was 7,628 too many. Considering the time and effort they spent passing Black Laws, most of Illinois agreed with Lincoln.
Louisiana had 18,647 free blacks. Maryland had 83,942; Virginia had 58,042; North Carolina had 30,463; Delaware had 19,829.
Another fact-free post from justshutupandtakeit. The few, the loud, the Brigade.
CENSUS 1860 FREE NEGRO POPULATION
01. AL 2,690 02. AR 144 03. CA 4,086 04. CT 8,627 05. DE 19,829 06. FL 932 07. GA 3,500 08. IL 7,628 09. IN 11,428 10. IA 1,069 11. KS 625 12. KY 10,684 13. LA 18,647 14. ME 1,327 15. MD 83,942 16. MA 9,602 17. MI 6,799 18. MN 259 19. MS 773 20. MO 3,572 21. NH 494 22. NJ 25,318 23. NY 45,005 24. NC 30,463 25. OH 36,673 26. OR 128 27. PA 56,949 28. RI 3,952 29. SC 9,914 30. TN 7,300 31. TX 355 32. VT 709 33. VA 58,042 34. WI 1,171
Thank you. I was alluding to the story told by Douglas MacArthur, about his father and Gen. Phil Sheridan following Arthur MacArthur's assault on the ridge. It is in William Manchester's book, American Caesar, pg 15.
"A few minutes after five o'clock Sheridan arrived on the scene. As Douglas MacArthur told the story a century afterward, the general embraced the teen-aged adjutant and said to the young man's comrades in a broken voice, "Take care of him. He has just won the Medal of Honor." If true, this would bespeak an extraordinary prescience, since the award, owing to red tape, was not made until twenty-seven years later."
"When the war ended I was Lieutenant Colonel, but held the Governor's commission as Colonel, which the War Department refused to recognize."
Manchester also writes, "For 'gallant and meritorious services in the Battle of Franklin, Tenn., and in the Atlanta campaign,' [Arthur MacArthur] was brevetted again, this time to the rank of full colonel, thus becoming, at nineteen, the youngest officer of that rank in the Union Army. Henceforth he would become known throughout Wisconsin as the 'boy colonel'."
Whatever relieves the blockage.
Let me repeat from an earlier post on this thread, from arch-secessionist Robert Barnwell Rhett:
"What has been the policy pursued in Kansas? Has the territory had a fair chance of becoming a Slave State? Has the principle of equal protection to slave property been carried out by the Government there in many of its departments? On the contrary, has not every appliance been used to thwart the South and expel or prohibit her sons from colonizing there.... In our opinion, had the principle of equal protection to Southern men and Southern property been rigorously observed by the General Government, both California and Kansas would undoubtedly have come into the Union as Slave States. The South lost those States for the lack of proper assertion of this great principle....
"New Mexico [Territory], it is asserted, is too barren and arid for Southern occupation or settlement.... Now, New Mexico ... teems with mineral resources.... There is no vocation in the world in which slavery can be more useful and profitable than mining.... [Is] it wise, in our present condition of ignorance of the resources of New Mexico, to jump to the conclusion that the South can have no interest in its territories, and therefore shall waive or abandon her right of colonizing them?"
It is not so important what had occurred up to 1861, but what the southern leadership wanted to eventually happen. There can be no doubt the southern leadership coveted the territories. Rhett realized that these lands were unsuitable for cotton or tobacco growing, but he also envisioned other uses for the slaves.
Also, you probably are unaware the the southern San Joaquin Valley of California become an important cotton-growing part of the state in the first half of the 20th century. Rhett had his eyes on California and the mineral wealth of the southwest.
That is what Arthur MacArthur, Jr. essentially said -- he was brevetted -- he was NOT awarded the rank by the U.S. Army or War Dept.
It is similar to more modern "frocking."
You are apparently unaware of the availability of cheap Mexican labor in California.
Also, California was a state, not a territory.
Rhett might have blathered, but the population statistics show that, up to now now, nobody paid him no never mind until you.
Importing slaves to California and mining for cactus and tumbleweed in New Mexico -- the few, the loud, the Brigade.
Why would Lincoln consider serious negotiations with criminals ("Confederate commissioners")? You would have us believe that the southerners meekly gave up on their expansionist desires. Nothing could be further from the truth. The expansion of slave territory was a southern article of faith.
"If, by your legislation, you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, I am for disunion" - Robert Toombs, 1850
"We ask you to give us our rights [in the territories]; ... if you refuse, I am for taking them by armed occupation." - Albert Gallatin Brown (1850)
"I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it.... I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican states; and I want them all for the same reason - for the planting and spreading of slavery." - Brown (1858)
"With Cuba and St. Domingo, we could control the production of the tropics, and, with them, the commerce of the world, and with that, the power of the world" - Southern Standard
"We are playing for a mighty stake. The game must be played boldly.... If we win we carry slavery to the pacific ocean, if we fail, we lose Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and all the territories." - David Atchison (1854)
"We are organizing. We will be compelled to shoot, burn & hang, but the thing will soon be over. We intend to Mormonize the Abolistionists." - David Atchison (1854)
"The admission of Kansas into the Union as a slave state is now a point of honor. the fate of the South is to be decided with the Kansas issue. if Kansas becomes a hireling state, slave property will decline to half its present value in Missiouri.... [A]bolitionism will become the prevailing sentiment [there]. So with Arkansas. so with upper Texas." - Preston Brooks (1856).
"Nevertheless, the Southerners were successfully shut out of California by a cabal, which obtained California's admission to the Union as a freesoil State. And so California was not on the table when the Southern States left the Union."
"The Nebraska principle of popular sovereignty and non-intervention smooths the way for an establishment of a slave state in southern California. For, if the people of California choose to divide their domain, and to set up another State with Southern institutions, of course Congress will not presume to interpose any objections." - New Orleans Bee (1854, four years after California became a state and at a time when Californians were considering splitting the state)
"I believe in less than two years from this time, if we are wise, we will have a slave state in Southern California. The State has been divided in the last six months for that purpose." - Harry S. Foote (1859)
the last two quotations show the slave-power conspiracy was still hard at work in the American West, including the free state of California.
You might be intereested in these two references:
"Slavery in New Mexico" DeBows Review No. 26, 1859
"The Cotton Fields of Arizona Territory" DeBows Review, No. 24, 1858.
Fehrenbacher, in The Slaveholding Republic, notes that DeBows correctly pointed out that the Gila River area of Arizona and southern California had "potential to support cotton agriculture." The professor also notes that the New Mexico Territorial Legislature passed slave code legislation in 1859, "as preparatory for some larger southern vision."
It certainly seems that the slaveholding interests were making a play for the territories in the southwest. Perhaps they should not have been so keen on secession, which settled the matter of southern slavery expansion once and for all.
Is it your contention, then, that the ACW was actually a war for southern liberation? If so, I agree with you.
I earlier made reference to the practice of peonage. Also, refer to the last two quotation in my #447. The south continued to covet California, even after statehood. There was a significant pro-south coningent in the sparsely populated southern part of the state (the great portion of the population was to be found in San Francisco and the gold fields of the Sierra.
Breckinridge did surprisingly well in southern California in the election of 1860. Overall, he carried 28.3% of the vote in the state, compared to Lincoln's 32.3% and Douglas's 31.7%.
"Rhett might have blathered, but the population statistics show that, up to now now, nobody paid him no never mind until you."
The southerners listened to him - intently.
"Importing slaves to California and mining for cactus and tumbleweed in New Mexico -- the few, the loud, the Brigade."
Rhett would be somewhat disappointed to hear you have nominated him for the "Wlat Brigade."
"Lying skunk"? Impressive chutzpah in rodomontade, coming from someone who just got pantsed in the act of fibbing himself, claiming he didn't indulge in sectional invective when, in fact, he did.
I didn't challenge your educational credentials, just the credibility and precision of your ad hominem argument about Southern chattel slavery: endogamous in, peculiar to, particularly vicious, and blah, blah, blah.
You slurred, you fibbed, you got caught. Veni, vidi, vici.
Congratulations on the SAT score, though; don't know what year you sat for your SAT, but my 1960's score (on the old scale, with lower scores) was 677 verbal + 677 math (kind of an anomaly), putting me at the 99th and 97th percentiles respectively that year, or the 97th and 92nd percentiles of high-school graduates who entered college. I sat for my GRE in 1973, four years out of college and three months into grad school, and placed at the 76th percentile among fellow majors, the 91st percentile in quant, and 80 points off the top of the chart in verbal, or about 120 points better than the 98th percentile. Since we're comparing Scout badges and all, there are mine. Too bad I didn't make it to Webelo.
I didn't have a minor in my undergrad studies but took some history (four or five courses' worth), German, and Latin and did some self-directed reading in classical history and comparative grammar (Greek, Latin, and Anglo-Saxon: the foundations of English). I garnered six credits toward my master's at Oklahoma after my Navy service but had to go to work when my target institution, the University of Miami (in Coral Gables), jacked up their graduate tuition about 100% to get rid of people like me.
It's probably just as well: once the theoretical work has been done (by Emiliani, in the 60's), chronostratigraphy tends to turn into a lot of laboratory drudge work .
My interest in chronostratigraphy had been tweaked by some exposure to Emiliani's oxygen-isotope work and its relevance to the Milankovich Cycle, with a view to fine-tuning an estimated date for the end of the current (warm) interglacial and a return to pleniglacial conditions -- a subject that is an area of three-way discourse among climatologists and meteorologists, oceanographers, and geologists. In other words, I was as interested in getting a Master of Disaster degree as an MS. But such was not to be.
So there are my humble attainments in the world of study. Humble enough for you?
The Dred Scott decision (what ever it might have been), was issued in early 1857. The legislature of the New Mexico Territory (comprising the present-day states of Arizona and New Mexico), passed slave codes in 1859.
Thank you for that clear statement of your prejudice. Of course, it just about disposes of your credibility in addressing this subject.
The South did not destroy the Union, and it did not attempt to destroy the Union.
The South did not destroy the Constitution, but instead emulated it in drawing their own.
The South did not "love" slavery. It lived with it -- which as any married person can tell you, isn't even close to the same thing.
Interesting to know, but I don't think it contradicts my point. Were there any significant numbers of freesoilers in New Mexico, and had they established a freesoil or antislavery ordinance that they abandoned as a consequence of Scott vs. Sanford?
My first response (tongue in cheek) is there were not then significant numbers of anything in New Mexico Territory. However, there must have been enough of each persuasion that when Charles F. Adams proposed statehood for New Mexico in the early 1861, in the Committee of 33, the southerners on the Committee were not too keen about it, and when it went to the whole House, the Republicans there were against it.
What a perfect self-contradiction -- and all in one sentence.
People like you have no crediblity because of such idiocies as trying to pretend that Blacks had it as bad in the North as in the South. These are nothing but abject lies from desperate minds.
This is a ridiculous statement and totally ad hominem. I have never argued that North or South was all the same to free blacks. Of course that wasn't the case. But when you argue that racism was peculiar to, and endogamous in the South -- as a blanket indictment of the region -- other posters have been sufficiently justified in bringing in examples of extreme prejudice against (free) blacks in the North.
This is fair argumentation, and you are not going to get out of it by simply pointing the finger at your interlocutors and calling us all liars. Especially when you got caught lying yourself, and now here you are again, blasting the South as peculiarly and particularly awful and bad -- but wait, now you are smearing the categories together, whereas before, you were talking about racism as a Southern preoccupation. Now you're throwing everything into the stew and trying to average it all together -- anything, anything to get the moral indictment of the South that you desperately demand be delivered against her.
As I said I in no way "spot" the South institutions but condemn and ridicule its society, culture, politics and economics AS A WHOLE.
Well, what the hell is that but raw sectionalism? You don't play games with stigmatizing the South's instutions -- you just damn the whole thing to hell in a handbasket?!
Do you speak English? Do you realize what you just wrote? How can you say that and not understand that it fits the bill perfectly for the indictment I laid against you, of ragging on the South out of bloodyminded regional animus?
It is pathetic to see supposedly intelligent people trying to foist the ragged myth of the Noble Cause on modern people.
What's pathetic is seeing your envenomed passion dressed up as thought.
There you go again -- sweeping, categorical statements of condemnation, delivered as fact, after your facts have been seriously challenged. You just return to your original position and reiterate it as if you'd never had a conversation on this subject at all.
That's called "bigotry".
What do you think 'bleeding' Kansas was about?
Even Douglas, who championed 'popular sovereignity' went against Buchanan, his parties own President, over the pro-slavers attempting to steal the government of Kansas and make it a slave state.
The Dred Scott decision gave moral sanction to the Slavery moving anywhere in the nation as a fundamental right.
Moreover, it attacked the very core of anti-slavery by stating that the Declaration did not mean that all men were created equal,for if the signers had meant that they would not have allowed slavery.
The South intent was to have slavery considered moral and acceptable in every state in the Union.
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.
It only did not stand up due to the armed resistence of anti-slavers, and the political resistence of Douglas and the Republican Party.
In fact, it was Douglas's dogged resistence against Buchanan and the pro-slavery party that led Lincoln to getting back into the political arena lest Douglas become the nominee for the Republicans.
I think Rhett was seriously in error there. The degree of risk entailed in mining, in which dozens of men might be killed by a single accident, was such as to prohibit deployment of slaves worth $1200-2500 each. As has been discussed above, this was the sort of work for which free immigrant labor would have been wanted, of the sort that involved no greater cost than the payment of a $10 gold piece to the grieving widow in the event of a fatality.
As general labor around a mine, yes, slaves might have been used. But in a mine would have been something different; and attracting free mine labor would have been complicated by the presence in the area of slave labor working other jobs -- but that's a nitpick. The gross bottom line is that slave labor wouldn't have been the best economic choice in mining.
The Spanish and Mexicans used Indians in their mines, but Indians were another matter altogether -- corvee labor rounded up by caciques, they represented no sunk capital cost.
By the way, are you quoting from his newspaper editorial? I'm not sure which publication or speech you're quoting from.
It is not so important what had occurred up to 1861, but what the southern leadership wanted to eventually happen. There can be no doubt the southern leadership coveted the territories. .... Rhett had his eyes on California and the mineral wealth of the southwest.
You are repeating here a charge which has been previously challenged by my quotation of Rhett's other manifesto, "The Address of the People of South Carolina, Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States". In that document, Rhett doesn't dwell on the Territories, and the motive he gives for secession isn't the extension of slavery but the protection of states' rights and their people's future, including the power to legalize and protect the institution of slavery, against the encroachments of a hostile faction in the North. He seems in the invitation speech to be channeling Calhoun and Madison on factionalism and its dangers, more than Lewis and Clark on the attractions of the territorial West.
The point is that Rhett is speaking almost entirely in defensive terms in the document I cited. When did he write the piece you quoted?
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