Exactly. Who is the more trusted authority on life in the antebellum South: a native Southerner or some editorial writer in California?
Note, on the other hand, that liberals tell us that we cannot pass judgment on 21st century Islamic jihadists (since we don't understand their culture).
Give a liberal a pen and you'll soon have a written lie. It is despicable the way Southerners have been portrayed as ignorant, slave-whipping toads. D'nesh D'souza (sp) in his book "The End of Racism" came to the conclusion that slaves in the pre-war South had a higher standard of living than most of the rest of the world at the time.
The notion that Southerners were the slavery bad guys is another that has been fed to us. Give me a break! No one was worse than the Northern traders and shippers.
And finally, when tribal kings rounded up and captured black Africans for sale to the merchant ships who is to say that if black Africans had been more powerful and advanced at the time that they would not have been rounding up white Europeans for bondage? Of course they would.