Confederate States Of America (2005)

What's wrong about this photo? Or if you're a true-born Southerner, what's right?

While scanning through some of the up and coming movies in 2005, I ran across this intriguing title; "CSA: Confederate States of America (2005)". It's an "alternate universe" take on what would the country be like had the South won the civil war.

Suffice to say anything from Hollywood on this topic is sure to to bring about all sorts of controversial ideas and discussions. I was surprised that they are approaching such subject matter, and I'm more than a little interested.

For myself, I was more than pleased with the homage paid to General "Stonewall" Jackson in Turner's "Gods and Generals". Like him, I should have like to believe that the South would have been compelled to end slavery out of Christian dignity rather than continue to enslave their brothers of the freedom that belong equally to all men. Obviously it didn't happen that way.

Would I fight for a South that believed in Slavery today? I have to ask first, would I know any better back then? I don't know. I honestly don't know. My pride for my South and my heritage would have most likely doomed me as it did so many others. I won't skirt the issue, in all likelyhood, slavery may have been an afterthought. Had they been the staple of what I considered property, I possibly would have already been past the point of moral struggle on the point and preparing to kill Northern invaders.

So what do I feel about this? The photo above nearly brings me to tears, as I highly respect Abraham Lincoln. I don't care if they kick me out of the South. Imagine if GW was in prayer over what to do about a seperatist leftist California. That's how I imagine Lincoln. A great man. I wonder sometimes what my family would have been like today. How many more of us would there be? Would we have held onto the property and prosperity that sustained them before the war? Would I have double the amount of family in the area? How many would I have had to cook for last week for Christmas? Would I have needed to make more "Pate De Fois Gras"?

Well, dunno about that either. Depending on what the previous for this movie are like, I may or may not see it. If they portray it as the United Confederacy of the KKK I won't be attending.

This generation of our clan speaks some 5 languages in addition to English, those being of recent immigrants to this nation. All of them are good Americans. I believe the south would have succombed to the same forces that affected the North. Immigration, war, economics and other huma forces that have changed the map of the world since history began.

Whatever. At least in this alternate universe, it's safe for me to believe that we would have grown to be the benevolent and humane South that I know it is in my heart. I can believe that slavery would have died shortly before or after that lost victory. I can believe that Southern gentlemen would have served the world as the model for behavior. In my alternate universe, it's ok that Spock has a beard. It's my alternate universe after all, it can be what I want.

At any rate, I lived up North for many years. Wonderful people and difficult people. I will always sing their praises as a land full of beautiful Italian girls, maple syrup and Birch beer. My uncle ribbed us once before we left on how we were going up North to live "with all the Yankees". Afterwards I always refered to him as royalty. He is, really. He's "King of the Rednecks". I suppose I'm his court jester.

That is why the Supreme Court had to remove the Declaration as a factor, since it deemed slavery immoral, as admitted by Stephens himself. The DOI did not state anywhere that Slavery was immoral. It is patently obvious that the writers of the DOI did not believe the Black race as fully human, otherwise how could they reconcile the "all men are created equal" and still own slaves themselves? That would make them the biggest hypocrites of all time.

Well, not according to Stephens it didn't.

Nice to live in a century without slavery and talk about how easy it would have been to get rid of it.

We can't even get rid of the Welfare state.

The fact is that slavery was a complicated, difficult problem, that Jefferson blamed England for in the original Declaration.

Lincoln noted the same thing, that many slave owners entangled in a system that was very difficult to get out even if they wanted to!

That being said,(again)there was no conflict with Stephens and the DOI with regard to the status of the negro.

Oh, there is very much a conflict since Stephens said that the Founders did view slavery as immoral and that the 'new' ímproved'Confederate Constitution had corrected the old error.

Stephens made it very clear that the Founders had always intended for slavery to end, not continue and expand, which he viewed as a mistake on their part

As far as keeping men in bondage, the North kept their negros in bondage for another year after the CSA was dissolved. That is hypocrisy, disallowing slavery in the States that seceded because its "immoral", but keep it going in your own region. The normally prudent course would be first to get your own house in order before demanding your neighbor to, but that is just my opinion, I could be wrong.....

You mean the border states that still refused to outlaw slavery.

Yes, it took another year to get rid of it in the Constitution.

A prudent course would have been to recognize slavery as being immoral and not demand its expansion as the price for staying in the Union.

[Little Ray] The worst parts of racism were not a legacy of slavery, but of Reconstruction. Whites were disenfranchised, while blacks became pawns for carpetbaggers and the like. This brought the interests of Southern whites into conflict with blacks and led to such things as the KKK and Jim Crow.

[x, mounting a high horse] That's what they tell you.

Translation: They're lying, but now I will dispel their lies and tell you the truth, because I am so much more trustworthy.

.....Black slaves comprised over half the population of South Carolina and Mississippi. There'd been efforts by the White population to control and restrict the slave population and keep Blacks "in their place" before the war.

This is generally known as self-preservation, which of course these people had no moral right to engage in.

Unhindered by any law, planters had brought in large populations of aliens to subserve their interests on their private property. These large crowds of slave laborers were a public danger if they ever burst the bonds that had been forged for them by their African kings and kept in place by their subsequent chain of owners.

Keep in mind, however, that under the sin-and-redemption theory that has been used by x and his fellow travelers since the days of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass, which invests with moral invincibility any and all violence against the object communities -- the South -- the slaves, and anyone whatsoever claiming to act on their behalf, were (and their descendants are) privileged, like the Spartans against the helots, to visit any horrors they please on the surrounding communities. After all, they deserve it, because x, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, say so.

But you can trust x; he wouldn't lie to you, even though you deserve to die.

The color line wasn't as important before the war, since slavery had been in place to keep African-Americans down, but it would be quite important after the war, whatever Republicans and Reconstruction governments did.

How dare they look to their own safety, in the face of superordinating moral privilege.

Black Reconstruction would give unrepentant Confederates something to agitate against,.....

Question: Of what were these Confederates and ex-Confederates supposed to repent.....see where the language is taking us?

...... but whether it happened or not, the fear of Black rule would drive White Southerners in some states to use repressive measures.

Black rule? How about, you're all dead?

Or do I need to review the box score run up by the Zulu kings Dingaan and Cetshwayo, when they ran into white people? Haiti? You do have a model, don't you, for peaceful moral retribution against white people for their having been, as Susan Sontag once pronounced them, the "cancer of the planet"? From which we infer that they offended against right order, against planetary dharma, by drawing breath as infants?

x, you are preaching race hatred against your own kinsmen. That is something really special -- noticed even by the Nazis, who employed Jews who hated other Jews to help them hunt down families like Anne Frank's.

Oh, but I hope I don't offend you, by pointing out your consanguinity to your prey. Cain and Abel, and all that. I'm not playing your game -- much -- by drawing moral authority from religious references, the kind of authority that invests moral blowhards with the right to do wrong.

That's what they did before and during the war. That's what they wanted to do after the war, until the Radical Republicans in Congress stopped them.

Or did the Black Republicans cynically enroll the emancipated ex-slaves in a political scheme to enrich themselves by neutralizing the (white) Southerners politically, for good and all?

Competing realities are such a bitch.

And that's what White Rhodesians and South Africans, who didn't have the experience of Black rule, did.

You understand, of course, that these were pariah states, rejected by white liberal opinion and thrown to the wolves (in Zim, blacks are murdering whites a few at a time in a slow-motion ethnic cleansing -- but you must ignore that; it's morally privileged cleansing), where they deserve only to be rent limb from limb as their Voortrekker ancestors were by Dingaan's pitiless warriors. "Black rule" being a euphemism here, in x's usage, for what is to be dealt out to these pariah whites.

You've only got to connect the dots and look at what Southern governments and leaders were saying and doing about race in the years leading up to the war and afterwards to see the trajectory.

Yes, listen to x. He won't lie to you. You can trust him. He's just cast out the white South Africans, but he won't do that to you.

.....they're not telling you the truth, or at least not the whole story.

But you can trust x, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass. They won't let you wind up like Andries Pretorius and his trekkers, or the Jews of Buchenwald.

You can trust them.

Well, that's about enough of that. You get the idea. Moral privilege, when piled up high enough on one side of the scales, the way the moralizers on x's side of the argument do it, can wash a lot of sins in, ummmm, how shall we say, resolving matters. As a practical matter, then, it's always a danger signal, like the chirring noise made by a rattlesnake's tail, when people like Stowe, Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and our friend start using the language of sin and redemption to point the finger and cry moral outrage against the other side. They're piling up those moral chips to use as counterweights against the objective evil they've got in mind.

When people's main argument is "you made us do it" chances are it's not a good one and they're not looking very deeply or very honestly into things.

I think you just said a little more than you intended to, x.

Revisionists MUST make the issue a moral one

Exactly, and here is why: see this book review, which is a pretty chewy essay in its own right about the moralizing language and appeal of the Abolitionists and their latterday emulators:

Johanna Shields review of Kimberly K. Smith's The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics, U. Kansas Press, 1999.

As Shields points out, Kimberly Smith is a political scientist by training rather than a literary critic, which is encouraging that she knows whereof she speaks when addressing political discourse.

The burden of the review is that the Abolitionists resorted to moral exhortation because other forms of Enlightenment-moderated discourse were not getting the job done.

This determination to turn up the heat and engage in a new rhetoric of moral inculpation and destruction is precisely what moved Harriet Beecher Stowe to write Uncle Tom's Cabin, and her brother to send "Beecher's Bibles" to Kansas. The actions of brother and sister should be seen as all of a piece.

In motivating Lincoln to send two million bayonets south, one can say that they certainly appeared to have "got it done".....but then there are the alternative explanations that are so tacky, as I pointed out in my post above to x and Little Ray. Explanations from self-interest and self-privileging, for example.

Off for a bit.

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