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.

You and your pals have certainly argued that the right to own slaves had to be respected in 19th century America.

Yes, because that right was protected by the Constitution until and unless someone amended it, and to despise that right, however unwisely, imprudently, or questionably held to, was to walk on the Constitution -- and on the very idea of rights. Either people have all their rights, or they don't have any. You know that.

Then when someone connects the dots, you get all angry about it.

No, I get angry about people who keep dragging invalid forms of argument in here to try to prove that Jeff Davis was an australopithecine morlock, when nothing of the sort was true, and to shout "and you're another!" at anyone who won't let you have your way.

You want to have things both ways: to skate as close as you can to defending slavery in the Old South, and to throw fits, claiming that others are misrepresenting you.

Category error, compounded with ad hominem. If you call yourself an American, you have to defend the idea of rights, and you have to mean it, even when you disagree with the right in question, as policy.

You are the one throwing the fit. Your post is triple-distilled moral pique masquerading as reasoned discourse. You are doing exactly what University of Kansas political scientist Kimberly Smith said about the Abolitionists's use of moralizing arguments:

Using the Enlightenment model, abolitionists first claimed that slave narratives were a form of judicial testimony. Critics, however, attacked the credibility of the witnesses, so "instead of producing a consensus about the facts of slavery, the narratives became mired in epistemological uncertainty, prompting apparently endless and irresolvable disputes over the truth of slavery". Abolitionists continued to use narratives for another reason: they thought that sympathy would motivate action against slavery where reason had failed. Abolitionists like Douglass and Stowe thought that by cultivating sympathy for slaves, they could reasonably attack the immorality of slaveholders, but critics responded that they just demonized their opponents. [Emphasis supplied]

Source: Kimberly K. Smith, reviewed by J. Shields, in H-Net Online.

"Action against slavery", of course, is in the circumstances a euphemism for starting a bloody civil war.

I'm not saying that you would want to own slaves yourself, or that you approve of slaveowning or want slavery back, but you certainly have defended slaveowning and slavery. It's what you do around here.

Yeah, when we run out of pins to stick in our corn dolls, that's what we do around here. And I would point out it's scarcely a concession on your part, to say on the one hand that I don't want to own slaves, while saying on the other that I date axe-murderesses and wear pink leos. Would you please pay attention to the argument and not the leotards?

And here come the axe-murderesses:

Your cronies attack Lincoln for showing less support for slavery and segregation in his time than you do looking back on the same period. For them, he is pro-slavery and racist.

In the first place, why don't you take that up with them? In the second place, would you like to try to parse that again? You are accusing modern Southerners of supporting slavery, again. What you granted with one hand above, you take away now with the other. Why don't you make up your mind?

Thirdly, your statement still doesn't parse: so far, I have you saying that we say that Lincoln was racist and pro-slavery, but we reprobate him for being insufficiently racist and pro-slavery. Your flair for moral comparisons is making you incoherent. Try logic. It's like a sort of mental road map, to help keep you from getting lost and wandering around.

If those epithets apply to him, don't they fit you as well?

Whom are you asking? Me, or all of us? Gee, I'd have to take a poll, but I'm pretty confident starting off with a count of at least one non-racist, or even anti-racist in stand_watie.

But I'm puzzled how you could infer anything about Lincoln's critics, from Lincoln's rhetoric -- the language that nolu chan quoted in luxuriant extension. Pardon me if I don't make a big effort to help you out here, but after all, you are saying something pretty vicious about people on our side of the argument. You're on your own, bucko.

How would your views of 19th century history actually differ if you were "pro-slavery," rather that whatever it is that you think you are instead?

How would my view of the sum of four plus six differ from that of Professor Einstein, or of Albert Speer? We'd all get the same answer. The 19th century was the 19th century. This happened, then that happened. Or it didn't. Whether it did or not is not a subjective process for logical people, unlike you liberals and your endless, restless search for "usable history".

Please try to answer rationally.

Just as soon as you ask a rational question. Are you up for it?

It was an adaptation of what Southerners -- or if you prefer, Americans, very much including White Southerners -- had been doing all along, and what they wanted to do, not an emotional reaction to Reconstruction.

If by that you mean that the return to Black Codes represented continuity with the past, then why don't you spell out what the change was and who did it? Black suffrage was intended by the Radicals precisely to destroy the South politically -- not to emancipate anyone or uplift anyone, but to cripple the South forever. Nobody up north rescinded their Black Codes.

If the Republicans had turned the state governments immediately back over to ex-confederates or if they'd tried to bring Black suffrage and biracial governments, the result would have been more or less the same once the unreconstructed took over again.

By "unreconstructed", I assume that you include, in the name of fairness, all those state legislators north of the Ohio who preserved their own way of discrimination against blacks?

And the results were "more or less the same" as they were in the North, when the Klan marched in Illinois, Iowa, and Indiana.

Any effort or any threat to bring voting rights and civil equality to the freedmen would be regarded as a provocation

Of course it would. Because that was how it was intended to work -- malevolently.

But if you look at what they planned to do from the beginning, it's clear that whatever happened in Reconstruction wasn't the main cause of segregation and the disenfranchisement of African Americans.

The political adherence of the newly-enfranchised blacks to the Freedmen's Bureau and the Republican Party, plus the White Supremacy reaction to black economic progress (and crowing about it), caused it.

I didn't venture an opinion about whether this was justified or not -- it's hard, I hope for 21st century Americans to feel that segregation was justified, though not impossible, as your posts indicate -- just that it wasn't something that Southerners were forced into.

My intention was to paint that outcome as likely bordering on inevitable given the social estrangement of the two groups from the beginning. I thought we had been over the origins of racism and the sociopolitically destabilizing effects of slavery on free whites wherever freehold farming and labor had to compete with undercompensated (or, as modern Cato and American Enterprise Institute apologists would probably call it, more efficient) black slaves, laborers, and sharecroppers.

Was it necessary to deny rights to freedmen and frighten them with strong arm tactics to prevent some bloodbath by Blacks against Whites?

That was largely a prewar fear that receded, I think, after the war, but was always present. Before the war, I'm sure most Southerners did feel it was true. In Brazoria County, Texas, home of the big sugar planters, the population was over 90% black slaves in 1855, rising perhaps to 95% by the outbreak of the Civil War. I agree the freedmen were largely innocent bystanders whose insecurity was the product of racism. But if you are referring to the specific incidents in Texas in autumn 1860, that's a horse of another color, because there was some apparent activity aimed at raising a slave revolt, carried forward by Wide Awakes and freedmen.

Most of your friends might disagree, preferring to blame Northerners for the problems of the postwar South. That's something you should take up with them.

I'll let them speak for themselves. But surely, with the Northern industrial elite in charge of the national government and agenda, wouldn't you agree that they were responsible for everything that they decided -- the tariffs of 1862 and 1883, the embarrassing surpluses, the Billion-Dollar Congress? They were responsible, too, for the Johnstown Flood, the Homestead Strike, and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire -- and never faced any consequences until the fire.

[Continuing]

But consider: for the dozen years of Reconstruction -- less in most states -- there was no Black-on-White bloodbath.

It never materialized, but there was always a frisson of violence during political campaigns -- gunfire was common, and the Tilden-Hayes election was no exception. And it wasn't just the whites who were carrying weapons, although it was the whites who were arrested for trying to suppress black turnout.

Where was the bloodbath after 1965?

In the cities, whither the blacks migrated during the first half of the 20th century. The bloodbath has been the rate of black-on-everybody-else murder: 25,000 dead per year, half of them black; 90% of murdered blacks killed by fellow blacks, and half of all the nonblack victims. Young black men "murdering out" at a rate that makes those Alabama Klan rallies and lynchings look like a kindergarten outing. Add it up: that was the murder rate during the big violent-crime wave of the 1980's and 1990's. How many people is that, and how does that stack up against the 4700 lynchings of blacks that occurred from 1865 to 1965? How many of those black-on-white murders were racially motivated? Nobody's asking, even though prisoner testimony concerning prison violence indicates racial hatred and revanchism is a primary motivator behind black-on-white violence behind bars.

You've bought into the racialist myths of the era.....

Your planted premise that racial attitudes of the era were grounded solely in "racialist myths" is patronizing and foolish; they were also filtered by experience. Some of that experience was misleading -- black-studies scholars tell us that blacks had a number of techniques for attempting to manage whites who had power over them, some practical and behavioral, some magical and religious. But not all observations people of one group will have made about people in other groups can simply be swept under the rug and dismissed as "racialist myths" or racist attitudinizing.

Furthermore, accusing me of sharing 19th-century racist ideas and attitudes in a drive-by comment is below the belt. I'll trouble you to show by citation and quotation where I have internalized 19th-century racialist ideas, or take down the remark.

and the idea that power-sharing means repression, that one either has everything all one's own way or one is a slave, perhaps because you like all-or-nothing categorical alternatives. Fortunately, life and politics aren't always so polarized.

Politics is a zero-sum game. Heard of that one? There was no love lost between the black and white populations of the United States in the 19th and most of the 20th centuries. You don't have to be a xenophobe, as you insinuate, to see that. And wholesale political changes do tend to be accompanied by really big changes in policy and in social and political status for the losers. Just look at the South. On Barbados, the losers are white -- despised by all. Why is it such a stretch to imagine that, if the white community lost political power in several Southern States, that they would come to be treated with summary contempt and abuse by the community of former freedmen, once they consolidated their hold on political power?

It's a peculiarly American tic, to imagine that politics can be like a Fred Rogers workshop -- "inclusive", "supportive", "affirming" and all that stuff. But that is liberalism, not reality.

And anyway, don't you follow the election returns? Southern black political machines exclude whites as if they were old white Choctaw Democrats checking the blacks at the polling booth. Oh, whites can vote -- but black voters vote 95% against white candidates, reflexively. The black machine in New Orleans has made a project of suppressing white representation anywhere in city and parish government. Or so Iris Kelso noticed, 25 years ago -- but I've never seen the national media, ever, take up that issue.

When he was reelected mayor of New Orleans with 20% of the white vote, Ernest "Dutch" Morial had the brass balls to complain about those "racist white voters" while he was getting 95%+ of the black vote. And the New Orleans TV stations danced all night around the huge supermajorities of the black vote that Morial was getting......never mentioned it once, although they waxed eloquent on the willingness (or not) of white Orleans Parish voters to give their votes to a black candidate.

The door always swung both ways, amigo -- even though that fact has never played in the Northern story about the South.

When somebody disagrees with you you talk as thought they are torturing or killing you.

I'm talking about trust, and trust betrayed, and void trust. Think Judas Iscariot. What did he do, and what did his kind of loyalty imply for its object?

You have repeatedly made statements to the effect that Southern whites and South African whites deserve whatever is coming to them. I pointed out what is coming right now to Zimbabwean whites who hung on and gave the black government a chance to prove itself, instead of joining what was called the "chicken run". Well, who's sorry now? And the radical party in South Africa is sloganeering, "one settler, one bullet". And yet you minimize the stakes in this kind of social conflict, despite the evidence of the 20th century, that losing control of your political destiny can get you killed, en masse.

Or should I repeat that remark in Hutu, for more effect?

That kind of mindset is all to familiar from recent history. If the Serbs don't get Kosovo, or Hungary doesn't win it's lost lands back, or Ireland remains divided somebody is trampling on your face or cutting into your windpipe.

Sometimes they are. So how can you tell in advance? Leaps of faith, when millions of people's lives depend on your judgment, are a little hard to justify on grounds of idealism. You won't find many political leaders risking the lives of the people they lead on velleities and contingencies and optimistic assumptions about human nature.

Fortunately, much of the world has gotten beyond such histrionics, and one great thing about America is that we have little time for indulging in them.

So you live in a nice, safe neighborhood. Congratulations. But other people don't, and at times in the past, some of those neighborhoods have been quite large. And you can drop the rhetoric about "histrionics", too.

That is the way that hysterics and other lunatics argue.

Say that again, in Tutsi. Louder -- they're having trouble hearing you.

Everything is turned into a matter of life and death, of survival or destruction.

Sometimes it is. What was a day at the beach worth last December 26th?

You can do that if you want, as a description of how people thought at the time, but 1) you can't simply dismiss the argument when it's used against you.....

Yes, I can, because you're bracketing again -- trying to tie discussants on this board to long-dead Grand Dragons so you can play your blame game some more. Knock it off, agitator. We're not having it.

Nobody on this board is a white supremacist, a Kluxer, or a slaver. GET IT?

-- you can't argue that the end justifies the means for White Southerners but not for other people, and claim to be evenhanded or consistent or expect to have any credibility at all

Ah, more ad hominem, just like Kimberly Smith was talking about. Moral inculpation to move the nation. More demonizing.

Quote me on "the end justifies the means" -- I want to see that one. I've been arguing processualism and constitutionalism until I'm blue in the face, and you accuse me of acting on your values! That's rich!!

-- and 2) you can't give your 19th century Southerners the last word and ignore present-day judgments of their actions.

Yes, I can. Because they were right about a lot of things, and you just hate it that they were. To wash your sides crimes against humanity, you need to inculpate the victims of your epic-scale public violence. More than anything, though, you need us to shut up and just die quietly....just a little push in....just a little stab, and then we can rest.....

Yeah, well, bite me, Fritz.

So if repressive measures are justified for White Southerners,......[emphasis added]

I'm sorry, you'll have to quote me again. You forgot to quote me, and my memory's so bad, I forgot where it was I said that "black people are evil and we need to repress and kill them all so we can be safe!" Or words to that effect. Premise not agreed to.

Anyone who wanted to change the slavery regime in the antebellum South, and the climate of racism and racial laws North and South, owed it to the community to come up with and advocate better ideas -- and to abide by the judgment of the community, even when it was adverse. Instead, the Abolitionists levelled an unanswerable moral accusation against the South, for the purpose of motivating a great civil crime. They amplified the moral dimension of slavery (ignoring white slavery, industrial labor abuses, and everything else) in order to justify the net criminality they themselves intended to add to the equation -- a civil war. That is a pretty huge moral onus, if you want to talk about moral onerousness. But you don't, do you? Because you can play the teleology card.

Remember, it was Hamilton who wrote that ends-justifying-means stuff in Federalist 10. Your champion's political hero and ideological wellspring.

......they would be justified for unionists seeing their republic torn apart and their compatriot's rights violated in rebel areas, and for Blacks who knew all to well what it meant to be reduced to actual slavery.

Premise not agreed to, again. And NO, I AM NOT GOING TO ACQUIESCE IN YOUR OUTRAGE-ENABLED VIOLENCE ON THE COMMUNITY. How many times do I have to call you on that? Your moral pique at my position on transubstantiation does not rise to the level of a justification or casus belli for waging war on my State and turning it into a pillar of smoke for the Cause.

And if we can somehow understand post-Reconstruction segregation in light of the standards of the time we don't have applaud it or justify it now that our own standards are different. We can say that Southern options were limited, and understand that, while still regretting that better options weren't available or sought.

That's true. But don't start that blame-game stuff again -- not when the South was standing on the natural, constitutionally-recognized rights of its People.

We recognize that what political actors did in those days couldn't reflect 21st century attitudes.

That's true, but why do you keep on doing it even after I've called your game and quoted political scientists to you on the subject of Abolitionist agitation and what it was intended to accomplish?

Hobbyists may well maintain that history would have turned out better if Guelphs had defeated Ghibellines or Lancasterians Yorkists (or is it vice versa?), but anyone who invests great passion in such causes is probably a crank.

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Jaffa wrote it, Barry said it, and it's true.

Golly gee whiz, I can hardly wait.

Now you.

You posted this:

A cowardly, draft-dodging, back-shooting sot? Hmmmm. Having dealt with the southron contingent around here for a few years then perhaps Booth is a fine southerner, by comparison.

2,530 posted on 02/12/2005 6:14:31 AM CST by Non-Sequitur

and this:

By downing a considerable amount of brandy, sneaking up behind a man, and shooting him in the back in front of his wife. True southron hero.

2,534 posted on 02/12/2005 10:16:19 AM CST by Non-Sequitur

Jefferson Davis, when he was told of the assassination, deplored it to his traveling companions. Assassination had always been outside the pale of the American political community. We're American, not Mediterranean, we didn't do vendetta. Booth broke that taboo, and Southerners widely deprecated his deed.

You have no call to sneer at people you don't know, by using Booth as an "exemplar" to tar other people who had nothing to do with his crime. You start in on that stuff, and you've got yourself a little flame war. You're using Booth to sneer at people who were much better than Booth and would never have stooped to assassination -- duelling, maybe; Lincoln had participated in one himself. But this is just uncalled for, and you knew it when you posted it.

So, just who the hell do you think you are? Talking to your betters like that -- you aren't tall enough to pee into Bedford Forrest's boot, but you run your mouth like a barroom drunk, safe behind your keyboard. Coward, yourself, slackmouth -- hell, you aren't tall enough to pee into my boot.

Who taught you your manners? Where did you get them? From home? I hope not. I know people who grew up in double-wides and working farmhouses who sound like Larry Olivier next to you -- and you claim an education. In what? Mumbling at people? Ankle-biting? -- a BAB degree?

Go crawl back under your table. Have another round. It's Saturday night. Just don't disturb the adults.

Next time you post up, try waiting until you actually have something to say.

Lots of that sort of slavery went on, and still goes on today but that's another thread.

Well, yes -- and it was -- but it plugs in here, too, inasmuch as liberal opinion, which is plugged into the old Abolitionist moralizing against the South for the same reasons -- South-bashing -- uses those same, exclusive and focussed themes Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass used to play up Southern wickedness.

They abandoned Enlightenment discourse because it balanced off interests and rights on either side. That wasn't what they wanted. They wanted an asymmetrical result, so they needed a different kind of discourse.

They went back to neoclassical oratory and its emphasis on drama and invective -- polemic -- which Cicero had used and taught in De Oratore. For Cicero, oratory was about mobilizing the public and decisionmakers in a worthy public cause. That was right up their alley -- not the parsing of differences and equities in an attempt to arrive at a dispassionate, detached, objective truth as per the Enlightenment tradition.

Modern liberals are using the Abolitionist tools for the same reason: they have the same Enemy -- the South -- and they want to move the public and destroy the ability of the South to respond to their policy initiatives.

That's why it's useful to remember that the Abolitionists were isolating on, and having a cow about, a distinct and narrow subset of all human miseries, emphasizing the horrors of the Middle Passage while ignoring the equal or worse horrors that had obtained for 300 years already in the English practice of "Barbadosing" people -- impressing them into corvees of indentured laborers, who were essentially slaves for a time certain.

In fact, the first slaves brought to Virginia Colony were indentured, and one of them, a black man from Africa, served out his period of labor and then began importing indentured labor from Africa himself -- and he was the man who figured out a way to have his time-limited indentures recognized as open-ended by a Virginia court, essentially making his indentured servants into chattel slaves. And he was a freedman.

So that is why I say Stowe lied by omission, by deliberately focussing on just the part of the problem that allowed her to beat up polemically on the South.

She was very modest about it, though. This is what she said about her composition afterward, feigning ignorance of rhetorical techniques (yeah, right):

"I no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house, thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist . . . I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation."

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