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.

I don't know how much you and they differ in your actual views, but nobody gets sticks as close to the old racial fears and the justifications for slavery as you do.

I'm describing the situation of 1860 and the considerations that needed to be dealt with -- but weren't. I am showing how unreasonable was the expectation that the program of the Abolitionists could be the basis of a reasoned political solution, and by extension supporting the attack on the anti-slavery position, which was not to seek a solution based on compromise and consent, but to impose a solution based on violence. If you had chased down the link to the review of Kimberly Smith's book, you noticed that she has begun to come to the same conclusion, that contrary the rhetoric about the American political system, it clearly relies on violence from time to time, and the Abolitionists' reliance on, and expectation of, a violent solution to the impasse begins to become clear on inspection of their argument. The Abolitionists weren't speaking to the South any more, but calling for their mastiffs, to set them on the South.

How do you (singular) escape the reproaches that your friends direct against 19th century Northerners?

Because their arguments are not directed to me. They begin with an understanding that racism and domination were common in the South, along the way to mounting the argument I've briefly described elsewhere but which, since it isn't one I'm interested in particularly, I haven't partaken of all that much. Their strategy is counter-crusade and recrimination. Mine is damage assessment, and resetting the question, was the Civil War really worth it? to 1860.

I could understand someone dispassionately making the arguments that you (singular) do, without anyone trying to characterize their views in a more general way. But it's clear to both of us that you are anything but dispassionate about this topic.

I get passionate -- okay, cranky -- when I see people who ought to know better, refusing to concede good points and indulging reflexively and tactically in ad hominem recrimination against me and against historical players, as part of the old feelgood propaganda and triumphalism.

There you go again -- this is an attack. Don't tell me it's not. And I've told you, ad hominem is not a valid form of argument.

You've got a real penchant for insults and for accusing people of advocating murder and rapine if they oppose your views, yet you're the first to complain when the tables are turned. If you make all manner of allegations against others, you ought to expect by now that people will wonder how close you (singular) can stick to the old pro-slavery and racist arguments without being racist yourself.

But I'm not trying to stigmatize you with that label. People will have to make up their own minds about that. I just point out that your views were common a century or so ago and have been repudiated by most people who have thought seriously about Reconstruction.

Oh, stow it, Harriet. The people who came south after the war were either looking for vulture-capital opportunities, or they were carpetbaggers sent by the federal Government, or by the vindictively partisan Union League clubs in the big Northern Cities. But don't take my word for it -- God knows I wouldn't want you to take the word of an unlettered bumpkin who can't frame an argument and never read a book!!! God, you are a piece of work.....try this:

In the autumn of 1866, and through the winter and summer of 1867 strange men from the North were flocking into the black belt of the South, and mingling familiarly with the negroes, day and night. These were the emissaries of the Union League Clubs of Philadelphia and New York that have been unfairly denied their historic status in the consolidation of the negro vote. Organized in the dark days of the war to revive the failing spirit of the people, they had become bitterly partisan clubs with the conclusion of the struggle; and, the Union saved, they had turned with zest to the congenial task of working out the salvation of their party. This, they thought, depended on the domination of the South through the negro vote. Sagacious politicians, and men of material means, obsessed with ideas as extreme as those of Stevens and Sumner, they dispatched agents to turn the negroes against the Southern whites and organize them in secret clubs. -- Claude Bowers, The Tragic Era, p. 198.

"Strange men ... mingling familiarly with the negroes, day and night," we can't have that Debbie, can we? Debbie, are you quoting Claude Bowers? The Claude Bowers who was a regular speaker at Democrat conventions in the 1920s? FDR's favorite historian? The one whose book on Jefferson and Hamilton FDR reviewed in glowing terms in The Evening World? The one Roosevelt wrote a fan mail letter to? The one FDR made ambassador first to Spain at a crucial moment in history then to Chile? Is that the same Claude Bowers that Harry Truman and John Kennedy quoted in support of their policies or to rally Democrats to the cause?

Is that the Claude Bowers who wrote about the Reconstruction era, Louisiana state legislature:

"The lobbies teem with laughing Negroes from the plantations, with whites of the pinch-faced, parasitic type; and Negro women in red turbans peddle cakes and oranges to the very doors of the chambers. It is a monkey house with guffaws, disgusting interpolations, amendments offered that are too obscene to print, followed by shouts of glee."

Could that be the same Claude Bowers who wrote "Rape is the foul daughter of Reconstruction," and "[when] the Klan began to ride ... white women felt some sense of security"? Is that this Claude Bowers:

Bowers, Claude Gernade (zhrnäd´ bou´rz) (KEY) , 1878–1958, American journalist, historian, and diplomat, b. Hamilton co., Ind. After serving as editor of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (1917–23), Bowers, as editorial writer on the New York World (1923–31) and political columnist on the New York Journal (1931–33), was an influential spokesman for the Democratic party. Ambassador to Spain (1933–39), Bowers remained in Madrid throughout the Spanish civil war and tried to get the Roosevelt administration to support the Spanish Republicans. He then served (1939–53) as ambassador to Chile. Though much of his historical writing is vigorous, well written, and deservedly popular, it is frankly partisan, further praising or reappraising favorably the characters and accomplishments of Democratic leaders in the past, e.g., The Party Battles of the Jackson Period (1922, repr. 1965), Jefferson and Hamilton (1925), The Tragic Era (1929), a now discredited anti-Republican view of Reconstruction built on the principle that political order could be restored only on the basis of racial inequality, Jefferson in Power (1936), and The Young Jefferson, 1743–1789 (1945, repr. 1969).

A long dead Democratic hack, an unreconstructed Copperhead and New Dealer, who had a real problem with African Americans, and whose works have been universally regarded as unbalanced and outdated? That's a fine source. I don't have time to read that Claude Bowers's books, but I notice him citing Hillaire Belloc on the front page of The Tragic Era to the effect that "readable history is melodrama," and thought, "Of course, that's why his books sold so well three generations ago, and why lentulus loves him so -- it's the melodrama!"

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is hardly any great improvement over Bowers. He's another Democrat sycophant who talked up the powers of the Presidency when it looked like his party was going to have more or less permanent control over that office, and thus took a dim view of Andrew Johnson's enemies. Beard was certainly talented, but he's been dead for half a century, and nobody can seriously accept his good agrarians vs. bad industrialist point of view any more. Things are too mixed together. A cotton planter who relied on slave labor and sold to the burgeoning mills was in key ways as much a capitalist as a mill owner or cotton broker. Look up Kenneth Stampp or Richard Nelson Current for more balanced views of Reconstruction that correct Bowers's errors.

Bowers's frankly melodramatic approach to writing history goes a long way to explaining why you cast everything into simply terms of scheming villains and suffering victims. Northerners and Southerners organize in similar ways to achieve goals that may be material or idealist or both, and you'll always see the "Yankees" as evil conspirators and the "Southrons" as noble and weak and bent only on defending themselves. History isn't so simple and human motivations don't sort themselves so easily on different sides of a state or party line. But you have to believe what you believe. The way out would be to try to understand what history looked like to those you consider villains. But most likely you won't do that, because you need the easy, comforting melodrama of victims and villains.

The primary moral argument we've been discussing basically says that, then and now, Southerners were and are homophobic racist Nazi wife-beaters etc., in a peculiarly Southern sort of way -- by which we're to understand that nobody in the South is exempt from this group guilt (can you say, "Christ-killers"?), and nobody in the South can ever answer the charge that the Civil War was justified by Southern moral retrogradation, which called for and completely justified a therapeutic war of liberation to save the Union and human freedom and deliver up the Negro out of the hands of his endogamously hateful oppressors, who can never be forgiven in this world or the next because their race-hatred, their moral malformation if you will, is an enduring social hallmark (can you say, "mark of Cain"?) whose eradication now justifies the total reorganization of Southern society, with or without its People's permission, for the wholesome public purpose of stamping out Southern culture and identity forever, and reshaping its pupae as Northern liberals-manque'. (Can you say, "New Soviet Man"?)

I think we have a winner in this week's longest sentence competition.

What you're doing is stacking the deck or creating a "straw man." You keep flailing away at this image that you've created and count yourself a winner in the argument, even though your straw man is far from "the primary moral argument we've been discussing." It's your preoccupation, and that of your friends, more than anyone else's.

You use the idea of disproving some hoary old myth to create a new one. Or simply replace one supposed tired old myth with another. People coming along now, who may never have been exposed to the myth you claim to be attacking, eventually come to accept your own myth of Yankee hypocrisy and venality and savagery as gospel, and it becomes as entrenched, and as false, as anything you object to.

A lot of bad history takes root as supposed debunking, and soon needs to be debunked itself. People sell and even get rich by simplifying and distorting what historians say to the point of parody, and then hawking their own simplistic and distorted views as the suppressed truth behind the official story. It's a racket that a lot of people have tried to get into.

If you really want to get beyond myths, you're going about it in the wrong way. Recognize first what we are as human beings and as Americans, and go beyond us vs. them, to get at that capacity for good or evil in all of us. Don't simply try to reverse the positives and negatives in the version that offends you to produce a photographic negative, that's just as biased only with the colors reversed.

I had to read this twice, to make sure it was not a quote from David Duke, or Robert KKK Byrd.

There are two reasons why you are confused in this case. First, you didn't read other parts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, particularly the part where Lincoln said: "I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man."

Had you read that then you would have known right off the bat that the first quote couldn't have come from David Duke or Robert Byrd, or Jefferson Davis or any of your other southern leader for that matter. Lincoln believed that the Declaration of Independence applied to all races. Jefferson Davis thought that blacks were suited only for slavery, not as people with any rights that a white man had to respect. Lincoln believed that blacks were his equal in several respects. Davis thought that slaves were useless, not that they were his equal in any way, shape or form. So you're confusion is not surprising, not for you.

...a gay racist as well.

Ah the great southron myth machine back at work. "Never tell a little lie when you can tell a big one." Didn't Joseph Goebbels say that? Obviously you learn from the best at the propaganda business.

It stated that all slaves in "states that were in rebellion" were hereby freed.

From the EP:

Whereas, on the twenty-second day of September, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-two, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States, containing, among other things, the following, to wit:

The proclamation was made Sept. 22, 1862 and was to be effective Jan. 1, 1963. Those in rebellion would be the people of the states that continued to hold slaves. *See below.

That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free

First, Lincoln lacked the constitutional power to free them.

I agree with you there. It's almost like an executive order, long before EO's were ever created.

Second, Maryland was a slave state but their slaves were not freed.

From the EP:

all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State

And also:

the States and parts of States wherein the people thereof respectively, are this day in rebellion against the United States, the following, to wit:

Arkansas, Texas, Louisiana, (except the Parishes of St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Jefferson, St. John, St. Charles, St. James Ascension, Assumption, Terrebonne, Lafourche, St. Mary, St. Martin, and Orleans, including the City of New Orleans) Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, (except the forty-eight counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkley, Accomac, Northampton, Elizabeth City, York, Princess Ann, and Norfolk, including the cities of Norfolk and Portsmouth[)], and which excepted parts, are for the present, left precisely as if this proclamation were not issued.

Maryland was not listed, because they did not officially leave the union, and were not in rebellion.

Third, the CSA was an independent country and did not recognize the power of Lincoln anyway.

I agree with you. However, What's the difference between what Lincoln did with the south, and what we've done with Iraq? History always sides with the winner.

Fourth, slavery was not abolished until the 13th Amendment was ratified.

Maryland ratified the amendment February 3, 1865, but they had already emancipated it's slaves on Nov 1, 1864 in the State's Constitution.

I'm not against voluntary servitude, which BTW is not prohibited in the 13th amendment. Nor do I agree with the North's agression.

I am interested in any further thoughts or comments you have.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.