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, quoting me] You have repeatedly made statements to the effect that Southern whites and South African whites deserve whatever is coming to them.

Where? When? That's just your self-pitying, histrionic way of twisting things.

No, it isn't. Most recently, on the subject of Reconstruction violence, you posted it up this way, here:

So if repressive measures are justified for White Southerners, 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.
2,523 posted on 02/11/2005 7:17:21 PM CST by x

Which misses the point that my point has been that violence and repression had been in the air ever since the first slaves were brought into the American colonies, but most particularly since the Abolitionists had cranked up their moral arraunt to justify moving the nation toward a violent solution of the sectional differences that had been on the front burner since the Missouri Compromise. You are merely reiterating that argument that Harriet Beecher Stowe made with propaganda, and whose solution her brother Henry made bold to supply when he sent "Beecher's Bibles" to Kansas.

The post from which you recoiled in the above statement was my #2344, which had challenged statements in your #2326 to Little Ray:

[Your #2326] 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....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.
[My reply #2344] 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.

That was the exchange that you characterize, for polemical purposes, so hyperbolically.

Well, what you call "histrionic" is instead historical. The Abolitionists lodged a moral attack against the South calculated to unblock the Northern people's political frustration of many years' standing and deliver the Abolitionists the Vesuvian political outburst that would, in their calculation, knock down the South and give them victory.

And then you take this as something very different, because you put things into all or nothing, life or death terms. If you have to accuse people of justifying violence against you at every turn, how strong can your argument be?

As strong as the historical record. Uncle Tom's Cabin is a fact of history. So are the writings and speeches of Frederick Douglass, which later in life he admitted, by way of putting the record straight, he had overworked somewhat as regards his own treatment at the hands of his former owners in Baltimore. Out of fairness to them, he later felt that certain things needed to be said. Perhaps those mounds of Civil War dead felt the same way.

My purpose in bringing up the subject of Abolitionist agitation is to point out that it quite clearly, as the review of Kimberly Smith's work that I linked to above points out, took leave of rational, Enlightenment discourse because reasoned discourse, giving everyone his due and being fair to all parties, was not satisfying to the Abolitionists, who deemed themselves invested with the moral privilege of advocating direct violence to achieve their goals and, in the case of Beecher and Lincoln, taking action to the same end.

That this default to older standards of rhetoric led to a bloody war carries with it moral consequences for the advocates, and that is the point I made, and which I reiterate.

So to do is not to blink the responsibilities of certain Southern fire-eaters who may, as I've read, actually connived at the breakup of the Democratic Party in order to throw the election to Lincoln, thus impelling the Southern secession, which was allegedly their desideratum. If that is true, then their burden is tremendous and their actions irresponsible in some degree close to that of the Abolitionists. But their having done so does not wash the Black Republicans for taking the nation to war -- and worse, a war of States against States, in which the freedom and sovereignty of the People, no matter the outcome, must be somehow embarrassed.

As to the immanent potential danger of slave uprisings in the South, I pointed out, and will continue to point out, the danger of cataclysmic violence attendant on such a revolt, and how it weighed on the minds of people in the South who never owned a slave, but who, under Haitian rules, were eligible for death because of the color of their skin. These people did not deserve any potential retribution because of either their race or their identity as Southerners, but the Civil War exposed them to that possibility.

Or do you deny that? Do you deny, here and now, that the Haitian slaves, risen in violence, killed every white person they got their hands on, because they identified them all racially with the planters?

I'm not going to let you glide past that point with vague and patronizing vaporings about my alleged participation in the Old South's favorite paranoia. One, it isn't paranoia if they really are going to kill you. And two, certainly, considering what had happened in Jamaica and Haiti, and considering what Nat Turner, John Brown, and other revolutionists tried to accomplish, the white occupants of the South were entitled to worry about this salient fact of life that had been reinforced periodically since the time of the Servile War of Spartacus.

Especially after John Brown's raid, it's certainly worth remembering that "it isn't paranoia if they really are out to get you." And yes, I also point to the Wide-Awake provocations in northern Texas in 1860, which might be called "John Brown Redux".

I also notice that you didn't touch Haiti or the Zulus with a 10-foot pole, but instead vituperated against me on the subject of racial and servile violence.

Uncle Pompey, a cook with Confederates at the early battle of Seven Pines, in violation of orders, was advancing to the fighting front, when asked by another black:
"Whar's you gwine, Uncle Pomp? You isn't gwine up dar to have all de har scorched off yer head is you?" Uncle Pompey still persisted in advancing and shouldering a rifle, soon overtook his regiment. 'De Lor' hab mercy on us all, boys, here dey comes agin! Dar it is,' he exclaimed, as the Yankees fired an overshot, 'just as I taught! can't shoot worth a bad five-cent piece. Now's de time, boys!' and as the Alabamians returned a withering volley and closed up with the enemy, charging them furiously. Uncle Pompey forgot all about his church, his ministry, and sanctity, and while firing and dodging, as best he could, was heard to shout out: "Pitch in, White folks—Uncle Pomp's behind yer. Send all de Yankees to de 'ternal flames, whar dere's weeping and gnashing of—sail in Alabama; stick 'em wid de bayonet, and send all de blue ornary cusses to de state of eternal fire and brimstone! Push 'em hard, boys!—push 'em hard; and when dey's gone, may de Lor' hab marcy on de last one on 'em, and send dem to h-ll farder nor a pigin kin fly in a month! Stick de d—d sons of—! don't spare none on'em, for de good Lor' never made such as dem, no how you kin fix it: for it am said in de two-eyed chapter of de one-eyed John, somewhat in Collusions, dat—Hurray, boys, dat's you, sure—now you've got 'em goss! Show 'em a taste of ole Alabamy,' etc.
H.C. Blackerby, Blacks in Blue and Gray: Afro-American Service in the Civil War, Tuscaloosa, AL: Portals Press (1979), pp.11-12.

Nonsense. I simply made the valid point that if you make fear the justification for repression in one case, when you are the one who is afraid and repressing, you can't argue against the principle if others use repression against you because of their own fears. That looks to be simply logic and ethics.

You can use repression, if you can get away with it, but you can't appeal to universal moral standards if you've already violated them yourself. You can try to get us to understand why Southerners acted as they did. And plenty of people will understand. But that's not enough for you.

You want us to approve of that argument from necessity in this case, and to approve of secession and repression in this case, while condemning it in others. Few people today will look at the situation honestly and agree with you and with today's generally accepted ideas about racial equality. There's a gap between where you stand and what most Americans believe or want to believe today, that one could drive a train through.

Other people probably see by now how you jump to the extreme case of victimization and base your arguments on it. When everyone does that -- when everyone thinks their back is against the wall and survival at stake -- then no rational argument or agreement is possible. When one person does it, that person lays down an ultimatum to others "give me what I want or else" with no compromise or rational solution possible.

By this time, doesn't pretty much everyone agree that the best thing for Southerners, White or Black, was to remain in the Union? That would defuse tensions, by allowing Whites and Blacks to spread out, so that you wouldn't have potentially explosive situations where half the population were slaves and half masters or half of the ruling race and half of the subject race. Plenty of people perceived that at the time of the Civil War as well. So excuse me if I don't follow your red herrings to Haiti or South Africa, Zimbabwe or Rhodesia. They don't prove your contentions.

You also have trouble keeping the abolitionists and more moderate Republicans -- and the various factions in each group -- apart. Radical abolitionists did use a highly moralistic language to bring slavery back into public discussion. That was what they set out to do. More moderate Americans were certainly open to compromise. But the serious of political provocations in the 1850s drove both sides further apart. I doubt one can put the blame for that on any one camp or individual.

If one really believes that something is wrong one is going to use moralistic language to condemn it. You do the same with respect to Alexander Hamilton. You regard him as evil and condemn him in the strongest terms. Now we do hope that politicians will be more open to compromise and peacefully working things out. But sometimes the common middle ground crumbles beneath them. That happened in the 1860s, but it wasn't entirely the fault of one side or the other.

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