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Endless complaints. |
Posted on 12/31/2004 2:21:30 PM PST by Caipirabob
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.
Stars with bars:
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.
Some things are better left dead in the past:
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.
Compelling story or KKK wet dream?:
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.
So what do you think of this movie?
But facing the gibbet of British retribution, that wasn't what they did, was it?
Unity among the colonies was more important, and they correctly decided that the Carolinas and Georgia had to be kept in the alliance, and in the war. And they stayed in the war, and delivered important results at King's Mountain, Cowpens, and Yorktown.
You can't have it both ways -- use your neighbor's goodwill and accept his services, and then turn on him in selfrighteous fury because you don't like his religion or his view of the estate of Man.
Did you have something to do with that?
Did you pull the plug on those guys?
Where's Forrest?
No. I didn't care enough about what they had to say to go to the trouble of complaining to the monitors.
BTW, here's one common version of the first verse and chorus to "The Bonnie Blue Flag":
We are a band of brothers and native to the soil
Fighting for the property we gained by honest toil
And when our rights were threatened, the cry rose near and far
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star!
CHORUS.
Hurrah! Hurrah! for Southern Rights hurrah;
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star.
In 1861, you simply sang the song if you were a secessionist: "Southern rights hurrah!" But today, you have to wonder about that "property gained by honest toil" -- about just what they were referring to and what we should make of it today. There does seem to have been some consciousness at the time that "Southern rights" and the cause of the war was in some way tied up with slavery, though one wouldn't always have expressed things quite that baldly or directly. If you lived there and then, you could very much have fought for slavery (among other things) without finding that thought reprehensible or worthy of condemnation. It's later on that people have to fudge things.
You're doing fine my friend, I'm just taking a few minutes to enjoy your responses.
Bump. First the yankees got the money, THEN they got morals.
Hark to an exiled son's appeal,
Maryland, My Maryland!
My Mother State! to thee I kneel,
Maryland, My Maryland!
For life and death, for woe and weal,
Thy peerless chivalry reveal,
And gird they beauteous limbs with steel,
Maryland! My Maryland!
Thou wilt not cower in the dust,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Thy beaming sword shall never rust,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Remember Carroll's sacred trust,
Remember Howard's warlike thrust,-
And all they slumberers with the just,
Maryland! My Maryland!
Come! 'tis the red dawn of the day,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Come with thy panoplied array,
Maryland, My Maryland!
With Ringgold's spirit for the fray,
With Watson's blood at Monterey,
With fearless Lowe and dashing May,
Maryland! My Maryland!
Come! for thy shield is bright and strong,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Come! for thy dalliance does thee wrong,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Come! to thine own heroic throng,
Stalking with Liberty along,
And give a new Key to thy song,
Maryland! My Maryland!
Dear Mother! burst the tyrant's chain,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Virginia should not call in vain!
Maryland, My Maryland!
She meets her sisters on the plain-
"Sic semper!" 'tis the proud refrain
That baffles minions back amain,
Maryland! My Maryland!
I see the blush upon thy cheek,
Maryland, My Maryland!
For thou wast ever bravely meek,
Maryland, My Maryland!
But lo! There surges forth a shriek
From hill to hill, from creek to creek-
Potomac calls to Chesapeake,
Maryland! My Maryland!
Thou wilt not yield the vandal toll,
Maryland, My Maryland!
Thou wilt not crook to his control Maryland, My Maryland!
Better the fire upon thee roll,
Better the blade, the shot, the bowl,
Than crucifixion of the soul,
Maryland! My Maryland!
I hear the distant thunder-hum,
Maryland, My Maryland!
The Old Line's bugle, fife, and drum,
Maryland, My Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she'll come! she'll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!
As did the founders, which has been pointed out to you countless times on this thread. When faced with a choice to keep slavery in order to avoid political weakness, they chose to keep it, and make it explicit in their constitution. Hammer away at the confederates all you want, in the end all you've got is a handful of quotes from a few firebrands who were on the fringe of the pro-slavery extreme. I noticed you avoided the comparison to Estrich alltogether; she is today's equivalent of your select-a-quote slide-rule targets re: slavery and the confederates.
And it is a distorted, warped, twisted history.
Warped and twisted, yes. American history is full of such characters. From Jefferson to Ike to Clinton. Americans they were, nonetheless.
Distorted? No.
What you confederates hide behind is the courage of the fighting men who fought and died defending a wicked constitution, one that made slavery an explicit right, signaling out one race in particular to be enslaved.
Are you talking about the revolutionaries of 1776 now? They fought without a constitution, perhaps you need to keep pinging your little buddies, who will tell you their myth about how the Constitution was a gigantic fraud perpetuated on the people by the federalists (well after independence was won).
During the revolution, and afterward. Even when the Constitution was penned, after winning independence, losing Virginia was a deal-breaker. Slaves? Sure, bring 'em on in... Representation? Well, count 'em as "parts" of people (and you thought the Southerners were pigs).
Franklin and others may have been opposed to it, but any more jibberish about the anti-slavery slave-owners and I'll start wondering how these people's heads don't explode in the confusion.
Confederate artwork just too much? I do see certain people's heads start spinning at the sight of NBF.
That is a another debate.
Spoken like a slavehound who sees the spector of slavery lurking behind every rock and ledge even when it does not exist!
Bonnie Blue Flag was written by Harry McCarthy, an English vaudeville performer who drafted up the lyrics in 1861 during a performing tour through Jackson, Mississippi and New Orleans. He based it directly after an old Dublin folk tune called the Irish Jaunting Car. It's traditional lyrics go "My name is Larry Dolan, I'm native of the soil" followed by variations on a second line that rhyme "soil" with either "toil" or "style" depending on the version. McCarthy drew directly on these lyrics of an old song he knew and probably performed all the time then simply adapted them to give a timeline of secession. Nothing more, nothing less.
Very true, since slavery had been accepted for so long, people did not want to look at it for what it was.
And if the colonies didn't hang together wouldn't they be hanged apart?
Unity among the colonies was more important, and they correctly decided that the Carolinas and Georgia had to be kept in the alliance, and in the war. And they stayed in the war, and delivered important results at King's Mountain, Cowpens, and Yorktown. You can't have it both ways -- use your neighbor's goodwill and accept his services, and then turn on him in selfrighteous fury because you don't like his religion or his view of the estate of Man.
And the North did not turn on the South.
The South was given every constitutional protection promised her.
What they did not like is that it was no longer enough to protect their political dominance.
What really hurt the South was splitting the Democratic party, when Buchanan refused to go along with the demands of the Southern slaver owners.
Why, because they compromised?
My, my, how self-righteous those who have never had to face fighting a revolution and building a nation become 200 hundred years after the fact.
The fact is that the Founders were against slavery and did see it as being immoral.
Those quotes you thanked me for, prove that
Lincoln's election in 1860 was guaranteed by the schism in the Democrat Party at the Charleston Convention - engineered by the southern fire-eaters.
Prof. Charles Dew, in Apostles of Disunion, convincingly demonstrates that the motivation for secession had much less to do with "state's rights," than it did with the slavery issue. Dew records the rationale for secession as explained by the Secession Commissioners sent by the states of the deep south to the other slave-states - southerners unabashedly lobbying for secession with other southerners.
By way of example, Alabama Commissioner Stephen Fowler Hale, in writing to the Governor of Kentucky, Beriah Magoffin, December 27, 1860, Dew relates:
Lincoln's election was "nothing less than an open declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government destroys the property of the South, lays waste to her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of the half-civilized Africans." Hale wrote, "the slave-holder and the non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with the free negroes, stand side-by-side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all social relations of life, or else there will be an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting all the resources of the country."
What Southerner, Hale asked, "can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes, upon terms of social and political equality?" Abolition would surely mean that "the two races would be continually pressing together" in the South, and under these circumstances "amalgamation or the extermination of the one or the other would be inevitable." Could "southern men submit to such degradation and ruin?" Hale knew the answer: "God forbid that they should." (Page 54 and Appendix Document #2)
It seems that secession was about, at least in part, white supremacy.
If you're going to keep saying this, then I might as well keep repeating the truth back to you:
The fact is that the founders spewed some lofty rhetoric about how evil slavery was, whilst behind closed doors they busily codified it into the constitution and wrote it into law. After a hard day's 'founding' some went home to rape their slaves and sell their children.
The fact is that this nation was founded on the principle that all men were created equal before God.
The fact is that slavery was slowly being ended state by state and that is what the slave owners of the South were upset about.
They knew their slave owning days were coming to an end, due to the principles set forth in the Declaration.
Some versions of "The Bonnie Blue Flag" changed the second line from "Fighting for the property we gained by honest toil" to "Fighting for our Liberty, with treasure, blood and toil" -- a sign of changing attitudes, perhaps -- but it's clear that Macarthy wrote about "property we gained by honest toil" and thousands sang it in 1861 with no doubt about what property they were fighting for or about the legitimacy of their claim to it.
There's more about the "Bob Hope of the Confederacy" here:
Harry Macarthy was an English-born vaudeville entertainer who emigrated to the United States in 1849 and settled in Arkansas. He billed himself the "Arkansas Comedian" and traveled widely throughout the South in company with his wife, Lottie, putting on "personation concerts." These performances featured Macarthy singing in the dialect of other cultures, dancing to ethnic-sounding music, and dressing in flamboyant costumes. Stephen Currie, in Music in the Civil War, reports that one of Macarthy's traveling companions during the war years was a cockatoo who had been trained to squawk "Three cheers for Jeff Davis!" on stage. Macarthy premiered "The Bonnie Blue Flag" during a concert in Jackson, Mississippi, in the spring of 1861. He performed it a second time in September of that same year at the New Orleans Academy of Music in front of an audience of soldiers headed for the Virginia front. Again, the response was enthusiastic, and Macarthy was suddenly in demand as he had never been before. He traveled throughout the South during the war years, performing to packed houses of appreciative listeners, and although he continued to compose patriotic songs (among them "Missouri and The Volunteer" or "It Is My Country's Call." "The Bonnie Blue Flag" was his greatest success. Although some claim that Macarthy was more interested in attracting audiences and making money than he was in supporting the Southern cause, the song was an undeniable hit with Confederate soldiers and civilians alike and remains one of the classic Southern War songs.
... but of course, we know it was all because he was mad about protective tariffs ...
Slavery was legal and a part of everyday life in much of 19th century America. The most naive and unguarded utterances might simply assume the existence and the rightness of slavery and slaveowning. I don't say that everything that was said in the antebellum South refered to slavery -- that would be foolish. And I'm not drawing a distinction between North and South. The majority generally made assumptions about outgroups -- Indians, Blacks, and others -- that would shock or surprise us today. But today, some people are so determined to remove slavery from the history of the Rebellion that if someone raises the point, some nutjob will accuse him of being a "slavehound." Ironic, ... but sadly typical.
Things were different in the 1850s than they had been earlier, though. In 1780 or 1820 one could raise the question of whether slavery was a good idea or a just institution or not. By 1860, this was impossible. Fear of abolitionists accounted for much of it. Perhaps Jacksonian Democracy played a role as well. The old aristocratic Virginia of the Founders could tolerate discussion of topics that would have been anathema years later. But of course, South Carolina and the new slave states were quite different from Virginia, and even in the days of the Founders, South Carolinians had been more worried about keeping control of the enslaved work force than other Americans.
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