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The 'South' lost again. :)

I live in the Deep South, sir. I don't really want to gloat.

And though it seems impossible to comprehend, I once resided north of the Mason Dixon in an area that was just as rebel as Ole Miss, and were just as embroiled in the secessionist rhetoric and activity as South Carolina on a hot, humid evening. People forget that The Federalist Party fell apart after they suggested New England secede from the Union. People forget partisan battles and terror activities in states hundreds of miles north in the 1860's. People forget that states such as Maryland and Missouri remained Unionist under suspicious parliamentary activities, and states such as Ohio, Deleware, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvannia harbored rebels-many without pretense. People forget the ethnic riots in the northern cities. It was truly a civil war that could have proved disastrous for all, including ultimately the world.

What I am saying is that the USA survived and the world is blessed by a union rather than a division. But there are those fools on both sides of the Mason Dixon that never learn the lessons of that horrific war. It has been almost 150 years since those bloody days and its time we learn from the lesson rather than rip open the scar.

The premise of the thread was asinine from the start. We are Americans by God, let's start acting like Americans. You can't go backward you can only go forward. I don't play what ifs, I'm Irish.

What I am saying is that the USA survived and the world is blessed by a union rather than a division. But there are those fools on both sides of the Mason Dixon that never learn the lessons of that horrific war. It has been almost 150 years since those bloody days and its time we learn from the lesson rather than rip open the scar.

Learning the lessons is precisely what the interest of some of the people on this thread is about. If you can't find it under all the rodomontade, well, that's understandable. The thread's in decay now, but there have been actual discussions on earlier threads that got pulled when people threw tantrums and called other people names.

The premise of the thread was asinine from the start. We are Americans by God, let's start acting like Americans. You can't go backward you can only go forward. I don't play what ifs, I'm Irish.

Well, which is it, Irish or American? 8^p

The point is, the person who put up the thread was engaging in a bit of discussion-bait by positing antihistorical circumstances and conspicuously wondering aloud how different things would be, if things had been different. Well, how droll, but the real discussion is whether there is something we ought to be paying attention to and learning about the Civil War era that has meaning for us in the here and now. And there is.

The problem is twofold. Southerners have generally been brought up with their own history of the Civil War, their own "civil war" flag and roster of heroes and battles, and Northerners have had theirs, and everyone has respected the truce over those old issues conjoined on us by the veterans of those battles themselves, who when they gathered together on the old battlefields, unfailingly set an example of letting bygones be bygones and of reconciling with one another. They had, after all, done their best through four years of war to kill each other, and they'd lived much the same lives while afield with the armies. The rest of society got the message, and all was peace for the most part except for scholarly quibbles over orders of battle and the occasional theorist like Otto Eisenshiml who would write a brooding book about conspiracy in Edwin Stanton's office, and he'd be generally ignored.

Then James McPherson and the faculty Marxists came along, and started doing politics as history, and jabbing fingers at the South. In the name of trying to break Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy", they worked with President Bill Clinton to "contextualize" (i.e. propagandize) the Civil War for modern purposes of the American political Left: attempting to drive a wedge between the Midwestern and urban Republicans on the one hand, and the conservative Southerners on the other who have been the rock of Republican and conservative political successes since 1968, when the South put Richard Nixon in the White House, not at all coincidentally defeating an ur-liberal in the person of Hubert Humphrey.

There is more, much more, but that is the beginning of the discussion on Free Republic between the largely Jeffersonian Southerners and the adherents of Lincoln's super-Hamiltonian vision for the country that has been, besides the cause of the South's destruction, the root of "big government", entitlement government, and corporate-welfarist, superstatal policies that are being formulated now under such rubrics as NAFTA, WTO, alienation of authority and sovereignty, the Law of the Sea Treaty, "globalization", open borders, the Kyoto Accords, and political globalization. That is the other part of the problem: American empire has its fans, who like to feast on the defeat of the Jeffersonians and who have come to the boards to purge them of the Southerners, by precipitating fist fights and (they hope) getting someone on the wicked Southerners' side to say something intemperate enough that they can go to the Moderators and have the person banned, thus moving FR closer to their ideal of a Potemkin forum, a Disneyland of "respectable" National Greatness Republican (McKinleyite) opinionmaking and partisan organizing, that will showcase the policies of the Bush Administration, whatever they are, and smooth out the individualistic wrinkles left over from the old days, when Free Republic was a roiling, brawling free-for-all of individualism and untrammeled conservatism of every stripe.

The principles being argued here, when we're discussion principles and not getting involved with personalities, are highly relevant to all of the above.