As a Northerner, I don't think anyone on Free Republic is seriously confused about this, excepting possibly our pro-Confederates.
Everybody knows that Southerners generally loved their blacks, just as the Bible commands, they treated them as members of their own families, which quite often they really were.
Yes, Southerners loved blacks, in their place, and as long as they stayed there, it was just one big happy family.
The only problem was, those uppity blacks, you know, the trouble makers, the agitators, the ones who somehow got mixed up with northern Communistjews & such.
Those required special... ahem... attention, shall we say?
You know, sometimes visitations... at night, you understand, right?
Northerners are a very different subject.
During the 1850s, when the South had around four million slaves, every year a few thousand (one tenth of one percent) would escape north, to be, as you said, "embraced with open arms" and helped onto the "underground railroad" for transportation to... Canada.
The simple truth is: even by 1860, still most Northerners had no problems with Africans or slavery in the South, just so long as they stayed in the South.
But very few wanted, and President Lincoln in 1864 was at pains to reassure them that it wouldn't happen: for huge numbers of former slaves to leave the South and move North.
That's the reality, and nobody here or anywhere else I've ever seen has tried to sugar coat it.
So where in the world is all this endless caterwauling, complaining pro-Confederate nonsense coming from?
Why is there never an end to it?
What exactly is the burr under your saddles that keeps you jumping around, never settling down to life again?
Lighten up, Francis.....
Any “burrs” under our lil’ ole saddles is really just fatigue.
We get a little tired of some of you Northerners with the “my ship don’t stink” complex when we dare have a little pride and try to shed some truth on the lies that are perpetually being offered up against the South.
Your passive-agressive obsession with putting people with a little “Confederate pride” in their place suggests perhaps YOU need to settle down to life.
Have a nice day, and I still prefer a Conservative Yankee to a Liberal Confederate.....