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WaPo Compares 'Low-Income' Supporters of Bush Tax Cuts with Poor Southerners Who Backed Slavery
Ken Shepard Blog w/ Link to original WaPo Article ^ | Jam 9,2011 | Ken Shepard

Posted on 01/13/2011 6:50:56 AM PST by Michael.SF.

A recurring feature in the Washington Post's weekly Outlook section is a column devoted to "Five myths about" a particular topic.

The feature for January 9 -- "5 myths about why the South seceded" -- happened to address a timely historical topic considering this year marks the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the U.S. Civil War. Yet the author, sociologist James W. Loewen, couldn't resist the opportunity to lump modern-day Republicans and conservatives with non-slaveholding whites in the antebellum South who may have aspired to slaveholding. Addressing the myth that "Most white Southerners didn't own slaves, so they wouldn't secede for slavery," Loewen argued that:

...Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low

(Excerpt) Read more at newsbusters.org ...


TOPICS: History; Miscellaneous
KEYWORDS: civilwar
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To: Verginius Rufus
I believe Savannah, Georgia is (or was) fourth in the US in Irish immigrants behind, NY, Boston and SF.
21 posted on 01/14/2011 3:05:08 PM PST by Michael.SF. (Current count of friends/family who have abandoned Obama: 11)
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To: Verginius Rufus

You are right, of course. There was a famous massacre of Unionist Germans trying to get to Mexico so they could eventually join the Union Army.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nueces_massacre

My point was that the huge majority of immigrants went to northern states, not that none went to the South.


22 posted on 01/15/2011 6:26:50 AM PST by Sherman Logan
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To: Sherman Logan

My family has old letters from Confederate ancestors, and they were convinced they were fighting Hessian mercenaries, just as their grandfathers had in the Revolution.


23 posted on 01/15/2011 6:32:42 AM PST by RegulatorCountry
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To: Verginius Rufus

How do you explain the thousands of black slave owners? And the black slave breeders who sold their own children into slavery?

I guess it wasn’t solely a white supremacy thing.


24 posted on 01/15/2011 6:37:50 AM PST by ladyjane
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To: RegulatorCountry

There were regiments and even whole divisions of Germans in the Union Army. Most of them had been in this country a while, but quite a few were fresh off the boat.

One of the German divisions was the first to be hit by Jackson’s flanking maneuver at Chancellorsville and started the panic that led to Union defeat.

They weren’t paid enough to qualify as mercenaries, though.


25 posted on 01/15/2011 6:43:56 AM PST by Sherman Logan
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To: ladyjane

Black men can be *ssholes, too?


26 posted on 01/15/2011 6:47:13 AM PST by Sherman Logan
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To: Sherman Logan

Some were there at Chancellorsville. They had some German ancestry themselves and pitied those poor “Hessian” boys, marched right into the line of fire and falling like logs, or so they wrote.


27 posted on 01/15/2011 6:48:57 AM PST by RegulatorCountry
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To: Verginius Rufus

Also the Republicans were aware a law was less permanent than an amendment. Had they not forced through the 15th Amendment southern blacks would have been legally, as opposed to illegally, disenfranchised in the following decades.


28 posted on 01/15/2011 6:50:56 AM PST by Sherman Logan
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To: Sherman Logan
There were several German immigrants who served as Union generals during the Civil War, including Carl Schurz and Franz Sigel. Sigel was living in St. Louis just before the war so he was technically in the South since Missouri was a slaveholding state.

An ancestor of mine who was a Missouri Unionist named one of his daughters Sigel. Unfortunately she died in childhood.

29 posted on 01/15/2011 9:25:48 AM PST by Verginius Rufus
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To: Sherman Logan

The Fourteenth Amendment was supposed to make permanent the rights secured for black people by the Civil Rights Act of 1866. It used a roundabout way of trying to compel the Southern states to let black men vote (by reducing their representation in Congress if they did not do so)—they did it that way instead of directly because that way Northern states could still restrict voting to whites without penalty (since they generally had about 1% black population—so they wouldn’t be in danger of losing any seats in Congress). Of course the threat to reduce representation was never carried out—in the 1890s and later when states like Mississippi and Alabama disfranchised the great majority of their black residents, they didn’t suffer any reduction in the size of their Congressional delegations.


30 posted on 01/15/2011 9:31:10 AM PST by Verginius Rufus
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To: Michael.SF.
...Americans are wondrous optimists, looking to the upper class and expecting to join it someday. In 1860, many subsistence farmers aspired to become large slave-owners. So poor white Southerners supported slavery then, just as many low-income people support the extension of George W. Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy now.

Poor white Southerners supported slavery because no matter how dirt-poor they were, they were always at least one level above the slave. Is this guy really suggesting that people supported the Bush tax cuts for the same reason?

31 posted on 01/15/2011 12:05:06 PM PST by K-Stater
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