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Great post, yankhater. A proper perspective is imperative to any truth's validity.

Thank you for your kind words. It seems that many people have lost their perspective, especially historical perspective.

Some of the more radical League of the South supporters keep ignoring the historical record to promote a modern political agenda which does not fit with the reocrd of Southern history.

Neo-Confeds keep claiming they want today's South to be free of "yankee" socialism. While socialism is certainly something to be despised, claiming the record of the Confederacy would be unwise. Although founded on a doctrine of state's rights, the Confederate Government of President Davis instituted a tremendous ammount of socialism in practice such as: CS Government ownership of a majority of the South's factories, the first national military draft in American history, as well as confiscating the property of thousands of civilians whether Unionist or Confederate for the war effort.

So as not to be accused of "damnyankeeness" I will state that the Union Government under Lincoln did much of the same. My problem is in accusing one section of the United States with political heresies that are prevelant in the other. In the United States today, conservatives tend to live in the rural and suburban areas, while liberals tend to thrive in the cities. Thus rural Pennsylvania and Alabama are conservative, while urban New York and New Orleans are liberal. Remember where Huey Long was from? It's silly to have North/South sectionalism in 2002.

Slavery was the dominant issue of the war. Southerners must accept this. That's not to say that it was the only issue or a moral crusade of good Northerners versus bad Southerners. The James McPherson position is outdated and over simplified. The truth is that the slavery issue was too complicated to fix on moral, social, religious, and economic grounds (even for the Founders), and thus led to a tragic war.

Another Neo-Confed myth is that the South was unified during the War. In areas where slavery was strongest (coastal SC, Mississippi) secession was popular. In areas of the South where slavery was weakest (Kentucky, West VA, East Tenn) secession was unpopular. That is as good evidence as any for the slavery issue to be coupled with secession. I repsect any Southerner or other American who stands up for protecting battlefields, symbols, and heroes like RE Lee and Cleburne. We must arm ourselves with knowledge and a better argument to combat the McPherson's of the world, the true damnyankees. Radicals like DiLorenzo do more harm than good.

You make an interesting case and though my own view of historical events surrounding the war is significantly different from your own, I do agree on the problem of the McPhersonist yankee view and its leftist and even marxist predecessors. They are propagating a noble lie of misinformation for political purposes.

I'll also agree that rural Pennsylvania is in some places every bit as conservative as rural Virginia. I would add though that the rural presence is much stronger in the south than the increasingly urbanized megapolis known as the northeast coast. The product has been felt both in the urban rat holes and the increasingly liberalized suburbs. Most of them still elect Republicans, but a suburban yankee republican is often politically comparable to some southern rural Democrats, hence the problem there.

As far as DiLorenzo goes, I do not believe his role is as you state it. To me, DiLorenzo fills a void by providing "the other half" of the McPherson/Sandburg/Von Holst/Marx/you-name-it story, and especially so to the public at large. By its very nature his book is marketted to mass culture for popular sales. He's there to argue a side that has been willfully neglected for years in the form of all the McPhersons out there. To pretend that DiLorenzo is the absolute treatise on all things pro-confederate is silly, but as a popular-oriented overview of some of the major problems with The Lincoln, it serves its role reasonably well. We must continue the debate on the confederacy as a whole in scholarly circles as that is the other role to combatting the McPherson noble lie, but without something there to make the case on a popular front as well, that task is severely compromised if not impossible.

Good comments. Let me add though that socialism, far from a "Yankee" invention, was championed by none other than John C. Calhoun (read carefully "Disquisitions" in which he waxes eloquent about the LABOR THEORY OF VALUE, which is the essential Marxist/socialist principle) and George Fitzhugh, which neo-Confederates have scrupulously avoided, because he flatly calls slavery "socialism."

It ought to be obvious that slavery is a NON-market structure because it enslaves consumers, and cannot fucntion except for the iron hand of government---in this case, southern state governments that REQUIRE free men to join slave posses; that prohibited freedom of speech when it came to talks on abolition; that prohibited free flow of information in the mail (i.e., abolitionist literature) and which denied "right to life" of the slaves.

SORRY, but you are WRONG about the causes of the WBTS.

slavery caused the war in precisely the same way that FISH cause FLOODS!

the notion that chattal slavery was anything but a "side issue" is a REVISIONIST heresy of historiography, which came out of the most extreme,leftist,anti-southern, poison-ivycovered walls of NE academia in the 1960s. prior to the rise of REVISIONISTS, academics of all sorts were NOT so extreme in their judgements on comlicated issues like "the causes of war".

to quote an old prof of mine, the late & much lamented Bob C. Riley, PhD: "only the simpletons need or attempt to formulate SIMPLE ANSWERS for complex probems".

free dixie,sw