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"Northern men, Northern mothers, Northern Christians, have something more to do than denounce their brethren at the South; they have to look to the evil among themselves."

Innumerable threads on FR are proof that is still unlikely to happen. And it's been a looooong time.

I don't think there is any particular desire on the part of most of us here to pick on the South. Nineteenth century quarrels like buried in the distant past. We are all part of one country and share in its virtues and vices.

It's just that when people start to make the Old South or the Confederacy a particular repository of virtue or victimhood, and the rest of the country evil and oppressive that people take exception. In other words, I doubt anyone here is going to start a conversation by running down the South, but when someone tries to make the Confederacy a model of freedom, people naturally object.

The real South of today is fine, and the rest of the country can learn much from it. But the mythic or legendary South that was always right and always victimized is a burden that modern Americans can do with out. We can find many things to in 19th century America that were good and many that were bad, but it's not likely that we need to bring back Jefferson Davis and make him our hero any more than we need to bring back Franklin Pierce or Chester A. Arthur.

I don't have any problem with Southerners taking pride in their history. But so much of that history is American or United States history and so little is the history of intersectional war that it seems a pity to emphasize four little years out of four hundred.

Maybe we should talk about ways we can increase or preserve our liberties, but the rebellion of 1861 and the Confederacy weren't means towards that end in the past, and they certainly won't make anyone any freer now.

Have you not, in your own secret souls, in your own private conversings, felt that there are woes and evils, in this accursed system, far beyond what are here shadowed, or can be shadowed?

Since you sothron types won't even admit that the southern rebellion was based on defense of slavery then I don't see this happening any time soon, either.