Replies

Well well, looks like we have some rebel bashing going on here.Look guys, your right, people in the south all have 6 fingers and 4 toes, etc. Why on earth would my northern brethren be moving here in droves is beyond me. Then again, when you have a 6th grade education and slop hogs all day, hey, what do I know? Keep dreaming. The south has risen again. If you wondered what happened to the capital in those old northern cities, both human and money, look south.Looks like to me, from my travels up north, Gen. Sherman was on the wrong team. Well, its feeding time. Hogs eat a lot in a 6 month summer. Better get them coats out up there. Oh, and don't forget the long underwear.

Well well, looks like we have some rebel bashing going on here

Believe it or not, I don't think that you're all a bunch of inbred racists down there. Personally, I rather like the south. What I will continue to attack, however, is the insistence by a small group that the south was blameless in the Civil War, that slavery had nothing to do with southern secession, and that all nobility rests in the confederacy and that the Union was entirely rapacious and intent on destroying the south.

These days, I'm leaning mostly toward the reading of the causes of the war provided by Michael Holt, that polticians on both sides, Whig/Republican and Democratic, were guilty, from 1820 through 1860, of demagoguery on the subject for their own electoral gain, polarizing the country and making war inevitable.

I give the southern soldiers full credit for outfighting the Union troops when they could and only succumbing to the greater numbers and greater resources of the north. However, I refuse to allow excuses for slavery, Jim Crow, the KKK or any of the rest of it. And make no mistake, I criticize northern racism just as fully. I come from a town in Illinois that was a hotbed of Klan activity in the 1920s and didn't have a single black person living there until the early 1990s, when a prison was built. It's an ugly thing (the racism, not the prison, although that's ugly, too). I lived in Chicago for ten years and saw what de facto segregation looks like as as opposed to the de jure segregation of the Jim Crow south. I give the south full marks for making a whole lot more progress in race relations over the last 50 years than the north has. I admire the south's economic boom, its respect for tradition and its general social tenor.