Is it true what they say about Dixie?

Should you notice a disconnect between the southerners that you meet and the American South that you hear about, your personal impressions are probably more accurate than the analysis you may get from media and academic types. “The PC police tell southerners that they have no right to honor their history,” Clint Johnson, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South (and why it will rise again) says. “Our ancestors were racist, and if we honor them, we are racist too.”

He was a featured speaker at Eagle Forum’s Collegiate conference on June 22. Johnson recalled a New England radio interview in which the talk show host asked, “Why are southerners so uneducated?” Tongue planted firmly in cheek, the author said, “Well, us southerners, you already know, are a bunch of gun-toting, redneck, beer-guzzling, barefoot clansmen who marry their first cousins.”

• Famed abolitionist John Brown of Brown University, and a Rhode Island House Representative, was a legendary mogul in the slave trade, and lamented the abolition in print.

• The University of Alabama’s library was burned to the ground by Union soldiers not during, but at the end of the Civil War.

• Southerners comprised a large percentage of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and were a driving force in the creation of the Bill of Rights.

• Patrick Henry, a Virginian, was one of the first to recognize the injustice of taxation without representation. His activism spurred national change.

• Activists in Charlotte, N.C. wrote the Mecklenberg Declaration of Independence on May 20, 1775, which was the first record of a collective desire for American independence.

For Vanderbilt University, the United Daughters of the Confederacy funded the building of the “Vanderbilt Confederate Memorial Hall.” The administration wanted to sandblast the word “Confederate” off of the front of the building, but the $1-million-dollar lawsuit afforded a different outcome. On the Vanderbilt campus map, however, the building is simply referred to as “Memorial Hall.”

Johnson went on to celebrate a characteristically southern culture as portrayed in literature and fine arts, comparably lacking in other regions of America: “There is no New England novel or Midwest musical genre,” said the author.

Virtually every form of distinctive American music originated in the south, said Johnson. Rock and roll, jazz, the blues, and, naturally, country music, all have their foundations from New Orleans to Nashville to southern Florida.

Distinctive literature includes works from William Faulkner, Mark Twain, and Margaret Mitchell.

The primal idea of the strong woman can be seen in the wives of farmers who effectively ran the family plantations. Sally Tompkins started a hospital during the Civil War with the lowest death rates of any American hospital. When Congress observed this, and passed a law that mandated that only army officers can run hospitals, Jefferson Davis made her a captain.

When asked for thoughts on the conclusion of the Civil War, Johnson remarked, “Lincoln’s death was the worst thing for the South. Had he lived, it would have been the best thing.” Johnson went on to describe the effects of integration and the economy in either situation.

When asked to give parting advice to young southern conservatives, Johnson told listeners to “defend your right to learn about and celebrate your history!”

Mary Kapp is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a program run jointly by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.

If you would like to comment on this article, please e-mail mal.kline@academia.org

everyone down here knows what the war was really about, state’s rights and tariffs.

Everyone back then knew it was all about slavery. Read the following declaration from the Mississippi secessionists and tell me where the talk about states' rights and tariffs are. It's all about slavery!

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A Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union

In the momentous step, which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.

That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.

The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.

The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.

It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.

It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.

It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.

It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact, which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.

It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.

It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.

It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.

It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.

It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.

It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.

It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.

It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.

It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.

Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.

Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.

A few things. First, my county was one of the few that voted for Stephen Douglas in 1860. My family, and I know this from journals, we were not all to eager to see war because we made our living as cotton factors, basically, the agents who helped facilitate the transaction between rural cotton planter and person desiring to purchase said cotton.

However, once the state decided to secede, like everyone else, we remained loyal to our state. In hindsight, we might not have if there had been a vision of what the state would become in the 20th century. But we supported the war effort because it was our duty to country, and everything else.

We are expected to villify our ancestors because they seceded, but people who are descended from Sherman’s soldiers are taught to honor their ancestors, many of whom, if they did today what they did back then, would be indicted by the Hague. See, I think that is B.S, the idea that we are to be villified but a war criminal such as Sherman is to be villified.

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