Posted on 10/02/2007 1:10:01 PM PDT by BGHater
AMERICANA, Brazil
Now well past 90, Judith MacKnight Jones is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, the illness that robbed her of all of her memory, her most precious asset.
She has been lying here for the past 11 years, covered by a patchwork blanket, made from pieces her great-grandmother brought from the United States between 1865 and 1885, after the Confederacy lost the Civil War.
Unable to speak or remember now, her book "Soldado Descanso" ("Rest Soldier") is written in Portuguese, but soon will be translated into English, as the publisher thinks Americans should know about the proud history of Confederate immigrants settling in Brazil, finding a new home here but maintaining many of the traditions they brought from Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, the Carolinas and Georgia.
Her daughter-in-law, Heloisa Jones, said patchwork is only one of the values the Americans have brought.
This blanket is not just any patchwork, she said, "these pieces are very old and reflect a valuable tradition," she said.
"Over a century old and symbolizing our heritage, the flight from our homelands, it is extremely important to keep it that way. I teach my children and grandchildren the American values our ancestors have brought with them. And I expect them to teach their children and grandchildren the same," she said.
Every spring, hundreds of the descendants of the soldiers who lost the war against the North go to the cemetery they call O Campo. They party and meet dressed in traditional costumes, staging shows, singing Southern songs like "When the Saints Come Marching In" or "Oh Susannah," playing banjos and blowing trumpets, the men eventually getting drunk on home-brewed beer.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
I just dump em in the easy over eggs add salt and pepper and feel the blood in me slow waaaaaaaay down !........:o)
BTW go check this video out at Joanie’s site.....
http://allegianceanddutybetrayed.blogspot.com/
Tryphorgetin is a powerful drug.....
Kind of like Eakers mycoxaphlopin addiction.
That’s not slavery. They are free to get work if they want it. They just find it easier to take free government money and live on that.
No red-eye gravy on those grits?? appalling.
Same thing. A slave to the dims in my view. You think as you like.
Even if one accepts the notion that the Civil War was primarily over slavery...and it's arguable...it's not a matter of "The South practiced slavery and the North didn't."
The overwhelming majority of the original colonies practiced slavery. At the time the Constitution was ratified, I believe only Pennsylvania had never been a slave state. A big hunk of the shipping trade through Massachussetts was conducted by slavers, and there was a slave auction block in Boston harbor. John Adams was himself a slave owner (albeit briefly; he was given a young woman house slave as a gift, and owned her only long enough to make out the manumission papers). Sojourner Truth was born a slave in the Hudson River valley of New York.
So if the North has any moral ground to stand on with regard to chattel slavery of blacks, it is only this: They got religion on it before the South did.
Not at all, as it turns out.
My comment was directed at this crew of Brazilian Confederados - not at American Southerners. So your claim that my comment was "Southernphobic" is demonstrably false.
Moreover you claimed that my comment was "uninformed" - when in point of fact I am quite well-informed on the movement of Confederate deadenders to leave their homeland in search of a slaveholding utopia elsewhere. Jubal Early advocated it as soon as Lee surrendered and left for Mexico. There were plans by Confederate emigrants to conquer or subvert the governments of British Honduras or Cuba to create a slave-holding refuge.
So your statement is demonstrably false on that count as well.
Choosing to vote Democratic is not the same as chattel slavery. Any black can choose to vote Republican if they choose (we do, after all, have secret ballots in this country). A chattel slave could not just quit working for his master and leave the plantation.
Even poorly used free will is much better than knowing that your entire life and that of your children and grandchildren rested on the whims, morals, and fate of your master.
Oh, Lord. ONe of those “gotta have the last word” types.
Whatever.
And for their descendants, they should be ashamed that they have not assimilated into Brazilian society. The United States (or the former Confederate states) are not their homeland; Brazil is. Be loyal Brazilians and recognize Brazilian culture as your own.
That doesn't seem to be unity....
His comment sounds an awful lot like a common characteristic of neo-Lincoln fascist derangement syndromers to use personal attacks rather than allowing normal discussion to occur. But I could be wrong.
The United States is not alone in owning up to a slave-owning history at all.
In contrast, some people should stop trying to sweep the history of slavery in the United States under the rug.
You could be wrong . . . but I doubt it.
By the way, I didn’t know that neo-Confederates had a mythology about themselves. Does that mean they are fighting neo-Yankees? And exactly what is the myth? That we all live on cyber Plantations?
Unlike in the United States, where slavery is a government monopoly.
Thank you for your comments, I see we share much in our heritage. Until this generation, in my experience, there were farm communities of families black and white, who had been together for generations. Surely, there was an abhorrent societal discrimination, but not a subjugation in these islands of rural cohabitation and commerce. There was a closeness, of "Uncle" and "Mammy" relationships, and a love between families that can never be understood by those not sharing the experience. I am the last of my blood to have known such. Most outside the south cannot claim as *family* - for generations - those of another race.
That time, alas, has passed.
wideawake made a very valid point, and a point that is about a prejudiced as noting many early Australian colonists were convicts or that the American federal government did not uphold agreements made with some Amerindian tribes--namely, the point was not prejudiced.
It's always been my understanding that in the United States where the Constitution is the wellspring of civil authority, those not charged with and found guilty in a court of law of such charges as treason remain innocent until so proven guilty. Since the leadership and followers thereof of the former Confederacy were not so charged, Americans then and now who follow the precipts of that Constitution likewise see them as without guilt; those who do not are something other than faithful followers of that Constitution.
Secondly, it would be helpful if you were to use the English language with a good deal more care, such as: May I ask what in which State did you and yours commit Treason? in?
Indentured servants, while they may have been pushed harder than slaves during their service, had a specific date in which they would be freed, and often given property. Additionally, the servant often voluntarily chose to become an indentured servant. Slaves didn't.
Slaves might be freed if their master was kind. If the master decided to free the slave, often that freedom came after the master had passed. Slaves could be separated from their families. Spouses from each other. Children from either or both parents and their siblings. Furthermore, the child of a slave was also a slave.
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