Posted on 10/07/2010 8:12:40 AM PDT by ComtedeMaistre
Southerners who celebrate their cultural heritage, are among the most misunderstood people in America. Italians who celebrate Colombus Day, and Irishmen who celebrate St. Patricks Day, never have to suffer the grief that Southerners who want to celebrate Robert E. Lee's Birthday have to endure.
Southern identity is partly about celebrating the Anglo-Celtic culture, which is the core culture that existed in America at the time of the founding of America in 1776. It is the culture that gave us the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and others. Most Southerners, both white and black, are descended from people who were in America before the Civil War in 1860.
It is often said that America is a nation of immigrants. Southerners are not immigrants to America. When the first Southerners came to Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, America did not exist as a nation. Southerners were the pioneers who built America. Southerners created colonial America in 1607, before the Mayflower folks arrived in 1620. Two sons of the South, the Virginians, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, led America to independence as a Constitutional Republic in 1776. Why shouldn't Southerners be proud of such a great heritage?
Many of the Northerners who love to mock and insult the South, are people whose ancestors came to America as immigrants, after the statue of liberty was put up in 1886. They love to mock the people who created and built the America that their ancestors immigrated to. If someone could create a time machine, and we could go back to the 1890s, we would tell our Southern ancestors to stop those European immigrants from getting off their boats at Ellis Island. It is time that the Southerners who created American culture and the American nation, are shown a little appreciation by the Ellis Island Yankees, who just got off the boat the other day. If you are a pro-Southern Yankee, this complaint does not apply to you, of course.
Except that there was no cannibalism of record engaged in by Southerners.
s, ping.
What, exactly, is "yankee" culture?
I'm going to go out on a limb and predict you'll say something along the lines of socialism/gay rights/big government/etc.
No problems here... it's the Marxism that's the problem and Karl Marx was as white as a ghost.
Quite serious.
I agree wholeheartedly! I also speak as one whose ancestors came at various times BEFORE the founding of the nation (including those who came on the Mayflower), so, though born a yankee, I am a Southerner by choice and a Proud Native American by birth!
Pardon me, and excuse my previous reply to you: I thought your question was in reference to an earlier posting. Yes; I was being sarcastic.
My sincere apologies Ma’am!
Let's be honest, it was about expansion of slavery into the territories. Lincoln opposed it, the South wanted it. Lincoln was elected, the South seceded. So from their point of view it was about slavery.
“A pity none of the “Northern opposition” in Congress bothered to mention that federal lands were only for white people at the time.
Presumably Congress forgot that the Choctaw weren’t white.”
Please reread the part about concentrating or killing.
Blacks were to be kept out and Indians either concentrated or killed. So who was the racist in 1860? There were many reservations created Congress. This would be understood as concentrating a population. They put limits on tribes and recognized their independence. They didn’t invite them to the dance though.
“A state’s right and determination to do what?”
What’s it to ya?
I certainly can lay no claim to the nationality of a country I’ve never visited, that is 3 generations removed from my own, and who’s language I can neither read, nor write, nor speak.
Yes, two different ways of saying the same thing.
“Are you comfortable as a Southerner, being the butt of jokes in this country. Are you comfortable having your ancestors constantly portrayed as monsters? And you are accusing me of being divisive? How so? By calling for Southerners and their culture to be treated with more respect?
Why don’t you tell those who are always mocking and insulting Southerners, to stop being divisive? Southerners only want to be left alone to celebrate their culture, without being called names.”
Worth repeating! Amen.
It was the Constitution, specifically Article VI and the supremacy clause, that denied them this right and not the federal government.
When nullification would not work and states felt that they were no longer respected, they moved towards secession.
Twenty years later, when a perceived threat to their institution of slavery appeared.
Like so much of the country she became a city mouse. When rats live on top of each other they demand more laws and less freedom... otherwise no one would pick up the garbage. Unfortunately, they always go to far and start gnawing their own tails off. You're not alone FRiend, we all have liberal idiots in our family. :-(
And Southerners were fine with black people in the territories if, and only if, they were the property of someone. My how noble of them. </sarcasm>
Curious.
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