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.
Ok I won’t knock “northerners” except The Yankees(baseball team).... can I at least reject their cooking... I mean really.... boiling or baking everything with little or no spices? bland and blah... yuck!
With little or no-spices? What exactly did you eat in the North? Besides, people who live in Grits houses shouldn't throw bisquits with bland pasty gravy on them.
I was born in Iowa and have lived in the Midwest all of my life, so I guess that makes me a Yankee.
My Mother was born in Georgia, lives in the Midwest and retains her Southern culture and heritage. I have a great deal of love and respect for Southerners. I also appreciate where I grew up and where I now live.
Quite frankly, I wish people would quit fighting a 145 year-old war and knock it off with all of this childish North vs South crap. There are much bigger fish to fry.
On a walk with a Great Aunt one day she told me about the "slave catchers" buried there. She said they'd put a little pile of rocks on top the grave so's to now disturb it in later farmwork.
THERE WERE A LOT OF LITTLE PILES OF ROCKS IN THAT ORCHARD.
Years later we found out about an ancestor arrested, tried and convicted for aiding slaves to escape through that region. I later turned up the route of the "Dipping Gourd", a paleo-Indian structure covering most of Indiana, and paralleling an internal "small dipper" centered on the Muncie/Anderson region.
The old family farm was definitely part of the Underground Railroad and given its relative distance from the various bends on the Ohio River, it was probably pretty busy ~ for both runaway slaves and the slave catchers following them.
I've come to think of it as one of the places the Civil War started.
If I might...
Exactly, “Slavery could never survive in a free nation” so it would have evolved out of the picture. It would have been a question of time. But the abolition movement and the media frenzy wanted quick action, something had to be done, and look at the result, lives lost and the South left in ruins.
It would have been better to have left them alone.
Also true.
Your country mouse and city mouse comparison -is- central, and is a large part of the picture, but it is not the entirety.
An agrarian affinity is a major part of the mix but does not cover all. I do indeed find much of the Midwest, the Southwest and some of the northern mountain and prairie states to be very congenial, pleasant places. There are however other perspectives regarding history, religion, the individual, family and community which make these areas very different, and they are not home. For me, they never could be home, although they are nice places to visit and I do like most of the people very much.
I heartily agree with you with respect to areas like Atlanta. Those are no longer culturally southern any more than Miami is.
OK, then such documents still exist, right? I would have thought so.
In general, what reasons do they give for leaving the Union?
OK, good luck with those hard to express “perspectives”. People are so transient in this country now that hopefully some of the old stereotypes will one day melt away.
Four states issued "Declarations of Causes. You can read them here and judge for yourself.
“If I might...
Exactly, “Slavery could never survive in a free nation” so it would have evolved out of the picture. It would have been a question of time. But the abolition movement and the media frenzy wanted quick action, something had to be done, and look at the result, lives lost and the South left in ruins.
It would have been better to have left them alone.”
The Radical Yankees then and now, as evidenced by many PC posters on this thread and on many others, were and still are not interested in leaving us alone. They react in orgasmic exultation about “leaving the South in ruins”.
These pricks are on the other side in the presently raging “culture war” and can barely disguise their liberalism here on FR.
Are you saying America..wasn't America around the time of Little Big Horn?
ROFLOL!!!
You have no idea...of what you are talking about.
Roger that!
You are wrong. We are the only TRUE CONSERVATIVES on FR. You’all are NEWCOMERS to the fundamental issues which necessarily include Freedom and Liberty For All
So, you are also saying....my Grandma was wasn't American..because she had an Indian name?
ROFLOL!!!
Keep digging...
Ha!!
They are not hard to express, they are complex and time consuming, and I have other things to do with my day. Southern agrarians generally, and M. E. Bradford in particular cover many of the particularities if you are actually interested.
Your desire for regional distinctions “melting away” will be frustrated I fear. Present trends in this nation indicate precisely the opposite absent the (re)application of brute force, and examples in other nations argue that distinctive cultures tend to re-emerge - even when brute force is attempted.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire is again Austria and Hungary, Czechoslovakia is once more Czech and Slovak. East and West Germany did merge, which could be offered in support of the utopian’s dream of collective unity, but in the context of them reuniting -as distinct- from their neighbors, it reinforces the primacy of local custom, culture and language.
Right now, the United States appears to be on a trajectory like the Soviet Union of the late 1980s. We shall see.
In the end, it is all Ozymandias, and peoples survive longer than polities.
Pretty much agree with you........
And most of my folk...were here when the country was “discovered”.
Some of my folk...crossed the Cumberland Gap with Crockett.
Some of my folk were of French, German, and who knows what blood.
The way I look at is...property rights. I mean we paid...Indians, the French, the Russians, and others for land. And now it’s American land.
FRegards,
“These pricks are on the other side in the presently raging “culture war” and can barely disguise their liberalism here on FR.”
Color it red, color it blue, call it a republic, a democracy, a union or a league, a statist is always a statist to the core, and will always hate the non-conformist.
I meant that in pre-america, the Indians considered themselves Cherokee or Sioux or whatever - not native American.
Sorry for the confusion?
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