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.
I'd like to believe that, but witness if you will, just in the last 10-15 years, the vast inroads made by bond labor yoked to mercantilistic policies, in South Asia and China, into the manufacturing industries of the world and the accompanying gradual weakening of our whole economy and society.
In one form or another, there is no economic force so much like catnip as bond labor that can be paid at will, or not, according to whatever pay scale the slavedriver wishes to set.
The progressive conversion of Italian, Sicilian, and North African freehold farming to factory-farming with its slave labor and economies of scale turned those farmlands into olive-orchards, vineyards, and marshland, and relocated the breadbasket of the entire Mediterranean to Egypt, in good time to be snatched away by the arrival of the conquering Arabs.
I think the Indians would regard you as immigrants.
It was about self-determination, the self-determination of the Negro not to be a slave.
The Constitution allowed it to exist in certain States.
Not according to the States that seceded it wasn't.
That was the reason why they attempted to break up the Union, they didn't like the results of an election.
He also didn't believe the black man should work and the White man eat the fruits of his labor-in other words, slavery.
The only time I see Southerners being mocked is when they try to rewrite History and pretend the Civil War was about something other than slavery.
Madison said secession was nonsense. As did Robert E. Lee.
Secession wasn't even allowed in the Confederate Constitution.
The fact is that 'many people' believed that secession was nonsense including Madison, Daniel Webster, R.E.Lee, Andrew Jackson etc
And what was Madison’s view on secession?
The laws needed to be enforced.
No, you refuse to be convinced.
You think slavery would have ended-on what fantasy basis?
This is all Libertarian nonsense from the Rockwell Institute.
Conversely if they have the right to call themselves 'native Americans' then everyone born here does. How about that?
“One “thingy” revisionists like you forget is that Southerners expelled the tribes that had assimilated and lived as Whites did. You know the Cherokee and the Trail of Tears.
So who was the racist in 1860?
Start with slaveowners and we’ll work out the rest later.”
You must be a yankee. Seems you forgot that the Federal Govt removed the Cherokee not the south. At the same time this occured the states of MO, KY, MD, DE were also slave owning states. Further, the states of IN, IL, OH, MI had laws on the books outlawing blacks from their state. Just remember who had no experience with blacks in 1860 and you might find those who had very bizarre illusions concerning the realities of slavery and the black population at large. So of the states remaining with the union in 1860, 4 were slave owning states, 4 had laws on the books outlawing blacks from settling in their confines, and all of 7 were non-slave owning states. Your anti-slavery crusade falls apart once you know the facts. Lincoln desparately used it to solidify his position to re-unify the union that he broke. This is the of yankee sainthood. Spare me the condesending projection.
My great great great great great great great great grandfather Thomas Tuttle was born in New Haven in 1634. I guess that makes me a native as well.
I can’t claim to be a southerner but I did live in Charleston, SC for a year when I was in the Navy in 1971.
lol.... you mean, like these ones? As the gentlemen of Mississippi put it:
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.
Yes, it sure would be nice if we had something like that..... ;-)
Still smiling at and with you, DC2000.
Boy did you get me wrong. I love the South and admire their warrior class (America would be lost without Southern recruits). I also love the people and the charm. But that won’t erase the truth about slavery and the Civil War.
“depravity in my own soul” ? Really?
Switch to decaf.
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