Uh, yeah... sure.
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.
My ancestors’ presence in the New World antedates the formation of the United States by over a century. I reckon that should qualify.
I’m reading a great book now called General Lee’s Army and it reminds me that “state’s rights” unfortunately became a euphemism for “protect slavery” in that time. Southerners who were not slave owners were whipped into a patriotic frenzy after Harpers Ferry, and it became easy to describe the building war as something it was not... urban north versus rural south, out-of-state dogooders versus locals, Black Republicans (northern whites who wanted abolition) versus southern Democrats... anything but a stubborn defense of slavery.
Sorry, South, but you hitched your star to an evil institution and you went down with it. Slavery could never survive in a free nation and northern busybodies like Harriet Beecher Stowe were simply doing the job your own people were too frightened to do: demand the end of slavery.
Human nature dictates that the guilty will react with violent defensive attack rather than admit the obvious.
I believe in states’ rights but I could never defend slavery. It’s too bad they are confused with each other today.
we had a couple peach trees in the backyard but they died because of those burrowing worm thangs. I knew we should have buried mothballs at the base of the trunk!
The good news is that the plum trees are still looking good.
heh
I large number of Spanish were in the south before America became a nation. Should they deserve to be described as “Native Americans” This is part of Mexicans to be “Native Americans”.
FIFY
Who am I???
1) Born in Florida
2) Raised until 15 in NYC
3) High Schooled in the Heart of Dixie -—Montgomery -—in a school called Robert E Lee
4) College degree from Syracuse
5) Business owner in North Carolina
6) Now Living the rest of my life in Texas
Answer:
A Southern born New Yorker who loves pizza, grits along with sweet potato pie, loathe elitists collectivists,has a soft spot for the Confederate military, roots for the wrong shade of Orange in Austin, is a die hard Yankee fan and loves the Texas heat.
Or as I commonly say...an average AMERICAN!!!
With my ignorance of history on full display, I ask, are you being serious, or sarcastic?
We were called “Hillbillys” and the Tennessee people lived in the same neighborhood. We definitely had our cultural differences with the Irish Catholics and Italians we lived next door to but we still met on Friday nights to play Rook and drink Pepsi. Southern definitely is a Culture.
States Rights
Uh, yeah... sure.
certainly.
I always hated the term, “native Americans,” but that comparison between Northerners and Southerners is about the dumbest-ass thing I think I’ve ever read. Just where the hell does the author think all those pre-Civil War Northerners disappeared to? They kept on moving, pioneering out to the mid-West, big West and Pacific Coast.
And just what would have happened to the Confederacy if the South actually won? An economy built on slave labor and cotton mills, run by savagely oppressing blacks, who would be the majority population? It would be world-infamous as a the most savage regime on Earth!...
Unless Abraham Lincoln was right that slavery as an institution would die on the vine, once the North established states’ rights. That’s right folks. It’s unthinkable that such a brutal, deranged nation would persist as such into the 20th century. See, those blood-thirsty, gore-crazed Confederate hooligans that started the Civil War were the ones arguing in front of the Supreme Court that there existed no such thing as states’ rights. The South wanted its Fugitive Slave Act, whereby Southern militias had every right to invade the North whenever and wherever they wanted to hunt down refugee slaves. When Abraham Lincoln was elected, he swore he had no intention to ban slavery. He withdrew forces from six of seven Southern Atlantic forts. He asserted that the North had no authority to prohibit slavery. But he also asserted that the Western territories had the rights to select their own destiny, and the Northern states had no obligation to permit their territory to be routinely raided by Southern paramilitary squads.
And for that, the South determined he, and the union, must die.
What happens if two Cherokees go to France and have a baby there, and then come back to America? What’s the kid? A “Native American?”
Oh yeah... I was born in Oklahoma and live in Virginia.
“If you are a pro-Southern Yankee, this complaint does not apply to you, of course.”
Sure it does...because you wanted to stop me from being here by stopping “those European immigrants from getting off their boats at Ellis Island.” That’s my dad’s side of the family.
On my mother side I go back to the Mayflower...they settled up North ya know.
You have no idea what is means to be an American and unless you can PERSONALLY trace your line to before 1620 you’re less American than I am (by your own retarded definition/requirements).
I am with you....my ancestor arrived in 1652 in Maryland. The Godiah Spray Plantation is a recreation of his land and existence.
http://www.stmaryscity.org/virtual%20tour/Plantation/Plantation.html
I would say we are native Americans!
Amen sir. Well written. You are a true American.
Next up, the Scandinavians arrive as permanent settlers simultaneously with the English.
From that point on what you have is a general outflow of people from Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Northern France and the United Kingdom into roughly the same territories.
Latin became a useful language for a while since that was the only one everybody could count on the educated classes (who made up the accountants and business managers) knowing.
About 1648 there were a series of plagues that pretty much wiped out the Indians on the East Coast as a relevant political force ~ from that point on they became part of the Euro-American framework and mostly engaged in commercial hunting to provide meat to that newer society then forming.
There were short periods when the Indians engaged in war against the Euro-Americans, but they didn't win ~ circa 1676.
English became the common language due to commercial interests in the Americas AND the need to deal with the arrival of the broad masses of Quakers in the early 1700s. Still worth remembering that George Washington traveled no where, not even to a beer joint in Alexandria Virginia, without a French speaking translator! There was a very good reason for that, and it wasn't just to woo the ladies through an intermediary.
The vast numbers of boatloads of Scottish POWs began arriving about 1700 as well ~ by which time the Sa'ami (among other Scandinavian groups) already had 2 settlements in Maryland, 5 in Pennsylvania, and were chopping down trees across a broad front running from Georgia to New York that became known by the early to mid 1700s as "THE FRONTIER".
You'all think that red hair all came in with the Alexanders, but it didn't. Some of it was dragged along and deposited by the Douglas'.
I cannot believe how many people commented on this ridiculous thread, including me.
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