Why the sympathy for the South?

2/18/2003 | truthsearcher

[Truthsearcher]

Why the sympathy for the South?

[Truthsearcher]

Okay, this might cause some heated responses by I am most definitely not trolling, but looking for an honest debate on this topic.

I am surprised by the amount of sympathy on Freerepublic for the South in discussions about the Civil War.

Now I understand the States rights argument, and I understand conservatives tend to stand in favor of strong States rights. But to me when it comes to the Civil War the states right position is as untenous as the woman's right to choose position on abortion.

There can be no legitimate right for a state to enforce slavery on her people any more than there can be a legitimate right for a woman to kill her unborn child. To me in both cases intervention is necessary to protect the life and liberty of those so oppressed, even if force is necessary.

We conservatives often assert that the "pro-choice" movement is in reality "pro-abortion", and rightly so. So I don't see any way to get around the same logic that would consider being "pro-choice" in the matter of states deciding for themselves on the issue of slavery is the same thing as being pro-slavery.

[boris]

The civil war was not about slavery. Lincoln justified it ex post facto on those grounds.

It was primarily about the right of secession.

--Boris

[Cold Heat]

Lincoln had trouble with the slavery issue as well. He was no southerner. The slavery issue was not on top of the list of reasons to cecede. The average southerner never owned a slave, they worked beside them.

Only a few pampered rich people had slaves then and at the time, every culture had them.

We were the first to stop the policy.

It still exists is some black nations.

[Alberta's Child]

You have to look at the slavery question in the context of the times. Yas, slavery was wrong. But fighting a war on the basis that slavery was wrong would have been preposterous -- when the U.S. Constitution was ratified it was clearly understood that slavery was "right" at least insofar as it was "legal."

[John H K]

Well, the deal is something that happens a lot on FR...

Irrational reactions to stupidity by the Left that go overboard and too far in the OTHER direction.

There's so much stupid crap from the NAACP freaking out over Confederate battleflags, etc. that people feel the need to counteract it, but the eventually get to the point where they're basically pretending slavery didn't exist and the South was God's Paradise on Earth, etc.

Same thing happens with environmentalism...so much nutty stufffrom the left, that now on FR even the most innocuous measure to clean up something, or regulate some pollution somewhere, or make anything into a preserve or park or protect a species in trouble gets trashed.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

You're falling into the false assumption that the Civil War was only about slavery. I don't blame you, that's the way it's taught in grade school.

The southerners (I'm not one, I was born in Wyoming) had many gripes about the way the north treated them, such as representation in Congress and tarriffs on goods that were produced in the south and shipped north. In their view, the north had the most say on how the rules were written and they felt that the north was writing the rules to be rigged in their favor at the expense of the south.

[Hobsonphile]

I agree with you on this. I concede the complexity of the Civil War period, but the Confederacy was no bastion of liberty, and to portray it as such is a distortion.

[willyboyishere]

You want to get an unforgettably indelible impression of
"sympathy for the South"? Read several of the scholarly historical works of Prof. Eugene D. Genovese, who I believe currently teaches at Emory University in Atlanta, and is a Marxist (hardly a FReeper, but might share many opinions with lots of Freepers on lots of subjects,(especially the long reign of Bill Clinton).

[Senator Pardek]

Prepare for this thread to be invaded by folks who attend Civil War Battle Simulations Weekends in finely pressed gray cotton uniforms.

[#3Fan]

Neo-Confederate revisionists don't have the organizational skills to run their own site so they all pile on this one to litter it with their agenda every day. Don't think that most conservatives agree with them. History is clear from the Confederate state's own words in their Declarations of Secession that the reason for secession was slavery. They try desperately to hide this fact and cause confusion so that they can get more sympathy and place blame on Lincoln. They live in the past and can't get over that they lost to the North. They are fringers.

[AEMILIUS PAULUS]

QUESTION: "Why the sympathy for the South?"

ANSWER: Because they were a noble enemy. A noble enemy is to be honored even when conquered. aAlmost all the leadership of the Southern Armies were in essence great, noble and good men(at least good as far as sinful man can be.) They were even respected by their enemy peers, their contemporaries. All my ancestry were Yankees and I would have been a Yankee but that does not stop my respect for all involved in this great war.

[Russ]

Why sympathy for the South?

1. I like to root for the underdog

2. I like their uniforms

3. Their Generals had some colorful names: Beauregard, Stonewall, J.E.B. Stuart, Longstreet.

[Mr. Mulliner]

I'm a bit bothered here too by what pass for arguments in favor of the South which are really nothing more than downplaying the evils of slavery.

However, to be fair, we are done a great injustice by the NAACP and other liberal watchdog groups which try to overplay their hand. From what I have read, slavery was never really popular in the South and if they could have gotten out of it without devastating their own economy, the vast majority of Southerners would have wanted to do so.

Interestingly, it seems to have been a reaction to northern propaganda about slavery which wrongly portrayed Southerners as cruel beasts that seems to have driven Southerners into a defense of slavery, something they would not have done without the North more or less goading them into it.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

These reasons are also the reasons why my neighbor is a New England Patriots fan.

[ml/nj]

There can be no legitimate right for a state to enforce slavery ...

I guess you think the war was about slavery. And to some extent it probably was. But to most of the people who fought in the war it wasn't about slavery. The number of Northerners who would willing die to "free the slaves" probably never reached four figures. The Great Emancipation Proclimation didn't come until 1863, and then it didn't apply to any slaves still held in the "Union" States. Something else was going on, and if you read about it beyond the usual stuff that the victors would write about anything they did, it isn't pretty.

James McPherson (Princeton) is the most mainstream of "Civil War" historians. In one of his books he quotes a Harvard professor writing in 1869 as saying that it was as if he is no longer living in the country in which he was born. McPherson completely misses the import of this. This Harvard professor never owned slaves, and probably cared little if at all about slavery. Certainly the end of slavery 400 miles to his south couldn't have had much impact on the life of a Harvard professor.

The professor was lamenting the passing of Jefferson's America, and that's what I miss too. Lincoln destroyed it.

ML/NJ

[arthurus]

Same thing happens with environmentalism...so much nutty stufffrom the left, that now on FR even the most innocuous measure to clean up something, or regulate some pollution somewhere, or make anything into a preserve or park or protect a species in trouble gets trashed

Where in the Constitution is the government given the power to clean up something or take land for preserves and parks?

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

So how did the North explain their use of slavery?

[Conservababe]

The south had slaves and the north had indentured servants.

Little Rock rioted when faced with integration.

Boston rioted when faced with integration.

[Alberta's Child]

It's also worth noting that the Civil War harkens back to an era when people identified themselves first as residents of whatever state they lived in, and as Americans second. That whole concept is kind of neat.

Interestingly, Robert E. Lee became a Confederate general not because he was sympathetic to the Confederate cause, but because his home state of Virginia voted to secede from the Union. If Virginia had stayed in the Union, we probably never would have heard of Ulysses S. Grant.