[wardaddy]

And what do you call the massive transfer of wealth from everyone to build all the projects up north and all the quixotic urban renewal in your shining cities?

Yes...you may blame us for agricultural subsidies....along with the midwest and great plains and Kali as well. That transfer of wealth urban areas are paying for.

Actually I blame Massachusetts.

They spawned Eli Whitney who with his dandy little cotton gin made cotton King and hence an explosion of slavery and all the other crap that has come down the pike since.

And that makes about as much sense as your diatribe that because rural Southerners supported FDR in 1932 that we are somehow to blame for your cultural and economic blight.

Yea...as you say...the truth hurts doesn't it?

GOP,

It would appear that the forum has more than one John Brown incarnate...lol

[#3Fan]

And that makes about as much sense as your diatribe that because rural Southerners supported FDR in 1932 that we are somehow to blame for your cultural and economic blight.

Economic blight? I think you've been reading too much of Willie Green. lol

[#3Fan]

And what do you call the massive transfer of wealth from everyone to build all the projects up north and all the quixotic urban renewal in your shining cities?

Like TVA?

[x]

Actually I blame Massachusetts.

They spawned Eli Whitney who with his dandy little cotton gin made cotton King and hence an explosion of slavery and all the other crap that has come down the pike since.

Though born in Massachusetts, Whitney's long been associated with Connecticut where he lived much of his life. The cotton gin (and the development of cotton mills in Britain, New England, and Europe) help to explain "King Cotton," but if anything it makes the planters look worse than otherwise -- less paternalistic and more concerned with getting the big bucks, sharing all the mercenary vices they denounced in Northerners.

That slavery was abolished in Southern states by the Emancipation Proclamation -- if slavery was abolished in the Southern states by the Emancipation Proclamation -- is no particular reflection of Confederate anti-slavery sentiment. That abolition had to wait a year or two or at most three in Border States like Maryland, Missouri, Kentucky, or Delaware is no indication of Northern hypocrisy. Rather, it's a reflection of the ambiguous condition of the Border states, slave states with union loyalties or under union control. With the minor exception of a score or so of slaves in New Jersey, the Northern States had abolished slavery by 1860.

In general, accusations of Northern hypocrisy may have some validity, but tend to support Southern hypocrisy. The presumption seems to be that Northern guilt or sins wash Southern offenses clean. Such charges have less to do with either the objective or the moral view of things and more to do with having something to throw at the other side.

The question is what one does after throwing every charge or accusation at "the other side." The tendency is to act like that's that and the matter is settled. The truth is that at that point one hasn't even begun to answer the serious questions. The debate format may be some use for determining the facts in objective history, but it's of little use in reaching a moral reckoning about the Civil War era or our country's history. That would require much more introspection and soul searching than this format allows.