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 don't know how anyone can say that the war was about anything but both. Either all men have rights or they don't and a state either has the ability to deny those rights to some men and not others or they do not.
Quote from the famous Baltimore Journalist, H.L. Mencken regarding the Gettysburg Address:
“But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination— ‘that government of the people, by the people, for the people,’ should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue.
“The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary.”
— Journalist H.L. Mencken, From “Five Men at Random,” “Prejudices: Third Series,” 1922, pp. 171-76: First printed, in part, in the “Smart Set,” May, 1920, p. 141
If they keep it up, maybe they can qualify for reparations.
I’m a Texan, not a Yankee.
I just think the whole debate comes from a faulty premise ... “indigenous” superiority. Who cares?
SnakeDoc
If only we had some kind of documents from the time that listed the reasons why the various states seceded--only then could we answer that question. As it is, we can only speculate.
The term is 'Native Americans' not 'Native United Staters'. White Southerners track their beginnings back to Europe. They have no more right to use the term than any other people who originated in Europe, Asia, or Africa.
I am a native American. The only difference is that my ancestors came here by boat rather than walking across ice.
Did this little tome crack a "C" in the sixth grade essay contest?
Honestly, how stupid . . .
As a native American, are we entitled to the same benefits other native Americans have, such as having our own land, and not under the US laws? Humm...this may be pretty good.
“Both. Northern opposition to the extension of slavery into the territories and newly formed states was regarded as interference with the southerners’ property rights and freedom of movement. But the media eliminate the part about state’s rights.”
One thingy the revisionists forget is that Northern opposition to the extension of slavery into western territories was based on the precept that the west should be for only the white man. Blacks were to be kept out and Indians either concentrated or killed. So who was the racist in 1860?
Abraham Lincoln Quote
“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything.”
Source: Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois, September 18, 1858
(The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, pp. 145-146.)
A state's right and determination to do what?
I am not a hillbilly, I’m an “Appalachian-American” !!
So, yeah, I'm a native American.
I'm also a southerner....on both sides of the family. Mother's ancestors fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War.
RE: There you’ve started it!!!
We don’t have to fight or quarrel over it. What’s done is done and we can’t undo what’s done.
But we can for the sake of educating ourselves, DISCUSS IT in a civil manner in order to avoid the mistakes of the past.
American by birth. Southern by the grace of God.
In the past it seems to descend into insulting posts!!
A lot of it had to do with power. Northern political and economic interests, which differed in many respects from the corresponding interests in the South, didn’t want to see more and more slave states joining the union and adding to that bloc of votes in Congress.
Wow, it was real nice of those Southerners to try and preserve slavery to help the poor black man out from those filthy Northern bigots. snicker ;-)
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