well, then feel free to come on down and have a nice glass of sweet tea then! :)
I have mixed feelings on this whole Civil War history. So sad that slavery was ever condoned and allowed here in the New World. But I also grew up hearing how the South was treated so badly after the war, how brutal Reconstruction was, and how the South still paid a heavy price for its rebellion and secession. Racial prejudice is not a Southern-only thing—it is EVERYWHERE! It’s just that the Southerner is the last “safe” target of reproach, since we’re all supposed to be toothless, dirty, uneducated, simple-minded, drunk on homemade moonshine, shoeless, and armed with any kind of firearm possible. Oh, and some of us are overtly Christian, pro-life, and for traditional marriage, so that’s also held against us.
Maybe everyone else is just plain jealous of our wonderful football teams...I dunno, but it seems that the friendly jesting that used to go on between sections of the country has gone by the wayside, and now every group clings to itself and considers everyone else as EVIL.
We don’t know true evil when we see it, or we are too afraid, too numb to say it.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. I’m just a fiercely proud Southerner (at least 10 generations on BOTH sides of my family—my ancestors came thru Virginia and Louisiana!), but more importantly, a fiercely proud AMERICAN! I see greater need every day for our country to pull together and to fight evil, to be willing to sacrifice for God and country. I see a dreadful future coming to this country as more and more of our civil rights are taken/given away...
Do you have any historical knowledge of how the losers in other great civil wars were treated?
In the English Civil Wars the leaders (and many of the followers) were proscribed, their property confiscated and they were often executed.
In the Spanish Civil War somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 of the losing side were executed after the war was over.
In the Taiping Rebellion, which took place about the same time as our War, 20M to 30M people died, many of them civilians massacred by the Manchu after the end of the fighting.
After the WBTS, the number executed in revenge by the winners was somewhat smaller. Exactly one, in fact.
Slavery itself is also not necessarily black-and-white (literally!). First of all (and this is going to get me in trouble with everyone) slavery as such is not anywhere forbidden in G-d's Law either for Jews or non-Jews. This does not mean that the form of slavery practiced in the South was Halakhic (it probably was not), but it is important to note that Halakhah regulates rather than forbids slavery. And if G-d did not forbid slavery, to attribute such a prohibition to him is to "add to the Torah" which is strictly forbidden (and which leads to all sorts of trouble).
However, slavery as practiced in the South at that time was more than just slavery--the owning of human beings by other human beings. It was racial slavery in which skin color was used as a mark of identification, so that even free Blacks had to at all times have papers on them to show that they were free. Now this is far from the only case of racial slavery in history; in fact, considering the habit of conquerors to enslave their victims, racial slavery may very well be the norm. But there is a schizophrenia deep within many neo-Confederate apologists (which all palaeoconservatives have inherited to one extent or another) which is to defend slavery while having come to hate (or at least extremely dislike) the slaves themselves. Now certainly in the beginning the white slave owners did not "hate" their slaves. Why would a person hate his own property? But over the years, beginning with the radical abolitionists and continuing down to our own contemporary "political correctness," neo-Confederates and paleocons have picked up an extreme negrophobia as a reaction to the "negrolatry" of the Left. This simply makes no sense. One cannot defend slavery as the bedrock of a stable society (which is what they did) if the slaves one is fighting so tenaciously to hold onto are regarded as a class of evil undesirable left wing "trouble makers." This negrophobia is not so much a product of slavery as the "jim crow" period that followed it, which in many respects was far worse than slavery had been. During slavery the owners had to at least provide the bare minimum of necessaries to their slaves. During jim crow the Blacks were on their own and back to performing the original tasks they had performed during slavery. Plus during slavery the slave owners played the slaves and the poor whites against one another. During jim crow the aristocrats were allied firmly with the poor whites and the Blacks had no one.
At any rate, I have read more than once on this forum the sentiment that "next time we'll pick our own d@mn cotton." I cannot read this line without wondering why the aristocrats did not merely enslave the poor whites who were all around them rather than import an originally alien people whom historical circumstances would eventually turn into their beit noire. Yet early ideologues of African slavery such as Calhoun despised poor whites and actually praised slavery for running them off the land to make room for the more noble slave-owners and their human property. This contempt of the Southern aristocrats for poor whites has been almost forgotten by history, though one catches a whiff of it in Gone with the Wind.
Another area of what I define as schizophrenia (or at least hypocrisy) among palaeoconservatives is their selective outrage not only at the charge of treason for disunion (since Southerners themselves made the same charge against secessionist New Englanders earlier in the nineteenth century) but also at centralization. The vast majority of foreign leaders admired by our liberty-loving decentralist palaeocons were in fact practitioners of centralization (Franco, Salazar, Papadopoulos, Chiang Kai-shek, etc.). There was no localism or regionalism under any of these palaeocon heroes. Why is Lincoln a tyrant for an attitude that made Franco a hero? This simply makes no sense. Even the beloved Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a centralizer! For that matter, for all the hoo-haw about the suspension of habeas corpus, the Birch Society's hero J. Edgar Hoover advocated the same thing during the Korean War, but you won't find the Birch Society criticizing him!
Anyway, the while the situation is not black-and-white as understood by most people, neither is it black-and-white as understood by neo-Confederates.
I am myself a descendant of Southern Unionists (though from the Upper South in my case) whose family has been Republican since Lincoln (there were lots of Union supporters in the South, many of whom fought for the Union--a fact often forgotten). I have had to admit to myself that their cause was not as lily pure as I used to believe. I wish the neo-Confederates would admit the same thing, but I know that they won't.