We Are All Southerners Now

American Thinker ^ | November 14, 2020 | EM Cadwaladr

[Jacob Kell]

When I was growing up in Ohio, the South began at the banks of the Ohio river. Below that muddy line, everyone knew, there lived a different breed of backward and uneducated people with lazy minds and even lazier language skills. You could have contempt for them, a privilege I indulged from time to time. I personally learned this contempt from two main sources.

[suthener]

I don’t have the time or energy to argue with you. I have read these comments on FR. I’ve been on here since 1998. I could prove one of them but the record of my comments only go back to August. If you don’t believe people on FR say crazy things you don’t read all the posts. On a normal day I do.

[BroJoeK]

Wallace T.: "The old regional alignments are now irrelevant."

Agreed, but there is still a cadre of Lost Causers here who insist that, regardless of whatever else you may have heard, the only thing that really matters in life is that d*mn-Yankee Northerners hate Southerners and so Southerners should be allowed to secede, again.

[BroJoeK]

suthener: "If you don’t believe people on FR say crazy things you don’t read all the posts. "

You're right, I don't read every post on every thread.

But I do try to follow those related to the Civil War and arguments from Lost Causers as to why "Republicans are evil".
In all these years (since circa 2001) I've never seen Southerners mocked as people, either from the CW era or now.
Yes, we do occasionally see unflattering comparisons made of slaveholders, but what percent of 1860 Southerners actually owned slaves -- was it 3%?
The vast majority of Confederate soldiers did not own slaves, and should not be criticized as such.

Point is: nobody comes on these threads to mock Southerners, only to try to correct the pack of historical lies known informally as "the Lost Cause".

[DiogenesLamp]

In other words, after about 80 years. Plenty of time for slave revolts. Getting rid of slavery wouldn't have ended the racial conflicts, though. States where Blacks were a majority or near majority and Whites had all the power and control would be powder kegs apt to explode.

I think that when they started keeping slaves, they never envisioned a time when this would no longer be feasible. They didn't think this thing through. Far too often in human history do people put immediate profit ahead of what is in their own long term best interests.

The Confederate Constitution required states joining the Confederacy to respect the right of slaveowners to their human property.

Yes it did, but this would not result in any large quantity of slavery in states where it was simply not economically viable.

What also gets left out of your argument is that the Midwest was really coming into its own in the late 19th and early 20th century. Those states had been Indian country just a generation or two back and thought they were building their own new civilization. They weren't going to throw in with the slave states and subordinate themselves to a very different culture.

Apart from the slave stuff, it wasn't a different culture. The midwestern people had a lot more in common with the southern people than they did with Boston Dandies or New York plutocrats.

Were Midwesterners really going to trade that in for domination by the very different plantation/slaveowner leaders of the South?

The plantation slaveowners were not going to be the source of their financial benefit. They would have been just another powerful constituency in a larger system. The midwesterners would have found more lucrative suppliers for their tools and materials and they would have found more profitable buyers of their grains and other products by not going through the New York controlled railroad and other cartel.

Even further west, whatever quarrels farmers and miners had with New York, they didn't think they had much in common with Jefferson Davis or Alexander Stephens. They might form their own country but they weren't going to become second fiddle to the plantation masters.

You keep coloring your view on what the slave owners were doing and what you suspect they would have done. I see them as a significant constituency in the Southern government, but not the sole controller of what it would have become. With European goods and services flowing through the Southern states, I think there would have arose a large merchant constituency that wasn't under the thrall of whatever the slave owners wanted to do.

So then your deranged idea that the 2004 election map reflects deep and fundamental historical differences between regions falls apart, and maybe you'll stop dragging it out on every possible occasion.

Does not follow. I don't see how you arrive at that conclusion based on what you have offered as supporting evidence. The social culture of these 2004 states more greatly resembles the social culture of the Southern states than it does the Coastal nuts and the New York/Boston/Washington DC aristocracy.

[DiogenesLamp]

That's because you're insane and just can't deal with facts or reason. If you ever wish to become sane then start here: stop lying.

You get to sounding a little unhinged yourself from time to time.

[DiogenesLamp]

When 2020 Democrats say, "count every vote" they mean "count all of our illegal votes".

Why? What do they get from their "illegal votes"?

[FLT-bird]

Yes. TO YOU. You clearly don’t get that these were different communities who had large differences before and after slavery. Even during slavery, while one owned slaves, the other was happy to trade in slaves.

Not everything is about slavery exclusively. Open your eyes.

[central_va]

State-ist thugs are really going have to pay up one day.

[x]

Apart from the slave stuff, it wasn't a different culture. The midwestern people had a lot more in common with the southern people than they did with Boston Dandies or New York plutocrats.

You are blinded by your hatred of cities. We were an overwhelmingly rural country in those days, even in the North. A Michigan or Wisconsin farmer had far more in common with a Maine or Vermont or upstate New York farmer than he had with a Southerner. Most likely, they had the same grandfather or great-grandfather. A Mississippi planter would look like somebody from another country.

Southern Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio did have much in common with the Upper South, especially with Kentucky. Farmers and townspeople living just north of the Ohio probably had parents born South of it (as Lincoln did), but they had little in common with the slaveowning planters of Virginia, South Carolina or Mississippi. Their families had moved North to get away from slavery and didn't want slaveowners or slaves to follow them northward. And people in the southern counties of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio were eventually outnumbered by those in the central and northern counties.

It was only after the planter culture and slavery were destroyed -- heck, it was only after segregation ended and air conditioning became common -- that most Midwesterners felt that they might feel a special bond with the South. Even in my parents' lifetime, most Americans didn't feel at home in Faulkner's or Erskine Caldwell's South. If the Confederacy had survived, it would have been a little different, but if you prided yourself on your love of liberty would you really throw in with the slaveowners? I wouldn't.

The plantation slaveowners were not going to be the source of their financial benefit. They would have been just another powerful constituency in a larger system. The midwesterners would have found more lucrative suppliers for their tools and materials and they would have found more profitable buyers of their grains and other products by not going through the New York controlled railroad and other cartel.

Farmers west of the Mississippi complained about the railroads in the 1890s because the had few options for transporting their goods. East of the Great Plains there were competing lines and the farmers could choose how to send their goods to market, so they weren't as disconnected. They also had large markets close to home, like Chicago or Saint Louis.

If New Orleans replaced New York, there would still be things to complain about for those who were in the mood to complain. If grain were going down the Mississippi to New Orleans and then sent out to the rest of the world through the Caribbean, the expense would probably be greater than shipping it to New York and then across the Atlantic. And, indeed, Southern firms were connected to the planter establishment and would have all the bad habits of the New York elites you are always ranting about - and then some.

You keep coloring your view on what the slave owners were doing and what you suspect they would have done. I see them as a significant constituency in the Southern government, but not the sole controller of what it would have become. With European goods and services flowing through the Southern states, I think there would have arose a large merchant constituency that wasn't under the thrall of whatever the slave owners wanted to do.

I base my argument on who the chief secessionists and Confederate leaders were and what they were saying in 1860-1. Slaveowners controlled the Confederacy. You can argue that the Confederacy would have been radically transformed by independence, but cotton would still be the base of the economy and planters would still be the high status group. Think of England: merchants and bankers aspired to become landowners because that was where the prestige was.

Manufacturers might shake things up, but people who were financing the cotton trade or importing goods from abroad wouldn't. The greater prestige -- and profits -- of the planters were one reason industry didn't develop as much in the South as in the North, and opening the borders to imports wouldn't change that. The necessity of keeping the enslaved labor force under control would mean that merchants and financiers would support the slaveowning planters.

Does not follow. I don't see how you arrive at that conclusion based on what you have offered as supporting evidence. The social culture of these 2004 states more greatly resembles the social culture of the Southern states than it does the Coastal nuts and the New York/Boston/Washington DC aristocracy.

It definitely doesn't follow that a map of how states voted in 2004 indicates what they would have done a century or more earlier. If you're saying throw out every other election when the West and Midwest voted one way and the South voted anothe, because this one election reflects some fundamental reality about the regions that's as true a century ago as it was 16 years ago, then you are obviously wrong. People change, regions change, issues change. Anybody who isn't positively transfixed by present-day hatreds recognizes that.

Even you admit that if New Orleans replaced New York City as the continent's business center (Charleston wasn't likely to do so), then resentments directed against New Orleans would replace resentments focused on New York, but believe it or not, resentment against New York or hatred of New England haven't really been the constant and overwhelming factor in American politics that you think they have. Hatred of California certainly wasn't. Coastal contempt for "flyover country" also wasn't a constant factor. People were smart enough to recognize that a country needs both the city and the country to prosper. Don't think that what you see now was always the case. The country changed a lot in the last few decades.

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird: "Not everything is about slavery exclusively. Open your eyes."

Sure, there were other issues (i.e., tariffs), but none of those had the power of slavery to move otherwise patriotic Southerners to first declare secession and then war on the United States.
People have even studied what percentages of "Reasons for Secession" documents were slavery and what % other reasons.
It breaks down as follows:

Reasons for Secession by:	S. Carolina	Mississippi	Georgia	Texas	Rbt. Rhett	A. Stephens	AVERAGE OF 6
Historical context	41%	20%	23%	21%	20%	20%	24%
Slavery	20%	73%	56%	54%	35%	50%	48%
States' Rights	37%	3%	4%	15%	15%	10%	14%
Lincoln's election	2%	4%	4%	4%	5%	0%	3%
Economic issues**	0	0	15%	0%	25%	20%	10%
Military protection	0	0	0	6%	0%	0%	1%

** Economic issues include tariffs, "fishing smacks" and alleged favoritism to Northerners in Federal spending.

[BroJoeK]

x to DiogenesLamp: "People were smart enough to recognize that a country needs both the city and the country to prosper.
Don't think that what you see now was always the case.
The country changed a lot in the last few decades."

Maybe, but in fact, as far back in history as you care to go -- i.e., decades before 1860 -- our Democrat party has always been an alliance of wealthy globalist constitution-bending elites (i.e., 1850 slaveholders & merchants, 2020 big tech owners) and poor Big-City immigrants.
Our Whigs & Republicans have always been middle-class farmers, small business, small-town & suburbs, professionals & skilled workers, religious conservatives, patriotic, Constitution-defending.

What about "Solid-South" Democrats, you may ask?
Well, first of all, whenever slavery or race was "off the table" -- as it was in 1840 and again in 1848 -- the allegedly "Solid South" Democrats voted just as conservatively anti-Democrat as every other region.
Second, even in 1861 there were huge regions of every Southern state in which whites voted against secession and after the Civil War voted for Republicans -- they were far from "solid" Democrats.

Today the lock of globalist Democrat slaveholders on Southern voters is gone and most Southerners realize they have more in common with Northern middle-class in smaller towns & farms than with Big-City globalist elites & immigrants.
With slavery & race now "off the table", most Southerners vote anti-Democrat today just as they did in 1840 and 1848.

1848 Presidential election, blue=Democrats, brown=Whigs

[FLT-bird]

Yes, they did have the power. You are just wrong about that.

Slavery wasn’t even a significant issue until we’ll into the 19th century. All 13 colonies had slavery. The Northern colonies continued to engage in slave trading on a massive scale until the mid 19th century.

What motivated people then as now are pocketbook issues. Tariffs for example touched everybody’s wallet - not just the 5.73% who owned slaves.

Besides, New England and the South were bitterly divided in culture and worldview right from the start in the early 17th century.

[bert]

Anti Slavery politics migrated here from the UK

Massachusetts loyalists took up the abolitionist hue and cry coming from the UK and force fed the USA

[BroJoeK]

FLT-bird: "Yes, they did have the power.
You are just wrong about that."

When Andrew Jackson and John C. Calhoun passed the 1828 "Tariff of Abominations", it drove South Carolina to threaten secession, but no other state joined them and President Jackson famously threatened to hang any rebels he caught.
That was the end of that -- tariffs had no power to motivate the vast majority of Southerners to secede.
Indeed, Tennesseans like Jackson and Kentuckians like Henry Clay were more likely to favor higher protective tariffs, they were never going to secede over them.

In their "Reasons for Secession" documents, such economic issues as tariffs were not mentioned by South Carolina, Mississippi or Texas, and in Georgia got only 1/3 as much mention as slavery.
Nor did any state before the 1860 election threaten to secede if Congress passed the new Republican Morrill Tariff -- such matters were just "politics as usual" for most Americans.

Many Southerners did threaten to secede if Lincoln's "Black Republicans" won because of Lincoln's open & public hostility to slavery, period.

No issue besides slavery had the political power to motivate large numbers of otherwise patriotic Southerners to first declare secession from and then war against the United States.

That's a fact, FRiend.

FLT-bird: "Slavery wasn’t even a significant issue until we’ll into the 19th century.
All 13 colonies had slavery.
The Northern colonies continued to engage in slave trading on a massive scale until the mid 19th century."

Sorry, but you've got your centuries badly confused.
Here are the real facts:

1. In 1776 (18th century), before the Declaration of Independence was signed, slavery was enforced by British law in all 13 colonies.
   It was also supported by British international slave-traders and others in Southern colonies.
   All told they had imported about 300,000 slaves from Africa and the Caribbean by 1776.

2. Almost immediately after 1776 both Northern and Southern states began restricting imports of new slaves and some Northern states moved towards abolition.

3. By the early 1800s (19th century) the Federal government outlawed imports of slaves and abolished slavery in the Northwest Territories.
   Every Northern state had abolished slavery outright or begun gradual abolition.
   Southern leaders like Thomas Jefferson proposed plans for Federally compensated abolition.
   It was still generally agreed that slavery was a necessary evil which should be abolished eventually.

4. By the 1830s all that began to change -- Southern leaders now saw slavery as a positive good which must be defended against any and all restrictions.
   But Northerners still believed that gradual abolition was Founders' Original Intent, and looked for ways to restrict and places to abolish it.

Well before 1850 many understood that American prosperity was based largely on cotton and cotton depended entirely on slavery.
Many Southerners wanted to see slavery legalized & expanded wherever possible, most Northerners did not.

As one politician of the time put it, years later:

"One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it.
These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest.
All knew that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war.
To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it....

...Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.
And the war came."

FLT-bird: "Besides, New England and the South were bitterly divided in culture and worldview right from the start in the early 17th century."

In 1776 North & South were united by far more than what divided them.
That continued to be true until the election of the first openly anti-slavery President in 1860.

[BroJoeK]

bert: "Massachusetts loyalists took up the abolitionist hue and cry coming from the UK and force fed the USA."

The Brits abolished slavery in 1833.

Northern United States began abolishing slavery in 1777 (Vermont), Pennsylvania in 1780, Massachusetts & New Hampshire in 1783.

[FLT-bird]

The northern states abolished it very slowly and made sure to give their residents ample time to sell off their property out of state so they would take no financial loss.

Not everything is about slavery. Open your mind.

[jmacusa]

So what you're saying to Bro Joe K is you're throwing in the towel. Yo “Causers’’ are masters at projection and prevarication. Maintaining an economic system based on the use use slave labor was the core belief of what drove the South to secede. No amount of intellectual acrobatics, fulminations and throwing ad hominems at me, the guy you Rebs love to hate here is going to change that. So many of you Lost Causers refuse into acknowledge the truth the South chose it's own path to ruin but objectivity is not the forte of average Lost Causer. I've asked here a.number of times a question that really brings out the daggers from you Rebs: If the South HAD won the war, would slavery been abolished? Without your usually dismissive jibes and sneering ad hominems can you ansewr. that question?

[FLT-bird]

Tariff of Abominations was done away with. That’s what ended the nullification crisis. Over the next generation other Southern states came to agree with South Carolina’s position about how economically devastating to their economy high tariffs were.

Reason for secession documents and attachments went on at great length about tariffs. They also went on about federal corporate subsidies. They also went on about federal usurpation of powers never delegated to the federal government.

Sorry but you’ve got your centuries confused. The settlement in Jamestown was entirely different from that in Plymouth. Different people and different purpose. The differences between the two regions started there in the 1620s. Slavery was not one of those differences. They both had it.

In 1776 there were large differences between New England and the Southern colonies. Even then the Southern colonies had an export based economy. New England had a fishing and shipping based economy. New England wanted more centralized power. The South did not.

[suthener]

Once again, and we’ve been through this before, I never commented about anything related to your long and tired post. This started when I stated ridiculous statements I’ve read on Freerepublic about people from the south and two people called me a liar. That’s it. There was no discussion about the War Between the States or the politics thereof. What is wrong with you? You have a serious problem.

[suthener]

After reading back through the comments I see what’s going on. Both of you wanted to get into an argument about the War Between the States. I guess that was Bro Joe K’s reason for calling me a liar. Basically, you’re both nuts. You have some weird compulsion to argue something that happed 150 years ago. I’ve been through this with jmausa before where he wanted to argue about TWBTS when it wasn’t even the subject of the conversation, just like he is now. There are obviously several people on FR who will have that useless discussion with you. I ain’t one of them.