Posted on 02/17/2003 10:41:15 AM PST by stainlessbanner
Director says 'Gods' has Southern slant, but 'full humanity'
The North may have won the Civil War, but in Hollywood, the South reigns triumphant.
That was certainly true in 1915, when D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation portrayed the conflict as a war of Northern aggression where order was restored only by the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan. It was true in 1939, when Gone With the Wind looked back on the antebellum South as an unrivalled period of grace and beauty never to be seen again. It was true when Clint Eastwood played The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), a Confederate war veteran who has run afoul of Northern "justice."
(Excerpt) Read more at sunspot.net ...
An early-20th Century political compromise, between the "War of the Rebellion" (the official name used by the victorious north) and "The War Between the States" (which Southerners were lobbying for).
But that is utter nonsense. The confederates didn't buy many finished goods to begin with from anyone, much less Europe. The minute amount of imports entering through southern ports is proof of that. And if the confederate states paid a disproportionate amount of the tariff income then it was a disproportionately small amount. About 95% of the tariff was collected in only three Northern ports.
Don't worry. There's a lot of people who say anywhere north of I-10 is "yankee territory". That would include TXBubba's location. And besides, no one knows where people in Austin are really from. LOL
In the 19th century context, Southern economic policies based on export of raw materials to British manufacturers were regarded by many as consigning America to a weak and subservient position with respect to the British empire. Looking at what happened to the Caribbean islands after the sugar boom went bust gives a clue as to how such policies would have served America. Things looked differently in the Deep South, but historically dependence on cotton proved to be very harmful for the South, once other countries got involved in cotton growing. Many a free-marketeer today would have supported Lincoln in furthering commerce and industry and overcoming neo-colonial agrarian, slave-based economics. I'm not saying that a high tariff policy would have been right, but one has to see it in the context of the options available at the times, and not just in a modern-day academic context.
A lot of exaggerated rhetoric surrounds the Morrill tariff. Everyone knew tariffs would be revised upwards. Even Buchanan supported tariff revision. That tariffs were increased so much later on was largely the result of the war. I would sympathize with Southern opposition to the tariff increase, but it wasn't at the top of their agenda. Had blocking it been so very important as you say, it would not have gone through. But Deep South militants split the party over slavery-related questions and spent time agitating for secession rather than organizing to block legislation. In the Upper South, tariffs were probably less important than the emotional pull of "Southerness" in sparking secession, and arguably less important than slavery.
Saying that Lincoln threatened to use force to enforce the Morrill tariff gives the wrong impression. He wanted to keep the federal machinery functioning throughout the country, and the primary ways that the federal governments touched the lives of people were the mails, forts, the courts, and the tariff. His words bear out that his purpose was simply to keep the machinery of government in operation and maintain the impression that the country had not been divided: "In doing this there needs to be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none unless it be forced upon the national authority. The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the Government and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion, no using of force against or among the people anywhere."
I do not know what you mean by "the use of the Dred Scott decision to allow the partial counting of slaves for purposes of Congressional Representation," since this partial counting was already in place in the Constitution. The question of who paid how much in tariffs has been much discussed. I don't think what's at issue is how much was paid in, but rather the fact that, not having developed industries, the slave states didn't get as much back from protection as the free states did. Also, you left out efforts by Deep Southerners to acquire more slave territories in the Caribbean and to get the slave trade reopened in the 1850s. Adding them in to your list of reasons for conflict changes the picture somewhat.
It's clear that more was involved than slavery, but if you are looking both for short-term immediate reasons for the conflict and for longer-term explanations of why the nation looked ready to divide into two sections in 1860 slavery goes much further than other reasons. Middle Western agrarians made common cause with Eastern industrialists and merchants because the expansion of slavery outweighed agrarian or tariff questions.
Your assumption that with emancipation, whites would naturally hire other whites over the freedmen, is not borne out by the survey which the chief Actuary for the Prudential Insurance Company conducted on the subject in 1895. He found much the attitude to which Booker T. Washington appealed in the same era--that there was if anything a sentimental bond between the more affluent whites and their ex slaves, and that the poor whites were seen as much more difficult to get along with--less desirable as employees.
You may not want to admit that it was the egalitarian rant of the Reconstruction demagogues, which undermined Negro society; but we have seen exactly the same process repeated with respect to the egalitarian rant of the "Civil Rights" movement. Just look at what has happened to crime and illegitimacy statistics, contemporaneous with the imagined "gains" from what was and is, inherently, a Socialist movement.
You cannot destroy the cultural images of a people and substitute leftwing fantasies without taking a terrible toll. (I must sound like a broken record, but we address the images of the old South--the images on which people could have built a better life for both races in the 20th Century--in The Persuasive Use Of Images.)
William Flax
Heh heh. The south started the war before Lincoln was even able to warm the president's chair. Here's the chronology of treason:
November 6, 1860: Lincoln defeats Douglas, Breckinridge, and Bell for the Presidency.
December 20, 1860: South Carolina convention passes ordinance of seccession.
January 3, 1861: Georgia seizes Fort Pulaski.
January 4, 1861: Alabama seizes U.S. arsenal at Mount Vernon.
January 5, 1861: Alabama seizes Forts Morgan and Gaines.
January 6, 1861: Florida seizes Apalachicola arsenal.
January 7, 1861: Florida seizes Fort Marion.
January 8, 1861: Floridians try to seize Fort Barrancas but are chased off.
January 9, 1861: Mississippi secedes. Star of the West fired on in Charleston Harbor
January 10, 1861: Florida secedes. Louisiana seizes U.S. arsenal at Baton Rouge, as well as Forts Jackson and St. Philip.
January 11, 1861: Alabama secedes. Louisiana seizes U.S. Marine Hospital.
January 14, 1861: Louisiana seizes Fort Pike.
January 19, 1861: Georgia secedes.
January 26, 1861: Louisiana secedes.
February 1, 1861: Texas secedes.
February 8, 1861: Provisional Constitution of the Confederacy adopted in Montgomery, AL. Arkansas seizes U.S. Arsenal at Little Rock.
February 12, 1861: Arkansas seizes U.S. ordnance stores at Napoleon.
February 18, 1861: Jefferson Davis inaugurated as President of the Confederacy.
March 4, 1861: Abraham Lincoln inaugurated as 16th President of the United States.
April 12, 1861: Fort Sumter fired upon by Confederates.
Once the states seceeded, the Constitution is irrelevant.
Lincoln could either see the states as violating their Constitutionional obligations -- thus being illegitimate governments deserving of being crushed, or Lincoln could have viewed the break-aways as foreign powers hostile to the remaining unions states (as the secessionist states proved by seizing federal forts and attacking Fort Sumter.)
So either way, illegitimate state governments or foreign hostile powers attacking US interests -- Lincoln and the US congress had full legal and moral rights to defend US interests.
And if that was how he was elected, isn't it clear that the claim that he held that as President, that he didn't have authority to abolish of prohibit slavery in the south (short of actions precipitated by a civil war), whatever his personal feelings on the matter, a clear indication that the south was the initiator rather than the north?
Why is the issue constantly framed by his limited emancipation proclamation that was given grudgingly late in the game after he stepped away from such actions numerous times in the prior three years?
But the racial fears that you refered to led Whites to bar Blacks from the franchise. Once that was done, rich Whites had to give work to poor Whites to keep up their own power in the community, however much they might have esteemed Blacks as workers. White fears of race-mixing and of being outnumbered by Blacks were in evidence even under slavery, well before Reconstruction, so it's not clear how much radical Reconstruction had to do with later race-relations. Radical Reconstruction could be pointed to as a justification, but all the reasons for segregation and the consequent decline of Black craftsmen were already in evidence before.
That would have made it more like the first, than the last link. And it's a backwards way of looking at history. Rather than the tariff making the war, it looks like the war made the tariff. Certainly the fifty years of Republican dominance and high tariffs were the product of the war, and of the conflict over slavery that preceded it. It was secession and war that turned a minor revision of the tariff into something much more drastic and long-lived.
Lincoln's threat to use force had a more subtle objective: by threatening to use force Lincoln repudiated 100 years of Constitutional scholarship about a sovereign State's right of secession. Lincoln's message to South Carolina and other secession-leaning states was clear: we do not recognize your right to secede and we will restrain you by force from doing so. All of the Founding Fathers would have found Lincoln's novel legal doctrine of the Union "creating" the sovereign states to be outrageous and tyrannical
Most Americans probably had not considered the question of secession prior to 1860 and among those who did there was much disagreement. If you listen to latter day Confederates they will tell you that unilateral secession was universally assumed to be valid, but that's far from the truth. Many disputed such an idea. And even those who did accept it didn't presume that whatever the seceders did would be right. The idea of the union creating states was hardly "outrageous and tyrannical." The federal government played an important role in acquiring and settling territory and would-be states had to petition the federal government for admission.
Lincoln was not the great emancipator, he was the great centralizer.
I would say that he was the great emancipator and the great preserver. Of course it was the 13th Amendment, passed after Lincoln's death and ratified in part as a tribute to him that finally freed the slaves. But if one must attach a name to emancipation, who would be more appropriate? True political centralization would come later with the progressives and the New Deal. Railroads and corporations also promoted a national market. A Confederate victory would have been a setback for centralization in the form that we've experienced it (though Davis had shown centralizing tendencies of his own), but Lincoln is more in continuity with Washington, Madison, Jackson and others, than a new departure. He shared with the Founders a knowledge of the dangers disunion could bring. Nationalism didn't begin with Lincoln, nor did the welfare state.
If you will remember Berringer played Longstreet in "Gettysbug", stuck behind that awful beard. I can't imagine him with another beard as Grant. I can see Gene Hackman as Grant, though.
What was the vote on secession at the Hartford Convention?
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