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 ...
Ya didn't win, did ya. heh heh
Great little fillibuster that Mary Landreiu, isn't she? Thanks Dixie!
What is it with you Yankees, does being uptight and arrogant come naturally to you? Or do you have to practice at it?
Confronted for the first time with the idea of secession many Americans rejected it as impractical, impossible or unconstitutional. That doesn't necessarily mean that they regarded the union as unbreakable, but they did reject unilateral secession by states.
There's more here in an article on how the secession crisis of 1850 produced greater devotion to the Union among many Southerners. That committment didn't last. Ten years later, secessionist arguments prevailed in the South, but the article does indicate how much gets left out of neo-confederate readings of history.
It's simply not true that before Lincoln came along the union was generally regarded as a "voluntary union of sovereign states" from which any state could leave any time it wished. When the issue came up, there was much disagreement about secession, as Jackson's and Madison's comments on the South Carolina crisis of the 1830s indicate.
Actually the theme of Gone With The Wind was how Scarlett O'Hara changed and triiumphed in the new post-war society. The people who continued to live in the past of the antebellum South and were unable to adjust, such as Ashley Wilkes, were looked on with scorn.
Supremisists or seperatists? There is a reason they are spelled differently. They don't mean the same thing.
"Fearing that they could no longer control the US government"
Control the government?!! I thought Lincoln was from Illinois. Correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks.
If slavery hadn't been available, what excuse would you have used to move this country to socialism?
I guess it's a moot point, as slavery was available. A noble victory. Being from the defeated South, I cannot share in your pride(especially that Bill Clinton part). Congratulations.
The South did not seek a war with you. They did not seek to rule the North, hence; is was not a "Civil War". The South merely wanted to be left alone(despite your urgent desire to rewrite).
The innocents, wealth, and freedoms you "lost" were of your own choosing, and creation.....then as well as those we continue to lose today.
If we so disgust & shame you, why demand that we stay together? Do you not feel "United" with me?
Why did the North introduce slavery to the South?
If the war was about slavery, why did the North maintain their slaves after those in the South were free? The war was about slavery...right?
Why continue the deceptive labels, such as "Civil War" & "United States"?
Please continue to ignore any questions that you feel uncomfortable with.
First, make it clear that he was talking about the Articles, not the Constitution.
Second, tell us how the southern states "safety and happiness" were in any way being threatened by the Constitution and Union as all of the states were threatened by the weakness of the Articles.
You likening of the secession of 1860-61 with the events leading to the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 are such a stretch of logic that they are laughable. You turn Madison on his head to back up your silly revisionist notions and fictions of the noble Confederates fighting big government.
BTW. You still have not told us what Northern states had slavery in 1860.
Fascinating. (why dodge the question?)
Was the "Civil War" about slavery, or was secession about slavery?
If the war was about slavery, why did the North continue to enslave their fellow man after those in the South were free?
The North had slaves before the South, and maintained them after. From where do you pretend to get the moral authority to criticise?
Canada freed their slaves before any of the "United States". Are the Canadians morally superior to the North?(after all they are more socialist)
Hogwash.
The North salivatingly embraced slavery; and introduced it to the South. The slave industry(of the US) got its start, and built it roots in a welcoming North.
Matching their anxious business desires with capital, the North enjoyed a growing & properous slave trade. The return on Northern investment was substantial, and appreciated.
"Not every slave state chose to secede"
True. Those founders of slavery north of the Mason-Dixon threatened to beat up any that would not stay, and be their friend.
But....we like you now.
Now that's an interesting implication for a former slave owner like Grant.
That is when it passed Senate approval. It had already passed the House nearly a year earlier in May 1860. A few weeks earlier Lincoln, who had campaigned on a protectionist plank, had pledged to make the new tariff a top legislative priority in the next session if it was not passed by his inauguration. The bill also had the backing of the outgoing president, himself a protectionist from Pennsylvania. In December 1860, the only thing the Morrill bill had not recieved support of was the senate. Rather than being able to block the bill in the senate, documents at the time indicate that the southern senators knew it was inevitable.
Only the walkout of all those Democrats from the Confederate states made its passage possible.
That is simply not so. The following calculations of the south's inability to block northern legislation were listed by Senator Wigfall of Texas on December 12, 1860 before any state had seceded:
"WIGFALL: Tell me not that we have got the legislative department of this Government, for I say we have not. As to this body, where do we stand? Why, sir, there are now eighteen non-slaveholding States. In a few weeks we shall have the nineteenth, for Kansas will be brought in. Then arithmetic which settles our position is simple and easy. Thirty-eight northern Senators you will have upon this floor. We shall have thirty to your thirty-eight. After the 4th of March, the Senator from California, the Senator from Indiana, the Senator from New Jersey, and the Senator from Minnesota will be here. That reduces the northern phalanx to thirty-four.
BINGHAM: Douglas.
WIGFALL? What?
BINGHAM: Douglas.
WIGFALL: Non tali auxilio nec defensoribus istis, tempus eget. There are four of the northern Senators upon whom we can rely, whom we know to be friends, whom we have trusted in our days of trial heretofore, and in whom, as Constitution-loving men, we will trust. Then we stand thirty-four to thirty-four, and your Black Republican Vice President to give the casting vote. Mr. Lincoln can make his own nominations with perfect security that they will be confirmed by this body, even if every slaveholding State should remain in the Union, which, thank God, they will not do." - Congressional Globe, 36-2 p. 74
Wigfall's sentiments on the northern ability to control the senate are evident throughout the session among the southern delegation, including before any state seceded. They were also expressed when the Morrill bill came up for debate in early February at a time when several of the states were in the process of seceding. Here is what Senator Hunter of Virgina had to say on that matter:
"Mr. President, it is very disagreeable to speak, as I do on this occasion, with a consciousness of my utter inability to prevent the passage of this bill. I have no doubt that the adoption of this measure is a foregone conclusion. I believe it has been generally understood that the adhesion of the State of Pennsylvania to the Republican party was upon the condition of the passage of this Morrill-tariff bill; and I suppose an obligation that has been incurred at such a price must be carried out. Still, I owe it, perhaps, to those whose opinions I represented on this committee, and to my constituents, to expose, if I can, the shallow pretexts on which it is sought to adopt this measure, and strip it of those disguises in the shape of specific duties, under which its enormous taxation is hidden."
He spoke at length about the wrongs inflicted by the tariff - 7 pages in the congressional record, not once mentioning slavery - and concluded with the following:
But pass this bill, and you send a blight over that land [of Virginia]; the tide of emigration will commence - I fear to flow outward - once more, and we shall begin to decline and retrograde instead of advancing, as I had fondly hoped we should do. And what I say of my own State I may justly say of the other southern States. But, sir, I do not press that view of the subject. I know that here [in Congress] we are too weak to resist or to defend ourselves; those who sympathize with our wrongs are too weak to help us; those who are strong enough to help us do not sympathize with our wrongs, or whatever we may suffer under it. No, sir this bill will pass. And let it pass into the statute-book; let it pass into history, that we may know how it is that the South has been dealt with when New England and Pennsylvania held the power to deal with her interests." - Congressional Globe, 36-2, p 898-905
As for tariffs or anything other than slavery being a reason for secession, it is all revisionist nonsense.
If that is so, then why are tariffs so frequently mentioned as a grievance in secession era speeches, newspaper articles, pamphlets, and writings?
Each of the eleven Confederate states published declarations of secession. Every word of every one of them is about slavery and the need to keep blacks people down.
That too is simply not so. Only four states published declarations reflecting anything of the sort and those four documents, though heavily dominated by slavery, do NOT devote every word to it. Georgia's, for example, discusses the tariff issue across several paragraphs. Beyond those four declarations, none of the other secession convention measures even mentions slavery as a cause. That includes 11 secession ordinances, 2 ordinances from rump conventions in Missouri and Kentucky, and a territorial ordinance in Arizona. The Cherokee nation also issued a secession declaration after the war began, and it mentioned slavery only briefly in a long list of grievances, most of which involved violations of constitutional rights and liberties by the northern government.
By that same reasoning, inland states such as Iowa, Vermont, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee must have NEVER paid ANY taxes at all because they didn't have a seaport to collect them. Surely that is not what you are suggesting, is it?
Suzie Terrell won the state excluding New Orleans parish. Her volunteers were all from Louisiana or neighboring southern states. By contrast, Mary Landrieu's party bussed in a bunch of womens studies lesbo types from colleges in the northeast to campaign for their candidate. Every one of them thought they were on a freedom ride to liberate the south from the eevvviilll Republicans. Adding to that, the DNC brought in the professional race hustlers from the northeast and the left coast to stir up black voters for Landrieu.
When election day came around New Orleans parish, which is entirely composed of black democrats and liberals, voted in near unanimaty for Landrieu and threw the election to her. Contrary to your fibbing, Dixie (which, BTW, unseated Max Cleland in GA and won all three open seats in SC, NC, and TX) had nothing to do with it.
No, what I'm suggesting is that if the lion's share of imports were destined for southern southern consumers then those goods would have entered through southern ports. The fact that 19 out of every 20 dollars in imports came to the North indicates that demand down south for those goods was virtually non-existent.
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