Gurdur

I would be interested if you would still say this if say a "militia" decided on a take-over of one state and succession from the Union in the modern day.

After all, the militia movement does exist, so it's not all that inconceivable.

Gurdur

uh. Why ?

Would you prefer a more global base of 6 or 3 ?

GH

If this is a minority group - as in minority opinion - and they take over a state and declare it independent, I don't think I would like that very much. If a large proportion of that state's citizens decided to break away freely (following some militia or anyone else), it might not be so bad.

It all comes down to the circumstances. I'd have to look at why they left. There could be legitimate concerns involved.

I guess my statement was too general, so I apologize for that. Maybe I should have said I don't see how a citizen of the U.S. could have a problem with rebels in general, seeing that the country was created by rebellion.

By the way, I'm not a fan of the Confederacy, just in case I was giving that impression. And I'm pretty much sick of the flag stuff. I just think it sounds weird for a citizen of a nation built by traitors and rebels - whose currency dipicts traitors and rebels, which has monuments built in honor of traitors and rebels and cities named after traitors and rebels - to speak so poorly about those who glamourize traitors and rebels (albeit not the same traitors and rebels, in this case).

THE_LEGENDARY_HQB

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LOLSDOMA!

Ah Rufus, don't you mean dagblasted carpet baggin' highfalutin' yankee?

Wow, until I joined this board, I never would have even considered the possibility that in this day and age, someone would use the word "Yankee" as an insult.

Rufus, you've been watching too many Yosemite Sam cartoons!

Lades,
HQB

paul30

When I was growing up in Georgia, I was often galled by my classmates who regarded the Civil War as still undecided.

They were not closet racists but out-and-out racists.

And the Civil War was primarily a war over slavery, although the technical trigger was secession.

Now that I am old and creaky I have two new thoughts about it.

Number one: if the United States had been wise, it would have settled the slavery question peacefully and cleanly, the way Great Britain did, by simply outlawing slavery and BUYING all the slaves and freeing them. That way the US would not have had the worst war ever on its soil, and a legacy of recrimination that has lasted almost a century and a half.

Number two: it would probably have been a good thing for world history if the US had been broken into smaller pieces. Then we might now have the US acting as such an imperial bully today. (To be fair, the imperial tendency goes way back in US history, at least back as far as the Mexican War and the Spanish American War--both simple wars for land.)

Optional

Wouldn't have worked. The south was not hanging onto slavery just because it was Pure Evil and they liked Evil... The problem was that pretty much the entire economy and way of life in the south had been built on slavery back when it was still held to be a perfectly valid practice by nearly everybody. They lierally could not give up slavery without WAY more pain and hardship than anybody was willing to accept.

In order for the south to have transitioned cleanly from a slave economy to a non-slave economy, it would have needed MASSIVE aid from the north... Which was not even on the horizon. This is why there are still economic reverberations going on in parts of the south a century and a half later. A ruinous war followed by a punitive period ironically called 'Reconstruction' pretty much guaranteed that the transisition would be as painful as historically possible.

Nah. Read the works of Harry Turtledove to find out why. The first half of the 20th century would have been even more horriffic than it actually was.

-me

Majestyk

Usage of the term "yankee", by "southerners", is pretty common, in my experience.

Fjordaniv

I believe that it was Terry Eagleton who once said "Ideology is like halitosis: it's always something the other person has." If we "Yankees" receive a "distorted" view of the antebellum, would it not also stand to reason that Southerners also suffer from the same potential for historical fabrication?

The central issue regarding the Confederate battle flag is, of course, it's direct connection to a slaveholding society. Many historians view this debate as a sign of the South's cultural victory after the Civil War. The premise of this argument is that while the south lost the military struggle, the decades following the war saw a resurgence of a pro-south mythology in American popular culture. Examples of this include a series of virtually proslavery historical tracts published in the 1920s, DW Griffith's flagrently racist film "Birth of a Nation," Selznic's "Gone With the Wind," and similar films and texts throughout the 20th Century.

Recently, Neoconfederate authors have attempted to advance the "noble South" myth by obscuring the links between Confederate ideology and slavery. They frequently attempt to do this by focusing on the "common," non slaveholding southern foot soldier, and by distorting the true number of slaveowning families (neo Confederate sources give figures ranging from 5 to 10%). For a discussion of Contemporary neo Confederate historical distortion, please view the following: http://www.splcenter.org/cgi-bin/gof...e=sitemap.html (type in slavery, or "White Lies").

What's remarkable about the state's rights argument is that it is so specious and dishonest, particularly given the vast number of primary sources directly linking slavery to secession. As others have noted, proslavery southerners had few problems with governmental authority and a strong government WHEN IT CAME TO DEFENDING THE INSTITUTION OF SLAVERY. George Fitzhugh, the most famous apologist for southern social institutions, went so far as to advocate the need for a powerful government to rule over the people and maintain a "natural" social order (proslavery ideologues viewed slavery as one of the pillars of southern society, along with patriarchy and religion. any assault on one was seen as an attack on the entire system).

Specifically, when neo Confederates gripe about "political correctness," they seem loathe to admit that in the 1830s, the Federal government censored abolitionist tracts by restricting the dissemination of antislavery tracts through the postal system. They also ignore the brutal Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, which forced northerners to become erstwhile slave catchers. Indeed, Southerners had little trouble imposing their will on others.

One of the most damning documents is the "South Carolina Declaration of Causes of Secession," where slavery is conspicuously listed as the primary reason for secession. Ironically, states rights did lead to South Carolina's secession (and the subsequent secession of other slaveholding states). The problem is that the states invoking the right to dismiss federal authority were all in the north: "The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the acts of Congress, or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these states the fugitive is discharged from the service of labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution" (304).

The authors also emphatically state the following: "Those [nonslaveholding] States have assumed the right of deciding the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of Slavery; they have permitted the open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturbe the peace of and eloin the property of citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books, and pictures, to servile insurrection" (305).

Larry E. Tise, who wrote the authoritative Proslavery: A History of the Defense of Slavery in America, 1701-1840, writes that southerners generally had few problems with the ideal of a centraized government until the 1830s-40s, when a more conservative southern caste gained an ever increasing influence in southern government, largely due to the resurgence of slavery as an economic institution. Previously, southern thinkers recognized the double standard in the doctrines of "equality for all" and slavery.

As a side note, the "common man" argument is inherently flawed. While most Confederate soldiers did not own slaves, many actively colluded in the system, and most saw slavery as a just and natural system. Given the evidence to the contrary, it is peculiar that so many still maintain that slavery was little more than an ancillary cause for southern secession.

Fred

The text of the "Causes of Secession" can be found in Eyewitness History of the Civil War, edited by Joe Kirchberger.

Gurdur

I don't think I agree with you here --- while you could have also adduced The Man In The High Castle by Phillip K. Dick on the side of your argument, a different alternate history would be The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, which paints a very different picture.

There's also a book by Harry Harrison along the same lines; A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah !, but it's rather lightweight compared to Gibson's and Sterling's work.

Optional

Hmm... I've not read the books you mentioned, as I don't particularly like Gibson (cyber-punk. literary abomination. similes.) and I find Harrison a little TOO light weight (I believe Stanless Steel Rat was his, as well as Bill the Galactic Hero?) (As for the Dick, mea culpa mea culpa mea maxima culpa... I'll have to find that and read it) But I find Turdledove's extrapolations to be persuasive. If the south had managed to win the war (most likely by winning enough battles to be officially recognized by France & England) there would have definitely been a LOT of bad blood on both sides of the line. In the entanglement of alliances that marked the latter half of the 19th century, both USA and CSA would have been looking for any advantage, and would almost certainly have wound up on differing sides of the Grand Alliances. Thus, when WWI broke out in 1914, the CSA and USA would have come in direct conflict immediately, with european style trench warfare occurring in the east and more fluid cavalry based raid style warfare in the west... As such, come 1917, there would be no infusion of fresh, high-morale troops on EITHER side, and the war would have ground on to most likely a bloodier and more inconclusive end... Setting the stage for WWII, of course, pitting the USA and CSA against each other once again, denying europe the use of america's massive industrial base...

Where do you think that scenario is least likely to be accurate?

-me