I agree. I get sick of seeing the "I'm a victim" mentality from a variety of sources.
One thing I do dispise is the notion that if you have a Southern accent, than you must be an ignorant redneck that has married your cousin, has a 4x4 truck with a gun rack and lives in a trailer park. I'm assuming this sterotype has been reinforced by the entertainment industry.
FWIW, I'm an Iowa native, lived in Georgia for 20 years and I am temporarily in California. Talk about culture shocks!!
I live in south carolina, in one of the most backwoods areas of the state and i'll be glad to offer up that this stereotype is not as unrealistic as it first sounds. Of the less than 2,000 people who live in the town i'm from; Whitmire, sc a good chunk of the population fits into this stereotype with almost scary parallel.
The good Southern states were willing to have a slave be considered 3/5 of a person for purposes of determining representation in Congress (they wanted a full 1:1 ratio), but they weren't willing to make them citizens.
the only reason for the south counting the slaves was to have a higher population and gain a larger number of representatives in the legislature. If the southern states could have gotten the number of legislators they wanted, the slave population would not have been counted at all. In reading diaries of Plantation owners (slave holders), you relize that the owners honestly viewed the slaves as property and not as people. this view was easier to maintain in the first and second generation slaves because they had little to no ability to speak english which helped to de-humanize them from the position of the owners. When you read primary documents from the period right before the civil war, you begin to see that some owners had started to see the slaves as actual people, though on a lower level than themselves.
As far as the argument of the civil war and its reasons, slavery was a major one, but not the only one. I am a student at the University of South Carolina at Columbia and I happen to be a history major with a concentration on the period of and after the civil war and my senior thesis has a great deal to do with William Henry Gist, the seccessionist governor of South Carolina.
many of the statements made in this thread have been 100% correct but you can't say that the south secceeded from the union simply because of slavery. Another Major reason was the movement for States Rights during the time and the always present feeling of too much governmental control at the federal level.
An important fact to remember when weighing the secession in light of lincoln's election to the presedency is the number of electoral college votes he got from the secessionist states, zero. The leaders of the south felt this solidified their feelings of not being a member of the union anymore and having their opinions ignored. Before the Presedential election, Governor Gist had already sent letters to other southern states explaining South Carolina's problems with the union and explained that if Lincoln was elected south carolina would be secceeding from the union. The Governor felt so strongly about the differences that he had a member of his own family, States Rights Gist, deliver four of the letters personally.
Even the name helps give a glimpse of the tensions that had been building between the southern states and the federal government for quite some time. There were strong enough feelings of the importance of the state having control that a member of the family was named States Rights Gist and had enough time to mature and become a man before the war broke out, so the war was a long time coming and not some half-cocked idea that was cooked up one night over a glass of brandy.
I take it you don't know that most "Jim Crow" laws were enacted during the officially US government terrorism called Reconstruction, and not by southerners who were prohibited from voting during this time. Turning a discussion of the War of Agression against the Confederacy into a modern discussion of racism is a typical obfuscation ploy. It doesn't work.
Actually, most of the Jim crow laws were enacted after Reconstruction ended. During reconstruction, the secessionist states did not have control of their governments as the federal government made all the decisions. during the period of reconstruction many schools were desegregated and some african americans held lower level office. Once the period of reconstruction came to an end, the whites of the secessionist states took power once again. Once the federal government said that slavery was no longer legal, the plantation owners switched to a de-facto form of slavery. The former slaves still had their freedom, but it was only a verbal freedom. The plantation owners hired the former slaves to work for them, and in many cases paid them not in cash, but in vouchers that could only be redeemed at the plantation store for goods which were way over priced. This system of de-facto slavery went on and then the jim crow laws and segregation were introduced slowly untill society in the south was as segregated as it could be made. It was during this period after reconstruction that racism toward african americans was strengthened and became in-grained in the minds of the southern population.
okay, i'm finished and i'll shut up now but i want to say that the argument over confederate history is not a simple case of racist vs not racist that many people think it was. There is much history involved that both sides are not familar with and yet both sides claim to know everything. As far as some of the research i've done, i've spent many hundereds of countless hours in the state archives and the south caroliniana library which is another archive for the state of south carolina. If you want to know more about something, don't take the word of any author you read, go to your local archives and research the primary documents you can find on a subject and you'll find way more than you ever expected to find and probably dig up things that will totally change your ideas on a matter if you read the first hand account rather than what some biased historian told you in a book that he wrote for money. The South is rich in history and one cannot begin to know all of it even in a lifetime of learning but even knowing just a little is worth the work.
Now i'm gonna quit typing and go to class.
feel free to roast me if you like, its too cold here anyway
