After the failure of his first experimental explorations around Vicksburg, a committee of abolition war managers waited upon the President and demanded the General’s [Grant] removal, on the false charge that he was a whiskey drinker, and little better than a common drunkard. “Ah!” exclaimed Honest Old Abe, “you surprise me, gentlemen. But can you tell me where he gets his whiskey?” “We cannot, Mr. President. But why do you desire to know?” “Because, if I can only find out, I will send a barrel of this wonderful whiskey to every general in the army.”
I’d lay that at the feet of the MSM. It’s gone to hell in a handbasket since the days of Ed Murrow and a host of print journalists. I think Molly Ivins was about the last practitioner of no false equivalence journalism.
What are you talking about? I’m trolling because I think the south should have been crushed after the war, that’s pretty standard practice when you win. You can disagree with me, but don’t be an idiot about it.
I think your statistics do an excellent job of proving that there actually used to be some reasonable Republican members of Congress, back before the Southern Democrats switched to the Republican party and used racial divisions to gain power and influence. The passing of the Civil Rights Act was a watershed moment in more ways than one.
Yes, back when there were New England Republicans, and even conservatives like Ev Dirksen, that party was the leader in civil rights, as it had been since 1856. The problem with the POS is he won’t admit that since 1964 his party has become the home for most racists, and the decent folk have fled the party. Would any sane person imagine George Aiken touching that party with a ten foot pole today?
Why should the North wait for the South to take baby steps on overt racism when there’s plenty of it in the North? Yes, of course mutli-tasking on a massive scale is needed. My point is that focusing on the rebel flag and the antebellum South. isn’t going to get us there because it narrows the immensity of the problem.
The first time I watched GWTW as an adult I was horrified at the distortions and fictions. One of my daughters was assigned this in school. I asked her to watch Glory as well to try and counterbalance, but there has never been an effective mass market counterbalance to the gauzy narrative as to the causes of the war and the failure of reconstruction.
Conservatives are obsessed with proving Democrats are the real racists because they founded the KKK.
Conservatives fought a war to maintain slavery. The sanctity of property rights, even when that property consisted of slaves, is a bedrock conservative principal even to this day. How many times have you heard a conservative trot out the “property argument” while opposing a tax increase? And by the way, Lincoln was a Liberal. He created the Federal income tax, the greenback dollar and believed in “internal improvements” like the transcontinental railroad.
Conservatives created Jim Crow, a system designed to disenfranchise black voters (sound familiar?), in order to maintain power under the rubric of “state’s rights.”
Slavery and race relations are part of the very fabric of this country from inception to the present. The abolitionist movement was born out of the first labor movement, the Lowell Mill Girls and the relationship of capitol v labor. Race made Reaganism possible.
It’s true the Democratic party has a racist history because conservatives began to bolt the party in 1948, but the Republican party has a racist present. Progress has always been made by liberals pulling conservatives forward kicking and screaming.
Let’s begin at the actual beginning of the modern situation. The South did not lose the struggle to maintain its social and economic system. It was not a “narrative” that it managed to build and preserve, but a way of life.
This way of life included a hierarchical, inert social system with essentially full subordination of the African American population, along with continued dependence on their cheap labor. On top of that, the South’s wildly disproportionate influence on the federal government went on as before, after a brief hiatus, and may even be still growing, especially given the extension of its mentality into states like Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and so on.
Enough with the military sentimentality and the high-toned “narrative” talk.
I love Tony Horwitz and Confederates in the Attic. The friend who recommended it to me emphasized the humor, but when I finished it I was angry as hell at the way our history has been hijacked and modern racists turned into martyrs by the neo-Lost Causers.
It does not matter what flowery speeches Confederate politicians made; human nature does not change that much over so short a period of time, and there is no way that over 1 million Southern boys (virtually the entire military age male population) fought, and half a million died, for slavery.
They had no economic interest in slavery and, in fact, their economic interests suffered from its existence. The ruling class convinced them, through fear and cajoling, that no matter how dirt poor they were, they were superior to blacks, and that without slavery their lives would be even more horrific.
Like all soldiers through history, they suffered and died for what they considered a noble cause. They were terribly, terribly wrong. The mid-twentieth century symbolism of the battle flag as an emblem of segregation is a comfortable, armchair stance completely divorced of the passions that are required to get that many people to march off to war, let alone continue a 4 year slog through blood and fire.
And those who attempt to simplify history to such binary causes and purposes are engaging in the same kind of dilettante revisionism.
The Civil Rights Act was passed largely by Northern Democrats and Republicans, with opposition largely from Southern Democrats and Republicans.
No matter how you try to spin this, Shitburner Jr., it will still be the fact that over the last 50 years, the GOP has become the party of racists and bigots.
Generally nice work from Tony Horwitz, but this bugs me: Yet the prevailing popular view of the Civil War still reflects a strong Southern bias
What he means is a strong Southern white bias. It is racist to identify Southern with White Southern, which is all too common and is what Horwitz does here. Horwitz is a fine, intelligent writer and no racist, but even he falls into this racist linguistic trope.
