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Curtis Lemay -> RE: 5 Myths re Southern Secession (6/25/2015 7:37:20 PM)
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ORIGINAL: Alchenar
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ORIGINAL: Curtis Lemay
The South seceded because after things like Bloody Kansas, John Brown, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Thaddeus Stevens, and the election of 1860, they perceived the North, not as a their countrymen, but as their enemies. Considering the nature of the war that resulted, they appear, in retrospect, to have been correct.
The South believed those things because they saw the effective veto they had over US federal policy slipping away and they knew that that was a threat to, you guessed it, slavery.
That's about like saying the US invaded Afghanistan after 911 because we could see sharia law coming - not because of all the dead.
Again, the South seceded because they were being subjected to slaughter and the North was indoctrinating its citizenry for a crusade against them. Who would stay in such an alliance?
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I'm going to quote extensively from a friend of mine:
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The second reason I wanted to bring up this issue, is because this type of polarization is far from unprecedented, and is intrinsically linked with the impossibility of governing the United States. One of the major reasons for the bitterness of ideological combat right now is because it is innately tied with identity. That identity is not the one people think it is. Contrary to apparent common sense, the most politically homogeneous group in American history is not African Americans but white southerns, who ever since the 1820s began to see themselves as a distinct national group. This was not in and of itself a problem, but the founding myth of America for southern whites became one of dualism, where America was not founded by Americans, but by partnership between the South and everyone else, whereby the South should have an effective veto over policy. This political belief drove US politics, and is why until 1851, the South insisted on parity in the Senate, and any effort of the national government to use its numerical majority to force its will on the favored Southern position, even if the effort in question had substantial support within the South, an unconstitutional violation of Southern "rights" and justification for secession.
The "Southern Question" in American politics was even in the pre-Civil War era never wholly about slavery, which is one reason it failed to obligingly vanish once that institution disappeared. Rather it was about the twin threats to Southern "rights" or sovereignty, namely the fear of a national majority overruling them, and the more immediate fear of becoming a minority in their own land. The fact that "Southern" meant white, and a very specific, Protestant(and in fairness given the century Sephardi Jewish) white, meant that they constantly under demographic threat and Southern politics took on the tone of Afrikaner politics in South Africa. In fact that is the proper comparison for understanding the US lost cause, namely it functions in the Southern mind much as the Boer War did in the Afrikaner one, as a national holocaust in which the Volk's enemies did everything in their power to destroy it and failed. In the case of the South, after a rearguard action, the North rejected the Union by electing a party pledged to governing without Southern support or cooperation, namely the Republicans, justifying their departure(I wrote about moderate Southern reasons for secession here) They then faced a war of conquest, followed by a military effort(Reconstruction) to make themselves a minority in their own land. Following their success, the dominant effort has been to prevent that by repressing the political opposition at home, which ends up in racially tinged gerrymandering and voting laws because that is who demographically the opposition is, as well as in taking the offensive at the national level. "Racist" policies in the eyes of Southern conservatives are hence justified not by the fact that their targets are Hispanic, Black or Asian, but because they are Democrats, and Southern Republicans today are almost ecstatic when African Americans join the party, and tend to go gaga over them as candidates, see Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina.
The problem is that this Southern defensiveness, in addition to equating electoral defeat at the state and local level with political/cultural genocide, involves effectively being able to have a veto at the national level. What the South saw as preserving a veto, the North in the 1850s saw as Southern efforts to block the settlement of the West by killing the Homestead Act and the construction of a Trans-Continental railroad, as that would lead to more Western and hence non-Southern seats in Congress. The decision to elect the Republicans in 1860 was not about slavery on the North's behalf. Rather it was a decision to get on with governing without the South, because it had proved impossible to do anything economically or internationally due to the Southern veto. The link with slavery is that it was the reason the South wielded its veto on everything else, in order to prove that it could if necessary use it on slavery. The South left because its veto was going to be gutted.
And the leftist indoctrination continues...
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