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Slave owners would never be convinced that something so perfect for them could possibly be so bad for Slaves. They believed the plantation system to be the prototypical way for lower class and upper class people to live in harmony. They saw the north as arrogant for them to assume the factory system was a far more humane way to treat lower class people.
When they looked back at their life they see old gray haired black men with white shirts , string ties and fancy vests dozing beside the front door awaiting callers or their children and the children of their slaves playing in the yard together, black women in the kitchen singing and cooking , wearing the missus's hand me downs, and all the blacks who would other wise be miscreants , felons and near do wells were kept from being idol by work.
The Slave owners were not convinced that the slave system was perfect.
For one, slaves died, got sick or were just otherwise lazy by nature.
I do believe that Southerners and well as many Northerners believed that the slave/master relationship was gods way of ordering the races. They believed that slaves NEEDED masters to survive and without them they would wander around endlessly until starving.
I am sure they felt the North was arrogant, but not because the factory was more humane. It was but the South didn't care about that and neither did the North. It was the abolitionists that got under the Souths skin.. not the Factory owners or workers. In fact, the abolitionists got under everyone skin.. north and south alike.
The version of the Old South, true or not, that is often glorified is a way of remembering a time when Southerners didn't have to hang their heads and try to suppress their accents.
We long for Robert E. Lee but all we get is Larry the Cable Guy.
Wow...right on. You know the South today is no doubt defined by what occurred in those years of the Civil War. I think it permeates everything. It's always in the air that the entire South breathes. The South, a proud people and rightly so, fought the war simply because they thought they could win but really its end saw them through a terrible time of defeat, like a Greek tragedy, even with arguably the greatest commanders war had ever seen.
And as for longing for Robert E. Lee, he sure isn't a bad model. His men of the South fought with great courage just like their counterparts in the North. They were certainly of the American character which is exemplified today.
You know the North won the war but the nation lost something with the South despite the problem of that 'peculiar institution' which existed there. Casualties in Civil War battles were quite large and I'd think almost every Southern family experienced a grievous loss sometime in those years. Add complete and utter defeat to that plus Reconstruction and I get an understanding of that 'Lost Cause' belief in antebellum Southern psychology today.
You mean because of the rule which says that whatever your ancestors of 165 years ago believed, we may safely assume that you also believe it today?
That rule has now been replaced by the Cootie Principle. I am no longer required to be a descendent of someone with a distasteful belief. The fact that I live in proximity to where the belief once lived puts me at risk for contamination, and, in fact, it is usually assumed that I am contaminated.
Very well. Could you explain what evidence you employed to determine that Frihed89 is "blind to his own country's rather enthusiastic participation in it."
Let's see, a preamble such as "Well, I realize that my own country, Denmark, doesn't have clean hands on the entire slavery issue, given how we were notorious for some of the most brutal practices ever on our little Caribbean islands, but...." might be in order. Because failure to acknowledge Denmark's use of slaves is pretty much a defacto example of my statement.
As an aside, I remember having a discussion with a Brit on this very subject not too long ago.
"Well, I think it's terrible that the South had slaves."
"I agree. But so did England."
"No we didn't."
"Um. Yes you did."
"No way!"
"Yes, way." [Followed by about ten seconds of searching on Google on smartphone and the proffering of the Wikipedia article to the ignorant git]
"Oh."
I had a similar discussion with a Belgian once who wanted to discussion the horrors of slavery in the South, yet seemed awfully ignorant of the breathtaking outrages of Leopold I in the Belgian Congo. Many of his practices make the conduct of Southern slaveholders to be positively benign in comparison.
In that same vein, the poster in question decided to hold forth on the South as if the Danes didn't profit from slavery at all, either in their substantial role in the slave trade or in their outright use of slaves on their own sugar plantations.
My point? People are awfully quick to leap on the South about slavery with self-serving rants, but seem blissfully ignorant as the role their own states or countries played in the origin and perpetuation of slave labor.
To be sure, it's always interesting how so many who live in Northern states turn a blind eye towards the fact that their own states had legal slave populations. For example, according to the public records in New Jersey, that state's census had 236 slaves on record in 1850 and 18 in 1860, while Pennsylvania had 40 slaves as late as 1840. New York didn't move to abolish slavery until 1817, doing so in a gradual way in order to not discomfit slaveowners, even though prior laws have restricted slave trade and slave markets in the late 1780s.
If the people of the North truly held the moral high ground, if they considered slavery to be such a terrible institution, then why didn't they immediately move to manumit slaves the moment they were free of the British crown? In fact, in states such as Massachusetts or Connecticut, it was rather routine for slaveowners to actually turn slaves loose in old age without a dime, a practice so endemic and inhumane that laws were enacted requiring slaveowners to post a 50 pound bond for the freed slave's welfare. In fact, that brings up another significant point: While blacks were mostly free in the North, the combination of restrictive laws and the overwhelming prejudices against blacks in those states made their collective lot little better than an enslaved counterpart in Louisiana or South Carolina.
And of course, no one who waxes indignant on Southern slavery seems to have much vitriol left over for the Northern merchants who made enormous profits transporting slaves to the Eastern Seaboard.
Mind you, I'm not excusing slavery for a moment and, if I had a time machine, I'd travel back to the very first sugar plantation owner in the West Indies and discuss the enormous moral consequences that would accumulate from the desire for a little cheap labor. Further, the number of slaves in the Northern states pales before the number in bondage in the South. But the tiny number of slaves in the North had much more to do with the lesser labor requirements for crops grown in the northern swath of the country rather than any moral superiority. And as someone whose family almost entirely came from Germany in the 1880s and 1890s, I don't have a dog in the hunt. But I find a bit hypocritical for folks to blithely weigh in with righteous indignation when their own forebears were co-conspirators in the entire enterprise.
Back to the original question. There was postwar nostalgia about the South because the South was a much more prosperous and stable place before the Civil War than after it, and the halcyon days of the antebellum South were magnified with each succeeding generation.
Let's see, a preamble such as "Well, I realize that my own country, Denmark, doesn't have clean hands on the entire slavery issue, given how we were notorious for some of the most brutal practices ever on our little Caribbean islands, but...." might be in order. Because failure to acknowledge Denmark's use of slaves is pretty much a defacto example of my statement.
As an aside, I remember having a discussion with a Brit on this very subject not too long ago.
"Well, I think it's terrible that the South had slaves."
"I agree. But so did England."
"No we didn't."
"Um. Yes you did."
"No way!"
"Yes, way." [Followed by about ten seconds of searching on Google on smartphone and the proffering of the Wikipedia article to the ignorant git]
"Oh."
I had a similar discussion with a Belgian once who wanted to discussion the horrors of slavery in the South, yet seemed awfully ignorant of the breathtaking outrages of Leopold I in the Belgian Congo. Many of his practices make the conduct of Southern slaveholders to be positively benign in comparison.
In that same vein, the poster in question decided to hold forth on the South as if the Danes didn't profit from slavery at all, either in their substantial role in the slave trade or in their outright use of slaves on their own sugar plantations.
My point? People are awfully quick to leap on the South about slavery with self-serving rants, but seem blissfully ignorant as the role their own states or countries played in the origin and perpetuation of slave labor.
To be sure, it's always interesting how so many who live in Northern states turn a blind eye towards the fact that their own states had legal slave populations. For example, according to the public records in New Jersey, that state's census had 236 slaves on record in 1850 and 18 in 1860, while Pennsylvania had 40 slaves as late as 1840. New York didn't move to abolish slavery until 1817, doing so in a gradual way in order to not discomfit slaveowners, even though prior laws have restricted slave trade and slave markets in the late 1780s.
If the people of the North truly held the moral high ground, if they considered slavery to be such a terrible institution, then why didn't they immediately move to manumit slaves the moment they were free of the British crown? In fact, in states such as Massachusetts or Connecticut, it was rather routine for slaveowners to actually turn slaves loose in old age without a dime, a practice so endemic and inhumane that laws were enacted requiring slaveowners to post a 50 pound bond for the freed slave's welfare. In fact, that brings up another significant point: While blacks were mostly free in the North, the combination of restrictive laws and the overwhelming prejudices against blacks in those states made their collective lot little better.
And of course, no one who waxes indignant on Southern slavery seems to have much vitriol left over for the Northern merchants who made enormous profits transporting slaves to the Eastern Seaboard.
Mind you, I'm not excusing slavery for a moment and, if I had a time machine, I'd travel back to the very first sugar plantation owner in the West Indies and discuss the enormous consequences that would accumulate for the desire for a little cheap labor. Further, the number of slaves in the Northern states pales before the number in bondage in the South. But the tiny number of slaves in the North had much more to do with the lesser labor requirements for crops grown in the northern swath of the country rather than any moral superiority. And as someone whose family almost entirely came from Germany in the 1880s and 1890s, I don't have a dog in the hunt. But I find a bit hypocritical for folks to blithely weigh in with righteous indignation when their own forebears were co-conspirators in the entire enterprise.
Back to the original question. There was postwar nostalgia about the South because the South was a much more prosperous and stable place before the Civil War than after it, and the halcyon days of the antebellum South were magnified with each succeeding generation.
You could always open a new thread on Danish slavery practices. Maybe start it off with, "Well, I realize that my own state, Alabama, doesn't have clean hands on the entire slavery issue, given how we were notorious for some of the most brutal practices ever on our plantations, but...."
You could always open a new thread on Danish slavery practices. Maybe start it off with, "Well, I realize that my own state, Alabama, doesn't have clean hands on the entire slavery issue, given how we were notorious for some of the most brutal practices ever on our plantations, but...."
True. But since my state doesn't have clean hands, I'm certainly not going to start a thread on their dirty ones. See how that works?
That rule has now been replaced by the Cootie Principle. I am no longer required to be a descendent of someone with a distasteful belief. The fact that I live in proximity to where the belief once lived puts me at risk for contamination, and, in fact, it is usually assumed that I am contaminated.
Just like on the fifth grade playground.
It's not your proximity to places where whites once believed that slavery was a "positive good" that contaminates you, it's your belief that keeping millions of black Americans in an additional hundred years' of virtual bondage through terrorism was justified.
American blacks in 1877 were no more "ignorant" and "illiterate" than the Famine Irish of the 1850s or the millions of immigrants who would flood into the US from eastern and southern Europe beginning in the 1880s.
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