re: 155 years ago today....Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant

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Without Southern cotton (which required a lot of labor) The North would have had no economy compared to The South.

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This is the "King Cotton" argument. It is included in the secession statement of Mississippi, which listed slavery as necessary for global trade. It is also the basis for the 1619 Project's argument that capitalism is based on slavery.

It is wrong.

If it were true, with the cut-off of trade, the North would not have had the industrial power to overwhelm the Confederacy. If it were true, the Confederate expectation that Great Britain would have to come to the South's aid and run the blockades would have worked.

Neither assumption turned out correct.

The Confederacy's economic arguments are garbage.

muh heritage tho

And Brian Williams was there.

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I've always loved how the people who fly Confederate flags are also really quick to lose their shite about people disrespecting the United States of America.

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Every confederate was a traitor, and the south fought quite possibly the most stupid war in history for one of the worst causes imaginable.

Good riddance

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I've always loved how the people who fly Confederate flags are also really quick to lose their shite about people disrespecting the United States of America.

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That's probably because they are still loyal to their country. I don't personally know anyone who supports flying a confederate flag who wants to overthrow America. I'm sure there are some extreme examples, but they're the outlier.

Of course, this works both ways. Those who will go to the mat screaming that the confederate flag should be banned are much more likely to be caught burning the Stars & Stripes. Funny world.

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They committed treason.

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Lies. Secession wasn’t deemed as treasonous until after the civil war.

Not that facts ever meant anything to good ole bench McElroy though

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Lies. Secession wasn’t deemed as treasonous until after the civil war.

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It wasn’t judged as treasonous even then.
Many smart men of the times argued about the right to secede. It wasn’t just southerners who thought about secession. Other areas had also thought about doing it before the south did.

USA USA

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There were few Americans who believed blacks were equal to whites.

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But why is important: post-emancipation there was another dynamic, at least in east central Mississippi, as to why blacks were not believed to be equal.

The following is an actual historical perspective from someone in the middle of arguably the most "racist" areas of the country in the civil rights era, and it might give perspective to the illusion that Southerners didn't think equally of blacks because of race and race alone. I believe it is worth a read, as it's an angle rarely talked about.

Firstly, regardless of the time period, while ethics may change, morals are written on our hearts. Across human history we've always known that a human is a human and that "owning" them was morally wrong. Americans didn't have a "lock" on being the first ones to own humans, and for thousands of years before, we knew all along that it was an atrocity to strip a man of his dignity by owning him like cattle.

My family's roots come from one of the most formerly "racist" melting pot areas of the country; a reputation stemming from the documented atrocities committed in the civil rights movement: Philadelphia, MS might get the all the press, but it was the adjacent rural countryside that was full of poor whites, poor blacks and downright poverty-stricken Choctaws, and where the real battle was waged. It was the countryside where the Freedom Summer murders really took place, not the town of Philadelphia where the more affluent, well-off and cultured "arsehole city folk" lived.

I asked my now dead grandmother who lived in the midst of it all and whose husband, my grandfather, who was blackballed and castigated for paying his black field hands with scales that he rounded up instead of down and who treated them with dignity and respect because he knew that he was just as poor and lowly as they and who wasn't afraid to believe they were all equal, as to why, as to HOW, so many people who were still alive (and many still are) and who were, by all accounts, genuinely good folks, treated blacks so poorly back in "the day" all because of hate? Because they didn't seem to be so full of that kind of hate? Most of them got along just fine with blacks, and they looked at them as equals, and they certainly didn't seem like the types who could carry that burden so long and so dutifully?

"Carrying even simple, trifling forms of hate for someone takes a lot effort- a lot of effort- and the peoples of her community didn't seem like they are formerly Natziesque type racist monsters, so what gives grandma?"

What she told me was striking, and it carries weight in its historical accuracy that you never read or hear about because it came from someone who was in the thick of it all. Furthermore, it makes sense of the kind of hate many post-war southern whites carried, and how they managed to maintain it for so long: For it was not a matter of carrying hate, it was a matter of shedding primal human fear.

What she said was this: Alot, if not the majority, of what caused the hate (at least in the area that my roots came from) was not a matter of racism, but of classism: It's not that the whites hated or even wanted to hate the blacks because they were black, and according to her many people wanted to speak up and say it was wrong because all of them knew it was, but their fear of the ruling class and of the possibility of abject poverty instead of just the poverty that nearly all Southerners were living in at the time prevented it. The core issue was the fact that all of the south was poor and "last" after the war and what it did to the southern states' economies and culture caused an almost "silent" civil war within the south to rage on from the Emancipation Proclamation all the way up to the civil rights movement: The war for class, not race. Just like the battle for first place, so too is there a battle to not be last. Roaches, mice and minnows are last place, and last place is an awful place to be.

She said that if the whites had to be equal with the blacks, then that meant that they were faced with the possibility of becoming the absolute last rung on the social ladder (save the Choctaws who did, and still largely do, live in a peculiar state of anonymity), and that was terrifying, and any reasonable human will relate to that terror, too.

They knew blacks were equal and when it became apparent that the folks from "up north" were beginning to take notice of the "silent," 100 year old civil war being fought from water fountains to classrooms and taking up arms with the class below them, they were terrified of being stripped yet again of their dignity and of the only thing they had left to hang on to: If they were nothing else, they weren't as lowly as the blacks. "The blacks could have the crumbs and sit in the back of the bus because they were last, not us." Much like the thousands of years before when a slave was stripped of their dignity, southern whites feared that the one tiny, inkling thread of dignity the northerners had left them after the war was being snatched out from under them, and preventing that was worth fighting to the death for: It was not about sustaining hate for another race of human beings, it was about sustaining a seat at the table- any seat.

Bottom line, from her historical perspective, the whites hated the blacks not for their skin color, but because of pride, or better yet, because of the shame and the fear of the thought of being societal bottomfeeders even more than what they already were: For no human wants to be in the expendable position of last place eating crumbs, and we will fight tooth nail and claw against that possibility- we always have from the time we lived in caves.

And that explanation makes far more sense as to why- AS TO HOW- so many fought so hard to resist segregation and the interruption of the hierarchy of southern society: How could you hate someone so much and for so long and fight so hard to harbor that hate? You can't, but it's easy to see how you can when you fear being in dead last place on the scale of human dignity when the society in which you live was left in shambles and is in the bottom bracket to begin with.

The mostly rich folks a hundred years before who, per usual, instigated the most devastating war in American history didn't cover their bases when closing up shop, and the common people of Dixie were left to pick up the pieces and put a semblance of a life back together with the shite can they'd been left with- a shite can full of oppression, aggression, loose ends and gray areas.

Blacks were equal and the whites knew it, but after the southern states were decimated somebody had to be last because no one clarified otherwise, and that is why whites didn't consider blacks as equal- because they could. Because blacks were equal (and the heart of every man knew it), but because the southern whites were human too, their human nature, along with politics and the post-war collapse of their society meant they'd either willingly or unwillingly been left with the upper hand in the battle for ALL of humanity's primal, human fear and they took advantage of it: Of being a nothing to no one- of being at the bottom of the food chain.

Somebody had to win last place, and with hindsight sometimes being 20/20, it's as clear as mud that all of we Southerners, black and white, won last place. From April 12, 1861 to today, we suck the hind tit of America's societal structure, but what we DO have is Dixie: She is the best of times and the worst of times, and likely always will be.

Take it for what it's worth.

Sad day for the south