You need to get your facts straight. There was slavery all over the US, whether it was 'allowed' or not.

Of course there were people supported emancipation because of the humanitarian 'hues' contained within it. (Just as people have jumped on the 'save the planet' bandwagon.) But the act itself was designed to bring the south to her knees. At the time the act was instituted Europe was in an industrial revolution . Planned industrialization of the US could have accomplished the same goal without the country destroying half itself, and without so much suffering being inflicted upon the slaves who tried to leave without being able to survive.

There was a better way.

And if you think this is not still a divided country you don't live near where I live.

We have a saying where I live: There are Yankees and there are DAMNED Yankees. Yankees come to visit. DAMNED Yankees come to stay.

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I'm not sure what you're asserting here. The law permitted slaveowners to visit and do business in states that did not allow slavery without losing their slaves, but generally not to become residents of free states while bringing their slaves with them. The point you were originally arguing, namely that the Emancipation Proclamation didn't free the slaves in union states, was correct but not nearly as significant as you were suggesting. You could not buy or sell slaves in the State of New York, for example, in the year 1860. You could not be a resident of that state and the owner of slaves also living in New York. The same was true of most (but not all) states that did not secede; I listed the exceptions.

So if there were occasional slaves to be found in free states, that does not change the fact that there were no slave owner residents of those states whose interests the union needed to consider.

Again, I'm not sure what you meant by that last clause. In any case, certainly the industrial revolution is what drove emancipation, as it also drove the emancipation of women, the revolution in sexual morality, and the workers' rights/union movement. Slavery, or some other form of forced labor such as serfdom, had been the basis for economic production throughout the thousands of years of agrarian civilization. It was only the fundamental shift from agriculture to industry as the primary form of wealth production that allowed slavery (and serfdom) to be abolished.

But it doesn't follow from this that emancipation was "designed to bring the south to her knees," unless of course you identify "the south" with the planter aristocracy culture, which was America's version of the landholding titled warrior nobility that dominated agrarian civilization throughout history (lacking hereditary titles in the U.S. because the Constitution didn't allow that, but otherwise similar in all respects). Yet that aristocracy represented only a small percentage of the south's population, even of its white population. Very few southerners were slave owners of any significance, and so very few southerners stood to be directly harmed in any way by emancipation. To bring a society's dominant elite to its knees is not necessarily to bring that society, as a whole, to its knees.

I agree, and in fact a better way was being tried -- but it was undercut by secession and civil war, which accelerated the change while accompanying it with a great deal of violence. But that was the doing of the south, not the north.

I don't and never have, but I did grow up in Texas, which was also part of the confederacy, and did not find any lingering desire to reverse the outcome of the Civil War. Of course, I was a city boy. Maybe there was more of that out in rural areas. What I'm saying, though, is that if there are still people who yearn for the antebellum regime, those people are surely a dwindling minority in today's south.

And perhaps the fact that there are so many "damned" Yankees is why the change I just described is happening.

Regardless, the south needs to overcome its separation mentality, to the extent that exists. It only hurts the south.

The highlighted section is an interesting statement given what is happening in the world today. Hmmm.........

Surely you don't think the people of the south are dragging their tongues in the dirt behind your steps to hear any of this.

You can have 4 generations of people in the cemetery in the south and you will not be accepted. The south is a model of TOLERANCE, only. You are tolerated at best. You will never be accepted.

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Perhaps No White man is their hero.

Correct me if I'm wrong; The South depended on slave labor to harvest their crops because most of their gross domestic product was agricultural.

But after the end of slavery the slaves had nowhere to live. Slavery as we knew it ended but a different type of slavery took it's place. Just the freedom to leave when you wanted or not changed a bit.

My wife was raised on a farm working for next to nothing during the end of the Great Depression. Plantation owners still owned their asses but they could leave and not have to worry about them setting the dogs on them.

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It's hard to stay mad at someone who makes you laugh - Jay Leno

That's about the size of it. My GGF's slaves didn't leave. The younger generation migrated away, but the older ones stayed until they died and are buried in a cemetery next to the family cemetery.

But hey, what did women's suffrage do for women?

In the end the 'oppressed' have to take up their own cause. My mother was among the first who could vote. But her life was not much different than her mothers. I, on the other hand, took charge and my life is vastly different than the lives of either of them. It is even vastly different than my sister's life.

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I neither think that, nor give a damn. I'm participating in a discussion on an internet forum regarding a subject of politics, and that's all I'm doing at the moment.

By whom? And why should I care?

For myself, personally, as I said I was born and grew up in the south, so your statement is quite untrue. It isn't the south that has not accepted me, but vice-versa; it's a culture I was born into but categorically reject. Before I left, though, I discovered that there were plenty of other people who had the same attitude I did but did not choose to leave, and at that I'm in a (relatively) older generation. The younger a southerner is, the less likely it is that he or she has the traditional southern attitude that you have been expressing here.

It will not endure.

You are wrong about that. Your perception is not reality. It is only your perception. Attitudes may not be ARTICULATED because the younger generation has learned how bigoted many are toward the south. But the south endures. You can rest assured of THAT!

The attitudes of the NORTH endure also. I can't tell you how many seminars I have been to with some northern bitch presenting who lets us know she is her to save us from ourselves. And with most of us having 1 or 2 degrees more than the presenter. You, and they, are tiresome.

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Preach it ! As you have already pointed out, merely being born in the south does not make you southern. And others will never understand that this does not revolve around racism because they are the ones who are bound by this sort of thing.

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Socialism doesn't create a rising tide that lifts all boats. It drains the lake and teaches the boat riders not to help themselves by rowing.

Jesus loves you, allah wants you dead

"Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others."

Ayn Rand

Certainly not if they start moving to San Francisco.

It seems that SF has a way of changing people.

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It's hard to stay mad at someone who makes you laugh - Jay Leno

As I said, I was born in and grew up in the south. I didn't say that my family lived there for many generations, but that's true, too. My great-great-grandfather was an officer in Hood's Texas Division and survived both Antietam and Gettysburg. Antietam, as you may know, almost wiped out that division. My aunt, the family genealogist, had a series of letters he wrote home to his wife that was one of the family treasures. I had an uncle who was a member of the revived KKK, and probably ancestors who were members of the original one although I don't know that for sure.

So it doesn't make any sense for you to regard me as an outsider who doesn't understand. I DO understand -- I just don't approve. Nor do I believe that this attitude will endure. In many respects, it already hasn't endured.

What a silly statement. What does it even mean? That the land is still there, and hasn't become depopulated? That there are still a few people around, most of them your age or older, who hold to the old attitudes? I don't deny that, but it decays year by year, generation by generation. I saw it happening as I was growing up. Some time in the 1960s, the last living person who could remember the world before the Civil War died. Some time in the 1980s, the last member of the generation whose parents lived before the war died. The generation whose grandparents lived before the war is now nearly gone.

There was a time when no Republican could win an election in the south, because people still associated the GOP with Lincoln. There was a time when overt racism was everywhere throughout the south. Neither of those statements is true any longer. The change continues. Ours is the last generation with any living memory of segregation, and segregation was the last vestige of the old south, the last, utterly stupid attempt to hold onto the tatters of the old slave owning society -- not even the realities of it, just its angry, self-destructive mirage.

Don't tell me I don't know what I'm talking about. That was my childhood. I most certainly do know.

I'll grant you that there's every reason to believe people will still live in those states for generations to come, and enjoy increasing prosperity. But they will do so precisely because the old stupid bloody-minded hostility is going away, making room for a more positive attitude, not so wasteful. Amazing what can be accomplished by a people who no longer insist on bashing their heads against the wall.

You can leave any time you get too tired.

LOL. Good one, but my attitudes formed while I was still living in Texas. I moved initially to Seattle and lived there for 18 years, and have never actually lived in San Francisco (I'm closer to San Jose today).

and never for the better

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Socialism doesn't create a rising tide that lifts all boats. It drains the lake and teaches the boat riders not to help themselves by rowing.

Jesus loves you, allah wants you dead

"Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others."

Ayn Rand

Texas is not "the south"

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Socialism doesn't create a rising tide that lifts all boats. It drains the lake and teaches the boat riders not to help themselves by rowing.

Jesus loves you, allah wants you dead

"Every government interference in the economy consists of giving an unearned benefit, extorted by force, to some men at the expense of others."

Ayn Rand

Texans will generally agree with you. They consider themselves superior to the rest of the south, not to mention the rest of the world, and unique.

However, the same argument could apply to Virginia and parts of North Carolina, or to southern Florida, or to southern Louisiana. These days, the same could also be said of urban areas such as Atlanta. The "real" south is shrinking, it would seem. Which is exactly my point.

You are right. They don't get it and they don't get it even when you TELL them they don't get it.

But, alas, I go out tomorrow with my girlfriends and we will laugh at them just the same.

Quote I heard at work a while back: "What does she know! She doesn't even know how to dress right." Yankees can make the worst faux pas when it comes to dress! They even think it's a complement when we tell them their dress is 'sweet', bless their little hearts!

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Well bless your little heart!

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