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I don't think there is a single "Southern way of life" since the South is a pretty big place. I'm not particularly interested in history, but from the little I

I don't think there is a single "Southern way of life" since the South is a pretty big place. I'm not particularly interested in history, but from the little I paid attention, the part I grew up in was too steep, rocky, and poor to have (any?) slaves. What we did have was a large number of Scotch-Irish who have a strong tradition of: - insularity - contrarianism - hardscrabble self-sufficiency - anti-authority - love nothing more than maintaining a good feud - religion (protestant roots) - loving "the land" (hunting, your farm, etc.) Ignoring the morals of the situation, from an economic perspective the North could afford to give up slavery. They were richer and their more industrialized economy wasn't based on slavery. The Southern economy was (completely?) reliant on slavery, and when the Northerners legislated their economy away the rebellion was somewhat predictable. Painting anyone involved as a racist is easier and true to a large extent, but there were strong components of "don't tell me what to do" and just not having any viable economic alternatives that also contributed. In my mind at least, a lot of modern day Southerners of a certain type (the poor white trash type, not the Gone With The Wind aristocratic plantation owner type that doesn't really exist any more) just love telling outsiders they can fuck off, and waving the rebel flag/preserving statues are pretty handy avenues for that.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Note that the owners of the big plantations who served as the Confederacy’s ideologues and political elites were not those "insular Scotch-Irish". On the contrary, they often boasted of their descent from prominent English families and set themselves apart from the poorer whites of less prestigious ethnic origin. Meanwhile, among those Scotch-Irish, quite a lot of them from Appalachia actually went north to fight for the Union. This is because as poor tenant farmers, they often owned no slaves themselves and were not invested in the big plantation economy based on slavery that the Confederacy’s elites sought to protect. This fact sadly gets overlooked today in, say, northern Alabama where many whites are enamored of Confederate symbolism and Lost Cause mythology, but if they actually dabbled in genealogy and looked at where their forefathers were during the Civil War, those forebears may well have been fighting for the Union.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  Whites from Appalachia largely against the war if not Unionist altogether.
  - sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
    Well, the ones in West Virginia at least.
itsoktocry 6y ago
>a lot of modern day Southerners of a certain type (the poor white trash type.. It's amazing to me that someone can type something like this and no one bats an eye. Imagine stereotyping any other class of a people as "trash" and it being wholly acceptable.
- pwillia7 6y ago
  The program just hasn't finished running the entire loop yet.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  It's been a long while since I've been in the south, but I'd never heard a southerner say "poor white trash". poor whites are a thing. white trash are a thing. they are exclusive categories. Edit: removed the way to distinguish between them. You all were correct, I should be more charitable.
  - catherd 6y ago
    David Allan Coe seems to think it's the correct term: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhEHB0a7Uyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhEHB0a7Uyg
    - 082349872349872 6y ago
      Life in hardscrabble Ohio might be like life in Pennysltucky, but neither of those are below the Mason-Dixon line. Looks like he went to Nashville at 28, after getting out of Ohio jail. Thanks for enlarging my country horizons. What do you think of Hank3? (Hank Jr's "cold cold ground" I like, but otherwise I prefer the other two Hanks)
      - catherd 6y ago
        I like some older country, but at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon... I can't get into most of the newer stuff so it's not really on my radar.
rland 6y ago
It should be noted that powerful people in the south had extreme wealth by the standards of the time. Plantation owners in the south at the peak of slavery had Bezos-esque wealth. Although the proles in the confederacy were poor compared to their counterparts in the north (especially slaves; that's obvious!), the south was wealthier in absolute terms. Racism was culturally endogenous, but it was also used as a tool purposefully and with surgical precision to protect and preserve the wealth.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 6y ago
  > Plantation owners in the south at the peak of slavery had Bezos-esque wealth. Although the proles in the confederacy were poor compared to their counterparts in the north (especially slaves; that's obvious!), the south was wealthier in absolute terms. The south was a plutocracy, which made a few individuals very rich, but it was not richer than the north in the aggregate. The claim is trivial to assess: slavery was ended in a dramatic fashion, so you can compare the country's wealth before and after emancipation. It did not change: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html. The notion that the antebellum south was "rich" depends on a slight-of-hand. It counts enslaved people in the south as "wealth" but free people in the north as "labor." But that is non-sensical: a society wouldn't become vastly richer if you enslaved half the population overnight. Likewise, you can't compare the "wealth" of the north and south by treating labor in the south as "wealth" but not in the north. As you can see in the chart, even treating enslaved people as capital stock, the civil war did not reduce America's wealth. And if you correctly classify enslaved people as labor, you'll see that ending slavery led to a rapid increase in the south's capital stock. That's because, as basic economics predicts, an unfree labor market is actually bad for the economy. Some of the recent articles floating around about the "economics of slavery" are not by economists and are rife with conceptual errors. I'll make on basic observation. In condemning colonialism, people assert that Britain made India poor by limiting it to supplying cotton (a commodity) while British factories performed the lucrative textile manufacturing. That left Indians low on the supply chain, and forced Indian consumers to buy finished goods from Britain. But for the exact same reason, exporting cotton could not have made the south rich. The opposite is true: the slave-based cotton economy kept the south from moving up the supply chain, and kept it poorer than it would have been otherwise.
opo 6y ago
>...when the Northerners legislated their economy away the rebellion was somewhat predictable. Lincoln didn't want slavery to extend into the new territories. That alone was enough for the slave holders in the south to plan to assassinate Lincoln on his way to Washington and when that failed, for them to try and leave the union. To placate them Lincoln even was willing to go so far as to support the Corwin amendment, but that wasn't enough for them - they wanted slavery to expand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment >...the poor white trash type You probably didn't intend it, but this really feels like an ethnic slur.
- catherd 6y ago
  As I understand it: Lincoln was anti-slavery in the sense that he thought it was morally wrong, he just didn't see any way of ending it that was constitutional. At the time, there was a balance of power between free and slave states. Ending that balance meant effectively the game was over, it was just going to take a while to play out. The people of the time understood the implications and acted based on their understanding.
  - opo 6y ago
    >Lincoln was anti-slavery in the sense that he thought it was morally wrong, he just didn't see any way of ending it that was constitutional. I think that is the general consensus of Lincoln's thoughts at the beginning of his administration. >...Ending that balance meant effectively the game was over, Well it is debatable that the "balance of power between free and slave states" had shifted because Lincoln had been elected. >...The people of the time understood the implications and acted based on their understanding. Slavery had existed in many other countries. As other countries have shown, just because slavery is prohibited, that doesn't mean you need to rebel against your country and cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  For further context on extra-territorial expansion of slavery, see also the non-political "filibuster" and review the Monroe Doctrine in light of the Congress of Vienna, Article XV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(military) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(military) Visualisation of the transatlantic slave trade: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582777
chrisco255 6y ago
This is where my family roots are from and this is the impression I get from them. No one in my fam actually embraces the rebel flag, but all the other characteristics you mentioned fit the bill. They generally abhor politicians and just want to be left alone, to live and let live. It was a very poor region until after world war 2, when the economy started to modernize.
mint2 6y ago
> don't tell me what to do That attitude as an argument against abolishing slavery is hard to beat hypocrisy wise.
Balgair 6y ago
All very true, but it went deeper. There was a saying in the antebellum period: The wife of a slave owner knows the heritage of all the 'mixed-race' children on every plantation but her own. The southern 'good ol boys', not just the owners, had done many unspeakable things to enslaved people.
mcguire 6y ago
"They were richer and their more industrialized economy wasn't based on slavery. The Southern economy was (completely?) reliant on slavery,..." Note that the South was not poor. (I'm not sure how exactly they compared with the industrial northeast.) The South was responsible for 70% of US exports, with cotton being 75% of that. Now, most Southerners were poor...

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

Note that the owners of the big plantations who served as the Confederacy’s ideologues and political elites were not those "insular Scotch-Irish". On the contrary, they often boasted of their descent from prominent English families and set themselves apart from the poorer whites of less prestigious ethnic origin. Meanwhile, among those Scotch-Irish, quite a lot of them from Appalachia actually went north to fight for the Union. This is because as poor tenant farmers, they often owned no slaves themselves and were not invested in the big plantation economy based on slavery that the Confederacy’s elites sought to protect. This fact sadly gets overlooked today in, say, northern Alabama where many whites are enamored of Confederate symbolism and Lost Cause mythology, but if they actually dabbled in genealogy and looked at where their forefathers were during the Civil War, those forebears may well have been fighting for the Union.

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
Whites from Appalachia largely against the war if not Unionist altogether.
- sfkdjf9j3j 6y ago
  Well, the ones in West Virginia at least.

itsoktocry 6y ago

>a lot of modern day Southerners of a certain type (the poor white trash type.. It's amazing to me that someone can type something like this and no one bats an eye. Imagine stereotyping any other class of a people as "trash" and it being wholly acceptable.

pwillia7 6y ago
The program just hasn't finished running the entire loop yet.
082349872349872 6y ago
It's been a long while since I've been in the south, but I'd never heard a southerner say "poor white trash". poor whites are a thing. white trash are a thing. they are exclusive categories. Edit: removed the way to distinguish between them. You all were correct, I should be more charitable.
- catherd 6y ago
  David Allan Coe seems to think it's the correct term: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhEHB0a7Uyg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhEHB0a7Uyg
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    Life in hardscrabble Ohio might be like life in Pennysltucky, but neither of those are below the Mason-Dixon line. Looks like he went to Nashville at 28, after getting out of Ohio jail. Thanks for enlarging my country horizons. What do you think of Hank3? (Hank Jr's "cold cold ground" I like, but otherwise I prefer the other two Hanks)
    - catherd 6y ago
      I like some older country, but at the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon... I can't get into most of the newer stuff so it's not really on my radar.

rland 6y ago

It should be noted that powerful people in the south had extreme wealth by the standards of the time. Plantation owners in the south at the peak of slavery had Bezos-esque wealth. Although the proles in the confederacy were poor compared to their counterparts in the north (especially slaves; that's obvious!), the south was wealthier in absolute terms. Racism was culturally endogenous, but it was also used as a tool purposefully and with surgical precision to protect and preserve the wealth.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 6y ago
> Plantation owners in the south at the peak of slavery had Bezos-esque wealth. Although the proles in the confederacy were poor compared to their counterparts in the north (especially slaves; that's obvious!), the south was wealthier in absolute terms. The south was a plutocracy, which made a few individuals very rich, but it was not richer than the north in the aggregate. The claim is trivial to assess: slavery was ended in a dramatic fashion, so you can compare the country's wealth before and after emancipation. It did not change: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2014/09/ending_slavery.html. The notion that the antebellum south was "rich" depends on a slight-of-hand. It counts enslaved people in the south as "wealth" but free people in the north as "labor." But that is non-sensical: a society wouldn't become vastly richer if you enslaved half the population overnight. Likewise, you can't compare the "wealth" of the north and south by treating labor in the south as "wealth" but not in the north. As you can see in the chart, even treating enslaved people as capital stock, the civil war did not reduce America's wealth. And if you correctly classify enslaved people as labor, you'll see that ending slavery led to a rapid increase in the south's capital stock. That's because, as basic economics predicts, an unfree labor market is actually bad for the economy. Some of the recent articles floating around about the "economics of slavery" are not by economists and are rife with conceptual errors. I'll make on basic observation. In condemning colonialism, people assert that Britain made India poor by limiting it to supplying cotton (a commodity) while British factories performed the lucrative textile manufacturing. That left Indians low on the supply chain, and forced Indian consumers to buy finished goods from Britain. But for the exact same reason, exporting cotton could not have made the south rich. The opposite is true: the slave-based cotton economy kept the south from moving up the supply chain, and kept it poorer than it would have been otherwise.

opo 6y ago

>...when the Northerners legislated their economy away the rebellion was somewhat predictable. Lincoln didn't want slavery to extend into the new territories. That alone was enough for the slave holders in the south to plan to assassinate Lincoln on his way to Washington and when that failed, for them to try and leave the union. To placate them Lincoln even was willing to go so far as to support the Corwin amendment, but that wasn't enough for them - they wanted slavery to expand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corwin_Amendment >...the poor white trash type You probably didn't intend it, but this really feels like an ethnic slur.

catherd 6y ago
As I understand it: Lincoln was anti-slavery in the sense that he thought it was morally wrong, he just didn't see any way of ending it that was constitutional. At the time, there was a balance of power between free and slave states. Ending that balance meant effectively the game was over, it was just going to take a while to play out. The people of the time understood the implications and acted based on their understanding.
- opo 6y ago
  >Lincoln was anti-slavery in the sense that he thought it was morally wrong, he just didn't see any way of ending it that was constitutional. I think that is the general consensus of Lincoln's thoughts at the beginning of his administration. >...Ending that balance meant effectively the game was over, Well it is debatable that the "balance of power between free and slave states" had shifted because Lincoln had been elected. >...The people of the time understood the implications and acted based on their understanding. Slavery had existed in many other countries. As other countries have shown, just because slavery is prohibited, that doesn't mean you need to rebel against your country and cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths.
082349872349872 6y ago
For further context on extra-territorial expansion of slavery, see also the non-political "filibuster" and review the Monroe Doctrine in light of the Congress of Vienna, Article XV. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(military) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_(military) Visualisation of the transatlantic slave trade: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582777

chrisco255 6y ago

This is where my family roots are from and this is the impression I get from them. No one in my fam actually embraces the rebel flag, but all the other characteristics you mentioned fit the bill. They generally abhor politicians and just want to be left alone, to live and let live. It was a very poor region until after world war 2, when the economy started to modernize.

mint2 6y ago

> don't tell me what to do That attitude as an argument against abolishing slavery is hard to beat hypocrisy wise.

Balgair 6y ago

All very true, but it went deeper. There was a saying in the antebellum period: The wife of a slave owner knows the heritage of all the 'mixed-race' children on every plantation but her own. The southern 'good ol boys', not just the owners, had done many unspeakable things to enslaved people.

mcguire 6y ago

"They were richer and their more industrialized economy wasn't based on slavery. The Southern economy was (completely?) reliant on slavery,..." Note that the South was not poor. (I'm not sure how exactly they compared with the industrial northeast.) The South was responsible for 70% of US exports, with cotton being 75% of that. Now, most Southerners were poor...