4 ms·

Having spent significant time in the South, but not being from there, I have conflicting feelings about the civil war. The divide that existed then is a permut

• kaesar14 5y ago
  What notion of the Confederacy exists outside of the institution of Slavery? It's so core to the DNA of the founding of the Confederacy that it almost seems nonsensical to suggest waging a war to free existing slaves, when that would've led to the same outcome of the total dissolution of the Confederacy.
  • seneca 5y ago
    Yes, perhaps so. I suppose what I mean to say is that it seems misguided, in hindsight, to treat preserving the Union as some ultimate good. 150 years later, and all we have is two groups that seem to bitterly hate each other still and a dysfunctional government incapable of reconciling the two different value systems. The Confederacy may well have dissolved, as you said, but the rest of the Union would be left a whole lot more coherent and ideologically unified. To wildly over simplify it, it strikes me as a bit like going to extraordinary lengths to save a marriage to a spouse you hate.
    • cmh89 5y ago
      The "split" isn't north vs south though, nor is it based on slavery or the Mason-Dixon line. Our government is dysfunctional because the main structure of government was created before the industrial revolution. The writers of the constitution couldn't envision just how little of the population would be engaged in an agrarian lifestyle. The US government is broken because all three branches are, at least some of the time, minority rule. The actual split in America is largely those areas that are economically advanced and those that are not. Places that support conservative candidates tend to be poor, mostly uneducated, and religious while the opposite is true for liberal candidates. Voters in Atlanta have more in common with New York City than they do voters in Lumber City. I'll also point out that there isn't much hate for rural people in the cities. You have at best indifference. The hate is very much one sided.
      • AvocadoPanic 5y ago
        I guess it's just that deplorables and coal miners live in rural areas. The people in cities don't hate them, just want them unemployed, disarmed, disenfranchised and re-educated.
        • cmh89 5y ago
          I guess if that's the conspiracy theory driven world you want to live in, that's your right but thank you for perfectly illustrating how the "split" is largely in the imagination of rural voters.
      • kaesar14 5y ago
        Yeah, no hate in terminology like hicks, hillbillies, flyover country, deplorables, etc. etc.
        • cmh89 5y ago
          I mean, I grew up in what is now trump country in a rural area and heard the term 'hicks' and 'hillbillies' as self-descriptors and descriptors of others but I now live in an urban area and never hear those terms. Its just projection bud. Now deplorables is a different story. Supporting racists/misogynists' is deplorable and Hillary Clinton was right on the money with what she said. But again, most urban folks just have anger and confusion on why rural people consistently vote against their own interests and support racists like trump. It's not really a 'hate' thing. I don't see people from urban areas travelling to rural areas to attack people and hold hate-rallies.
          • kaesar14 5y ago
            People like Hillary Clinton have never voted consistently in the interests of people who voted for Trump. It's under her own husband's presidency that many of those people's jobs were shipped abroad. Under her former boss's Presidency that the banks who made them lose their homes were bailed out. Not saying Trump's presidency was any more beneficial, both parties don't give a shit about the little guy, but calling 30 million people "deplorable" certainly qualifies as broad brush hate.
    • deeg 5y ago
      We can potentially say that in hindsight but politicians at the time could not come to that conclusion. After 80+ years the US was still the only major democracy and it was teetering. Unionist politicians, embodied by Lincoln, were afraid that letting the US fall apart would deal a blow to democracy everywhere. Lincoln so eloquently voices this concern in the Gettysburg Address. Historian Joseph Ellis said (I think in his book "Founding Brothers") that we now take democracy as the inevitable conclusion of liberalizing politics but that formed only after the US Civil War. (This also doesn't address the moral horror of allowing slavery to continue for who knows how many years in the Confederacy.)
    • kaesar14 5y ago
      The majority of the people in those groups don't like each other because they've been pit against each other by the media and corporate interests who know a divided house is easier to rule.
• bradneuberg 5y ago
  There’s a strong counter factual argument that can be made that if the Confederacy was allowed to exist seperately, then when we go into WW2 Hitler counts them as an Axis ally. Having a direct Axis ally on the continent probably means he can defeat the US, causing the Allied powers to lose the war. So: if the American Civil War had come to a draw, you can make a convincing argument the fascist powers (Germany, Japan, Italy, and a Confederate US) would dominate the world now. A scary thought.
  • emptyfile 5y ago
    >Having a direct Axis ally on the continent probably means he can defeat the US, I don't think I've ever heard an argument as weak as this...
  • seneca 5y ago
    That's a very interesting thought. Given the poverty the South was left with even with Reconstruction, I think you're right that a defeated-but-intact Confederacy could have potentially been an Axis power. It's difficult to extrapolate out details though. It's certain American history would be drastically different, but predicting how is near impossible.
  • digisign 5y ago
    Southern states were British colonies also. There's very little likelihood they would have aligned with their enemy during such a war.
    • zozbot234 5y ago
      They would have aligned with Mexico and the Caribbean by the time WWI happened - the social structure would have been very similar in both, due to the institution of slavery. The Northern states would perhaps have aligned closer to Canada. This would have had interesting implications well before WWII or any 'Axis'.
  • Apocryphon 5y ago
    None of this would have happened, because the butterfly effect would have wiped Hitler from existence, not to mention the U.S. being split across two polities would also have significant consequences for European history.
• lacker 5y ago
  People outside the South seem to despise southern people and their values more than ever, and the south is no closer to sharing their values. Just speaking personally, this doesn't align with my experience. It might be the parts of the south I lived in. But the values of urban North Carolina and the values of urban Ohio seemed quite similar to me, and many people seemed to happily move back and forth between the Midwest and South without suffering any culture clash. Coastal California values do feel quite different from either of those, though, although I wouldn't say most Californians "despise" the red states.
• greenie_beans 5y ago
  There's truth to the statement that the divide then is a permutation of what divides us now. But the south isn't monolithic, so when non-southerners paint the south as a single thing, they're disregarding the experience of a large portion of southerners who don't believe in the lost cause myth or other harmful/racist opinions. That's especially true for black southerners, but there are also white southerners who don't fall under that flag either. Then and now. If we left the Confederacy alone, then we would've left those people behind. As a white southerner who doesn't fit into the majority worldview of other white southerners, I'm glad to not be left alone.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]