YOU WROTE: "It's been documented many times Republican focus was on industrialization and tariffs, not on freeing the slaves."
MY REPLY:
Do you honestly believe that the Civil War was over tariffs?
Just so you don't think I bash all Southerners, I'll share Peggy Noonan's recent comments about the South and the reaction to the Muslim doctors who thought they'd play a prank on a Georgia woman.
THE REST IS PEGGY NOONAN:
They sensed the questioning within the gazes, and they thought it would be amusing to show these stupid and uneducated Southern people, these dumb crackers, these yokels, who was boss. You think we're bad guys? We'll show you bad guys.
And so one of them or a few of them said the things Eunice Stone says she overheard. Talk about explosions, references to Sept. 11, talk about how Sept. 13 will be even bigger.
And Ms. Stone, alarmed, put herself on the line. She called the police and told them what she'd heard. She was interviewed by them repeatedly and exhaustively. She did everything she could to see that the young Muslim males were stopped.
The young Muslim males took off in their cars, driving south. They were stopped in Florida, where police closed a highway for an entire day as robots searched their car. The young Muslim men, the police said, were not entirely cooperative. They had attitude. Certainly in their interviews after they were released, after nothing was found in their cars, they displayed plenty of attitude. They were an unsympathetic bunch, in both ways. They showed scant sympathy for those they'd inconvenienced and alarmed, and they also inspired no sympathy for their plight. Later, a sister of one of the young men went on CNN to declare that this was the South, and you know how the South is: "It has a reputation of racism."
I thought, as I watched this: It has a reputation for patriotism, too. It's why Southern men and women join the armed forces in such high numbers, and why, if the sister were ever attacked by a terrorist, they'd risk their lives to save her sorry, sanctimonious little . . . Well, as I watched I got a little mad.
The South's reputation for patriotism may be why Eunice Stone put herself on the line, and wound up overwhelmed by insults and unwanted fame, in the hospital, and ultimately being patronized--We won't sue you--by the three young Muslim males.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110002297