Do you really think we’re all ‘’big government’’ types up here? Please don’t tell me you would assume that of me. The South launched a war it couldn’t possibly have hoped to win and in the tenor of the times it suffered for it. Doesn’t make it right but that’s the history. What is going to change that 150 years later? I bought up the subject of Kansas (”Bloody Kansas’’) and you didn’t even address it so who’s knowledge is lacking? To make value judgements along cultural lines isn’t the smartest of things to do so again, please don’t assume we’re all liberals up here. I will concede however I was a liberal once and I did vote for Jimmy Carter. I’m aware of the stereo-types of uneducated Southerners and quite honestly it is just that— a vicious stereo-type. Not to be-labor a point but it’s as vicious a stereo-type as to assume all “Yankees’’ are flaming Lefties and liberals, wouldn’t you say? Two of my brothers actually went to a very fine Catholic institution of higher learning in the South,— Belmont Abbey College in Belmont North Carolina. I’ve been there several times, beautiful place in a very beautiful state(’’The “Tar-Heel State’’ is the eighth largest in the nation, did you know that?) I’ve a sister-in-law from NC but I digress. It seems,as I said, the politics of The Civil War still goes on. And btw, New Jersey is one of the “Mid-Atlantic states’’, not a “New England State. :-)
Wow. I don’t even know where to go with all of that. Paragraphs would have been a nice start.
I said in several ways, that I was generalizing. Generalizing is fine, if done with that knowledge and an awareness of what generalizations mean and how they can be applied.
“To make value judgements along cultural lines isn’t the smartest of things to do...” Really? You made the assumption that we think like y’all and I pointed out that perhaps that generalization is incorrect and, culturally, we are different. You assume sameness, I point out difference. Either way, it’s a general assumption about culture.
I’m not sure where the dreaded “L” word came in. I never even addressed liberal vs. conservative. For a lot of reasons. Like that we have leftists, too.
I was explaining why the war is still much more of an issue and of significance here than it might be in, say, NJ. Was that not the original question? Or, do you have something else in mind?
Northern prejudice, and the inability of those states to assimilate their former slaves, certainly discouraged efforts toward freeing the slaves in the South. Having inadvertently freed the slaves in the state, the Massachusetts legislature voted to bar interracial marriages and expel all blacks who were not citizens. Boston authorities took action against 240 of them in 1800, most natives of Rhode Island, New York, Philadelphia, and the West Indies. White Philadelphians were rioting against blacks from 1805, driving them from the Fourth of July celebrations on Independence Square. Within a decade, the burning of black churches in the city had begun. A Virginia judge, observing the North in 1795, wrote, "If in Massachusetts, where the numbers are comparatively very small, this prejudice be discernable, how much stronger may it be imagined in this country ...?" [5]