Posted on 10/03/2002 12:54:46 PM PDT by Rebeleye
Now, as I look back through the past few semesters and the people I've met and interacted with, I too can say I despise the Confederate battle flag. There's a common misconception that only African Americans hate the flag. That's wrong -- I grew up in the South, and I cringe at the sight of the Southern Cross flying in the sky. I associate it with hate, slavery and oppression.
I am a Southerner (by the grace of G-d). As far as I can tell none of my ancestors owned slaves (I may have missed a few, granted). The only old Southerners that I knew intimately were my grandparents and grand uncles and aunts. I will admit that they had a way about them that should have riled any self-respecting person. They considered blacks to be sub-serviant and treated them as such. Cooks, dishwashers, servers etc. I don't deny that anger should arise from a new generation of blacks in the sixties when they realized that their parents were "mammys" so to speak.
But there is one word I can't tolerate when the discussion involves blacks, slavery and the South. That word is hatred. Slave owners and subsequent generations of middle-upper class whites who employed blacks in their homes as cleaning ladies or yard men did not hate their employees. Yes they felt superior. Yes they treated them with an inappropriate amount of respect. But hatred was not there. Feeling was there, closeness was there, and I am sure my northern brethren can't begin to understand the fact that I grew up with black folks. First, in my house as employees of my parents, then in high school when integration took hold and then as an employee of black folks and the employing black folks. I had a real comraderie with black people. Much more so than my parents, I guess, because I was younger. But, understand, I saw concern on the part of my relatives when something went amiss in the lives of the black people they employed.
Please don't take this the wrong way because it will be easy to do so. If one of my relatives had a favorite horse that did the work around the farm would my kin "hate" that horse? Hell no. He or she would learn to grow fond of that horse. Why do people who lack the experience of the South assume Southern slave owners hated their slaves?
I can tell you the people I know that once felt black people were inferior to whites didn't hate them. In many cases they loved them.
The certainly did.
"But I trust I may not be intrusive if I refer for a moment to the circumstances which prompted South Carolina in the act of her own immediate secession, in which some have charged a want of courtesy and respect for her Southern sister States. She had not been disturbed by discord or conflict in the recent canvass for president or vice-president of the United States. She had waited for the result in the calm apprehension that the Black Republican party would succeed. She had, within a year, invited her sister Southern States to a conference with her on our mutual impending danger. Her legislature was called in extra session to cast her vote for president and vice-president, through electors, of the United States and before they adjourned the telegraphic wires conveyed the intelligence that Lincoln was elected by a sectional vote, whose platform was that of the Black Republican party and whose policy was to be the abolition of slavery upon this continent and the elevation of our own slaves to equality with ourselves and our children, and coupled with all this was the act that, from our friends in our sister Southern States, we were urged in the most earnest terms to secede at once, and prepared as we were, with not a dissenting voice in the State, South Carolina struck the blow and we are now satisfied that none have struck too soon, for when we are now threatened with the sword and the bayonet by a Democratic administration for the exercise of this high and inalienable right, what might we meet under the dominion of such a party and such a president as Lincoln and his minions." -- John McQueen, Secession Commissioner from South Carolina
"Therefore it is that the election of Mr. Lincoln cannot be regarded otherwise than a solemn declaration, on the part of a great majority of the Northern people, of hostility to the South, her property and her institutions-- nothing less than an open declaration of war-- for the triumph of this new theory of Government destroys the property of the South, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations, and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation, to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans. Especially is this true in the cotton-growing States, where, in many localities, the slave outnumbers the white population ten to one." -- S.F. Hale, Secession Commissioner of Alamaba
Seward was the Secretary of State. Caleb Smith and John Usher served as Secretary of Interior. How do you know what he said if you don't even know who he was?
Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on September 21, 1862 or about 17 months after the war began. It took effect on January 1, 1863, or about 20 and a half months after the war began. From Sumter to Appomattox was almost exactly 48 months. Any way you look at it, the Emacipation Proclamation was not issued 'near the end of the war.'
So did Robert E. Lee and John Breckenridge. Any thoughts on either of those gentlemen?
And Southerners will look back on days like this, and lay the blame for the destruction of freedom of speech at the feet of men like Jesse Jackson, Asa Gordon, Ed Sebasta, Christine Stephens, and Wlat.
Who is Stephenson?
Typical left wing dribble. Running on emotion, pay no attention to the facts.
I remember when I was in college, boy I thought I knew everything, just like this girl. Now I look back to my own college days and I see the folly in my judgement and decisions back then. This young lady ought to study up a bit before she passes judgement on Southerners. The more Southern folk I meet, the more friends I have!
Lincoln is the one blacks hold to be their Messiah. He wasn't, is the point.
Your prejudice is showing. And my native state of Missouri sided with the North.
And you were embracing diversity and the spirit of interracial brotherhood when you referred to Lincoln as a 'black messiah', is that it? If Lincoln should be criticized for his beliefs then why shouldn't southern leaders be criticized for holding to the same beliefs?
Criticize away. I don't care. Nobody else cares, either. Those are not exactly household names you are referring to. Lincoln is a household name.
It is interesting to see how far you have to stretch to make even a non-point.
The Cornerstone Speech was delivered extemporaneously by Vice President Alexander H. Stephens, and no official printed version exists. The text was taken from a newspaper article in the Savannah Republican, as reprinted in Henry Cleveland, Alexander H. Stephens, in Public and Private: With Letters and Speeches, before, during, and since the War, Philadelphia, 1886, pp. 717-729.
So no official print of the speech, just what a reporter wrote and in his own words admitted it was in his judgement. And a speech that long we just know he got it down word for word. Heck, I'm not even sure he gave a speech. But you'll take a very long speech of which there is no written copy except from a reporter as gospel, but a few scant words out of abe's mouth or in his own writing that destroy the yankee argument are apparently taken out of context. Talk about faith!!
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