My father, liberal, Christian, Democrat and anti-racist, grew up in the FL panhandle. My late mother, from Pittsburgh, was a Mayflower descendant (although she did not know it), an Ike Republican, and while by no means a rabid bigot had a dollop of prejudice against anyone not WASP. I am white, old-stock, lower middle-class, descended from 8 Revolutionary patriots (including Moses Bush, possibly kin to George Bush) and had ancestors on both sides at Gettysburg. I am middle-aged, was born in Manhattan, have lived in the South, and am married to the grand-daughter of 4 Italian immigrants, we have an adopted Vietnamese daughter, and we moved specifically to send our kids to a highly diverse school. I am a Democrat, was a Vietnam-era draft resister, and tend toward the left on economic and environmental issues, and a bit more toward the center on social issues.
I would ask that Democrats stop demonizing white Southerners, and consider history before buying into how the Confederates were "traitors" and "General Sherman should have finished the job."
That's sure as hell no way to win votes in Dixie, and it's based on bad history and bad Constitutional principles as well.
In the mid-1800s, neither in the North, nor anywhere on the planet where white people of European descent were in the majority, did people of African descent enjoy full legal equality, nor were they regarded as even POTENTIALLY the social equals of whites by any but a tiny fraction of the white population.
Probably not more than 10% of the Northern whites were abolitionists, and many of the prominent (white) abolitionists were the worst sort of patronizing racists (describing blacks as monkeys etc.). Abe Lincoln was an avowed white supremacist, and made clear his opposition to the expansion of slavery in the territories should not be construed as favoring making electors or jurors of blacks, allowing them to intermarry with whites, etc. "As much as any [white] man," Lincoln said in debating Douglas, "I favor the superior position being retained by the white race."
That the North abolished slavery state-by-state in the first half of the 20th century had more to do with economics than morality, and nothing at all to do with any view so enlightened as to regard blacks as equals. In the South, among my ancestors as well as most, your morality was largely a function of topography and how you chanced, unless you were among the very topmost crust, to get some land. If, as among my grandmother's ancestors, you got free land 'cause Georgia had pushed the Native Americans out of the higher ground in the NE of that State, you were a small farmer and had no slaves (or a very few). If you had been in the War of 1812, and thought what the hell, free land in NW FL looks good to me, when cotton prices soared, you became a slaveowner. (It's a little bit like today, where we invest in profitable companies that exploit the living fuck out of Third World labor).
By 1850 or so, however, perhaps not more than 10% of Southern whites were "fire-eaters" who proposed perpetuating the institution in perpetuity. There were a lot of bad consciences, and had there been no war, many historians believe there would have been an emancipation, with compensation to slaveowners, by about 1885, as was eventually done in Brazil. Whether the carnage and destruction that, pretty much as an afterthought, accelerated the process by a mere 20 years or so, was worth it I do not presume to say.
Dixie numbered six-plus million whites, and three-plus million slaves on the eve of the war. The North (Union states) had total population of, if memory serves, about 23 millions.
The South then furnished what (given populations) was an outrageous portion of the national budget, which Northern-dominated Congress spent mainly on "improvements" (railroads, and what today we call corporate pork) in Northern states. Northern opposition to permitting slavery in territories was in large measure designed (1) to exclude blacks COMPLETELY from the territories (several Northern states, after the war, passed laws forbidding freed blacks from the South to settle, or even enter upon, their territory) (if you travel to those Red states like Wyoming, Montana, Idaho etc. you see the outsome -- almost no blacks at all); and (2) to maintain unjust status quo, with cotton, and the South, bankrolling the lion's share (I believe it was on the order of three-fourths) of the federal budget.
While Southern slavery should NOT be romanticized or excused, the slaveowners, with well-deserved bad consciences, had some justification in resenting the preachments of Northerners WHO HAD SOLD THEIR SLAVES SOUTH JUST DECADES BEFORE (few were actually freed), who had been the primary profiteers of the importation of Africans (most slaves came via Newport RI and other Northern ports) and who continued in the 1850s to benefit very substantially, with taxes from slave-picked cotton being sent North to build railroads. And, again without romanticizing or excusing, Southern slavery generally wasn't as depicted in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" either, and labor conditions then, and always, have to be measured in the context of what was going on elsewhere. (I don't see Kos postings saying New Englanders should be struck dead, because their mid-19th century ancestors had brutally cruel factories employing child labor).
The war was neither commenced nor prosecuted by the North and by President Lincoln to free the blacks -- several non-seceding states had, and continued to have, slaves throughout the war (KY, MO, DE, MD, even NJ, albeit in small numbers) and Lincoln, and many other Northern leaders, disavowed any intent to end slavery where it existed. General Grant, for example, said he had no understanding that the war was being fought to free blacks and, were that the case, he would fight on the other side. Robert E. Lee freed his family's slaves before the war, but fought for the Confederacy. My Georgia ancestors who did not own slaves and professed to regard slavery as an offeense against God did likewise, and shot as many Yankees as they could.
Indeed, on the eve of hostilities Congress, from which the Southerners had withdrawn, enacted a Constitutional Amendment that, had the South accepted it, would have preserved slavery where it existed FOREVER, and divested Congress of authority to interfere with it. The deal was, however, one that would have kept the South in the inferior position politically and economically, which they understandably refused. The myth of the Christlike Lincoln, launching a holy crusade to free Southern blacks, is about as true as King George II launching a crusade to bring democracy to the benighted Arabs. (I suspect Lincoln, at the end of his life, saw in Emancipation a way to bring some good out of the horrors he had unleashed, and perhaps to save his soul, but that's another diary).
As for secession, before 1860 virtually everyone concurred (Lincoln included) that the States had that right. New York's accession to the Constitution specifically reserves the right of secession, damn it! The war, regrettably, launched the movement toward centralization and empire that we see coming to full flower in Bushista fascism. And, for all that I favor liberal OUTCOMES that enjoy little favor in Dixie today, PROCESSES that the Confederates defended -- (such as the reservation of rights not specifically enumerated to the States, or to the people) were, and remain, valid. (Thus I am able to be pro-choice, with some reservations, while seeing Roe v. Wade as a Constitutional travesty).
As for "treason," suffice it to say the Radical Republican lawyers tried, and failed, to come up with a colorable theory to put Jefferson Davis on trial. As for Sherman, and Sheridan, they were war-criminal scumbags, and anyone who babbles about how they "should have finished the job" is talking shit and, frankly, lamenting that the genocide of my ancestors, many of whom owned no slaves, was not completed. Reconstruction did not fail for lack of Northern will to punish the South -- rather, blacks were exploited to denude white southerners of wealth, by people who despised them as much, and arguably more, than the southern whites did. When that purpose had been pretty much fulfilled, the North dropped the blacks like hot potatoes.
As a Southerner, or half-Southerner, I regret that most Southern whites wound up clinging to the bath-water of imagined racial superiority. In my early 1960s childhood, I was shocked, disgusted, and ashamed when my parents took me South, and I experienced Jim Crow. I am likewise horrified that white southerners (or indeed anyone) votes Republican, whether for racial reasons or otherwise.
But racism was, and remains, a sin of nationwide distribution. And before you froth at the mouth about mid-19th century slavery, my friend, survey carefully your possessions, reflect on where, by whom, and under what conditions many of them were made (as in "child labor in Bangladesh," or "by political priosners in China") and consider whether our energy is better spent in demonizing the descendants of Dixie slaveowners, or shining a light on labor and economic issues of our own time, in which the slavery or its near equivalent flourishes, only it has been "offshored" where we need not gaze upon or be troubled by it.
And, if you cannot see that one can be Southern, white, and not a far-right, racist "cracker," well you are trafficking in stereotypes no prettier than those used to denigrate blacks, Jews, Arabs, and others.