About the only real change between the Civil War then and today is that the political parties have switched sides, which they did around the 100th anniversary of the war's end.
42% of Americans are pretty ignorant, since they don't think the Civil War was fought over the issue of slavery. The problem is, of course, that such a view is not supported by the historical record.
150 years after the war began, nearly 50 years after the 1960s civil rights acts, over 40 years after the Supreme Court said that anti-miscegenation laws were unconstitutional, 46% of white Republicans in Mississippi believe that interracial marriage ought to be as illegal as gay marriage (or marrying barnyard animals, the favorite bugaboo of the American Taliban). That was a plurality, since 40% agreed with the legality of interracial marriage (and 15% were either too embarrassed to say or too brain-dead to respond).
If you were to go back and look at the history of prosecutions for interracial wedlock, I'll bet you'll find that they didn't give a damn about Blacks marrying Asians or Indians. No, it was only when the interracial marriage was a black & white one that the authorities freaked out. And, as shown from Thomas Jefferson to Strom Thurmond, powerful white men screwing around with and fathering children by Black women was tolerated, as long as nobody said "I do" and the resulting children were born out of wedlock.
One wold have to wonder how many of that 46% think that slavery should be legal I'm guessing a fair number.
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But the Republican party of today isn't about racism. I know that because, well, they say so, and they would never lie, just ask Jon Kyl. And ignore those funny points on their heads, what, you thought they were wearin' *hats* when they was caperin' round the woods in their bedsheets? Sheesh!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Comrade Misfit:how many of that 46% think that slavery should be legal, I'm guessing a fair number.
Gee, Dear Leader, why bother with all the bad press and opprobrium of slavery, when you can achieve the same ends by reducing everyone but the rich to grinding poverty. Just destroy the economic bases of their lifes, shred the safety nets and, voila, done. Oh wait..........
46% equals 100%
Simple math.
Oh but it is legal, they call it minimum wage. Yet even that is not good enough they say that it should be even lower.
Well it will be lower soon...ZERO
and then the poor shall eat the rich.
Karma can be a real bitch in the end
It's the lack of proper historical education in the high school level, it's also WILLFUL ignorance
i type again WILLFUL...if it does not fit the meme then the history (truth) goes out the window...
Why we LOVED our slaves they was happy (read SATIRE)
Glad MY family fought for the Union
The Union forever hurrah boys hurran
Why, yes, Tom, that is *exactly* what the fine doyennes of the Daughters of the Confederacy taught me when I was in school in the Deep South back in umpity-ump -- that mean Mr. Lincoln did the blacks a disservice because they're just plain inferior and incapable of taking care of themselves, why, just look at the Negro sections of town! Racism? They would have been shocked, shocked I say, to be called racist. Why, some of the finest people they knew were Negros! Simple like children, understand, but fine people. (The above sounds better in the original Southern, just like Pat Buchanan's typical natterings about Jews sound better in the original German... for some definition of "better" that does *not* have a moral compass).
As for my own ancestors, from what I can discover one set of male relatives was in northern Alabama (southern Appalachians) as the Confederate and Union armies fought through the area and mostly hid off in the hills and hollers and migrated to a similarly hilly area of North Louisiana after the war to escape the starvation and chaos of the immediate post-war period in the area the armies had fought over, while the other set of male relatives spent most of the war hiding in a swamp in Louisiana with fellow draft dodgers. All my ancestors were poor subsistence farmers so their families would have starved if they'd done some damnfool idea like go fight some rich man's war. Mostly they just wanted to be left alone in peace putting food on their family's table (literally, I should add, since they grew or killed most of the food that ended up on the family table), and the word "Jefferson Davis" would have gotten more of a spit out of them than "William Tecumseh Sherman"... Sherman after all mostly burned plantations down and freed their slaves (of which none of my ancestors owned slaves), while Jefferson Davis wanted to starve their families by drafting them into the Confederate armies.
- Badtux the Southern Penguin
It wasn't until decades after the war that this "Noble Crusade" bullshit got going.
Just like it took about 50 years for the Boston Tea Party to go from being widely reviled as a bunch of nuts to being patriots.
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