I’m beginning to wonder if it would have been best had the South won the Civil War.
One-hit wonder Ted Nugent, somehow relating the Supreme Court decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act to the Civil War, which nearly ended the United States and split the nation in two. Perhaps Nugent is trying to say that two Americas, one liberal and one conservative, would be more harmonious. Or perhaps he’s trying to say that he’s a big ol’ fat stupid racist.
Connect:
Hey Ted,
Any chance you forget the detail about slavery in the South. What a cornut..
Lorenzo
I always tell my wife that the Civil War isn’t over – at least not to a lot of people in the South. I travel down there frequently and there are a substantial number of people who respect the Confederacy more than they respect the United States, who openly disdain black people and think they are not entitled to the same rights as whites, and who think a violent overthrow of the federal government is not only necessary, but imminent!
Stephen Kriz, the Civil War isn’t over for the entire country, which is why its themes crop up constantly. This isn’t about bashing the South, although while we’re on the subject I’ll bet one or two people who “openly disdain black people and think they are not entitled to the same rights as whites” can be found in other parts of the country too. Ted Nugent was born in Detroit and raised there and in Illinois, so there goes the theory that racists are a Southern phenomenon. He is among those you mention who entertain ideas about violent federal overthrows. I think those folks are called the Tea Party and they have no special claim on the South. If the rest of the country — maybe even where you and your wife live –could stop tsk-tsking about how racist we are in the South and take a look around you, we might get somewhere. But as long as someone like Ted Nugent can say something blatantly racist and have the South get blamed for it, we are still swimming upstream.
Pro-slavery and anti-slavery sentiment was not cut and dried, North vs. South, during the Civil War. There were thousands of conservative, pro-slavery activists in the Union states before, during and after the war, the best known of these groups being the Copperheads. During the war, there were skirmishes and acts of sabotage by Copperheads and other non-Southern secessionists and slavers on the island of Manhattan, in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Southern California and dozens of other places. Also, the two presidents before Lincoln, Buchanan and Pierce, were both Northern conservative, pro-slavery Democrats.
There were also opponents of slavery in the South, including the Ponder family in the mountains of North Carolina, from whom Trish and I are directly descended.