The South Abides, But Will Not Rise

Don't call us hateful 'cause we fought yir flag.
Blast, it's our flag now, and we own up, on account of we were cussed wrong.
Back then, most us were too damt ornery for our own or other's good.
Still are, some say.
I couldn't stand myself if I weren't me!
Hatred came of defeat, and dirt, and pride.
It was our fall of man, but here we are!
If not good-natured, at least good-humored,
(Or the other way around, I firgit).
Sic transit gloria and hell on the Kennesaw Line and tough mule meat at Vicksburg,
And all that for all that, a mud stompin's a mud stompin and a'walkin' it dry.
So vade retro Sathanus, you Confederate re-enactors!
The sooner we get over this Norman Conquest of other folks solvin' our problems,
The sooner we can stop being Gurth the swineherd.
Come to cipher on it, reckon black folk got more in common than the Canuckois.
And old enemies can become old friends - indeed, they surely do.
And earth itself become a kindly garden,
Where we meet acrost our howin' in the cotton patch.
We've suffered into truth,
And the ghosts may not be at rest in Gettysburg,
But they quarrel not amongst themselves,
But at us, that we may still hear what they have to say-
Si vis pacem, para bellum.
You could learn a thing or two down South, says I.
Bre'r Mule, said Father Francis, you'll get yir resurrection someday.
Till then, just remember that you got some good licks in
And had a heckuva time.
It's not yir fault yoor a mule.


For all the right-minded attempts to defend the South, racial slavery (I aver!) is not to be found in the Scripture, the shade of RL Dabney not withstanding. Slavery was doomed the day that Christ nailed Himself to the cross, although perhaps some of the old ways still remain. And yet, the solid South does have a strange mystique to it, as any John Grisham fan can attest. And the Southerners have filled up America's armies for generations. The once great leadership of Virginia is gone in the tragedy of the Civil War, but the last three president have hailed from the lower states. And the South has threatened to develop a literature and a philosophy from time to time, only to piddle out. When all is said, perhaps it is good that we were beaten. We were certainly in an indefensible position vis a vis our peculiar institution of racial slavery.
I somewhat concur with this following assessment, minus a few caveats (founding an Empire in the Caribbean was a dream Alexander Hamilton entertained as well):

"The Confederate States of America arose through irreproachable democratic forms, with the overwhelming support of the populace of the southern states, who sent three-quarters of their military-age men to fight. In proportion to population, the 289,000 Confederate dead of 1861-1865 - one quarter of the military-age population - dwarf the million or so Iranian fatalities during the war with Iraq and seem trivial by comparison (6% of total population vs 2% of total population). No war cabinet ever enjoyed more enthusiastic support than that of Jefferson Davis, and no modern people ever matched the Confederacy's willingness to sacrifice for their ambitions. Yet the Confederacy was an evil proposition from start to finish, not merely because it wished to preserve the three-fifths of its net worth embodied in human chattels, but also because it proposed to create a vast slave empire in Latin America. [1] A slave economy based on cotton, which then ruined the soil in less than a decade, could not persist another generation without expanding its territory. The vast majority of Southerners did not own slaves, but hoped to get them through conquest. [2]"

However, the issue is naturally much more complicated than that, though if I had to simplify, I would do it something like that. No other nation was ever so right and so wrong at the same time. The South had all the rights in the world, yet failed to understand that being right is not enough. Certainly, in the name of Freedom, a great many beautiful forms were annihilated, in both North and South. This happens in any and every war. There are no exceptions, especially for one so sanguine. The South also committed the impardonable blunder of underestimating its opponent. For a mistake, this is too big...

But I still love the South. And saying they were wrong doesn't make the North a plaster-saint. It is grossly unfair to call the South "an evil Empire" (one of my cavils with the above quote), but it is equally unfair to call it anything better than a "dubious proposition". Success in war would have justified the slavery situation. And expansion would have come as soon as the secession was a fait d'accompli. The South as it stood in 1865 (and not in 1800), would have been a bad idea.