Fields: Honoring a Dishonorable Cause
BY SAM FIELDS
Guest Columnist
If you thought longing for slavery was Gone With The Wind, take a trip to good ol’ South Carolina.
Apparently there is a big part of South Carolina that isn’t the New South. It’s the Old South, the racist South.
There is an element in South Carolina that longs for the plantation life of Tara surrounded by slaves singing work songs as they pluck cotton from the fields.
I bring this up because in South Carolina, the descendants of Confederate soldiers this week celebrated the sesquicentennial of South Carolina’s secession from the Union.
The Secession Ball honors a dishonorable cause — a war the South caused and South Carolina started which left 600,000 dead. More than all our other wars combined.
Defenders of the event continue to publicly deny that Secession was about slavery. They will tell you that it was about state’s rights and the oppressive taxes that the North was imposing on them.
They are trying to rewrite history.
Beginning with South Carolina’s December 1860 Succession Statement, history says otherwise. Succession was a defense of slavery and a denunciation of the Abolitionist Movement. It attacks the refusal of Northern states to return fugitive slaves. Signers believed that the election of Abraham Lincoln, the first anti-slavery President, was a mortal threat to the “peculiar institution.
Slavery drove the Southern economy. This threat to slavery drove Secession.
You can no more separate slavery and Secession than you can separate government ownership of property from communism.
The “States’ Rights canard–the term is found in the imagination of Southerners, but not in the Constitution– has been used to defend slavery, Jim Crow and segregation. It was the hue and cry to oppose anti-lynching laws and every civil rights proposal that has come down the pike.
Let’s get down to the simple truth. They don’t like Blacks and they long for the days when they owned them and could use them like farm animals.
This past week, for a few hours, these South Carolina losers could pretend Appomattox never happened.
How sad they are. For unlike their heroine Scarlett O’Hara who wanted to “think about that tomorrow, all they have is a fanciful yesterday.
December 24th, 2010 at 4:07 pm
Masterful essay.
Is it any wonder that South Carolina is perhaps the reddest of red states?
Republicans and racism have more in common than just the first letter of the words.
December 24th, 2010 at 4:41 pm
@ Big D
Talk about rewriting history, it was a Republican President that freed the slaves, it was Republicans that gave blacks and women the right to vote and it was Republicans who passed all of the meaningful civil rights legislation.
South Carolina is a Democrat stronghold where Jessie Jackson won the primary convincingly.
I don’t know that I fully agree with Fields here, but you will find the states that hold on to the confederacy the most are more often D states. Do we have to name the outright racist D’s that have served congress. Byrd, Thurmond, et al
December 25th, 2010 at 12:44 pm
Dear Frog,
In case you have not read a newspaper in the last fifty years the racists in the Democratic party all became Republicans.
Last week Haley Barbour, the GOP governor of Miss, made it clear that nothing has changed. In his latest screed he defends the White Citizen’s Counsel that controlled Yazoo City.
His argument is that it was only “KKK Liteâ€.
Were they Democrats. Probably, but in name only.
Until FDR the GOP was the party of civil rights.
\
With the rise of the civil rights movement racists from the Dems took the only choice they could find–the GOP.
If asked about Lincoln I am sure that Barbour would concede he was ok except for the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation thing.
December 25th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Death frog….progressives freed the slaves, gave women and blacks the vote….Lincoln was a progressive in his time and would be a “D” today
December 25th, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Sam
If they ID themselves as Democrats you have to take that. If a person votes D but registered R and goes out and shoots up a school of blacks… We both know the headlines would be Racist Republican.
So to say they are D or R in name only is really a grasping at straws argument.
The fact is R or D matters not, they are opposite sides of the same coin. The power structure of each party gets idealists to fight against each other while they divide up the power.
Anyone who votes for a person soley on their party affiliation is wasting a vote
December 26th, 2010 at 12:38 pm
It is amazing that these North Carolinians cannot get over their war of occupation.
December 26th, 2010 at 6:03 pm
Sam. if you think things are better now, take a stroll through Collier City about 10 tonight and let me know how it went. You’d have been safe in 1860.