Re:For Decades, Southern States Saw Thanksgiving as an Act o...
by JumpCrisscross on Sunday November 25, 2018 @01:44PM
(#18528162)
> they assume that non-elite white southerners are either stupid or evil to the point where they will start an extremely brutal war who's explicit aims are to preserve the wealth of the elite at the cost of everyone else. This seems... unlikely
What were the dissenting poor supposed to do? Refuse a paying army job? Travel to the North to read up on the other side’s views? Before the modern era, most wars were fought for personal reasons involving the elite. Commoners enlisted because the army paid and offered opportunities to rise in social status.
The South was run like a feudal society:
“Among the many scholars who have worked on this question, V.O. Key is a distinguished political economist from the Southern University of Texas who devoted his life to offering a factual and definitive answer. He is a founder of American political economic studies -- he used scientific factual surveys and data rather than ideology and speculation. So this issue of how rich ‘plantation’ oligarchs repeatedly got poor white farmers to vote against their own interests in local elections is really no longer a mystery. For centuries, the oligarchs limited public education, and tightly controlled the media in the South. Travel was restricted in the South before the Civil War. Southern newspapers consistently lied to the voters. The sermons, school-books, political tracts, and newspapers repeatedly ran ‘stories’ intended to keep the population angry and afraid of Slave ‘rebellions’ and foreign influences. Achievements of the Slaves, or any brilliant black person, were systematically suppressed.
Professor Key factually documents the repeated behavior of the rich plantation owners in taking and maintaining political power. Very few of these feudal lords did much for their own communities and they did not build a middle class. The rulers blamed Negroes, and Yankees and foreigners, for the poverty and lack of infrastructure in the South. Southern politics in State and Nation by V. O. Key
More recent scholarship -- influenced by V.O. Key's scientific and mathematical methodology in ‘political economics’ -- continues to document the fact that at the time of the Civil War, the South was one of the wealthiest regions of the world. The oligarchs had a global lock on raw cotton production and could easily have won the Civil War by paying for an army three times bigger than anything the North could have produced.
In addition, the South was heavily-armed and each State funded a "State militia". The "militia" was conscripted from almost all able-bodied poor white Southern males. They were conscripted into press gangs to hunt down runaway slaves. The North had no equivalent ‘state militias’.“
What were the dissenting poor supposed to do? Refuse a paying army job? Travel to the North to read up on the other side’s views? Before the modern era, most wars were fought for personal reasons involving the elite. Commoners enlisted because the army paid and offered opportunities to rise in social status.
The South was run like a feudal society:
“Among the many scholars who have worked on this question, V.O. Key is a distinguished political economist from the Southern University of Texas who devoted his life to offering a factual and definitive answer. He is a founder of American political economic studies -- he used scientific factual surveys and data rather than ideology and speculation. So this issue of how rich ‘plantation’ oligarchs repeatedly got poor white farmers to vote against their own interests in local elections is really no longer a mystery. For centuries, the oligarchs limited public education, and tightly controlled the media in the South. Travel was restricted in the South before the Civil War. Southern newspapers consistently lied to the voters. The sermons, school-books, political tracts, and newspapers repeatedly ran ‘stories’ intended to keep the population angry and afraid of Slave ‘rebellions’ and foreign influences. Achievements of the Slaves, or any brilliant black person, were systematically suppressed.
Professor Key factually documents the repeated behavior of the rich plantation owners in taking and maintaining political power. Very few of these feudal lords did much for their own communities and they did not build a middle class. The rulers blamed Negroes, and Yankees and foreigners, for the poverty and lack of infrastructure in the South. Southern politics in State and Nation by V. O. Key
More recent scholarship -- influenced by V.O. Key's scientific and mathematical methodology in ‘political economics’ -- continues to document the fact that at the time of the Civil War, the South was one of the wealthiest regions of the world. The oligarchs had a global lock on raw cotton production and could easily have won the Civil War by paying for an army three times bigger than anything the North could have produced.
In addition, the South was heavily-armed and each State funded a "State militia". The "militia" was conscripted from almost all able-bodied poor white Southern males. They were conscripted into press gangs to hunt down runaway slaves. The North had no equivalent ‘state militias’.“
https://www.quora.com/If-the-majority-of-southerners-werent-...