They Hate Their Emancipated President

Civil War historians have a difficult time explaining how America's Southern aristocracy convinced poor sharecroppers to fight a war on their behalf. The majority of Confederate soldiers who charged the cannonballs and bullets of the Union Army were rarely the monied aristocrats who started that war. They weren't the ones who owned plantations and slaves. But they were willing to fight a war so aristocrats could keep their slaves. We should be honest with ourselves about a war that killed 600,000 Americans. It was not a war about high ground principals like "states' rights," or "economic equality." Respected Civil War scholars have written mountains of books explaining that the driving force for that war was that an aristocracy wanted to perpetuate its slavery money machine. But it was different for the typical confederate soldier. Their war of "Northern Aggression" was ginned up more from a fear that their social status might fall to the point that there would be no class distinction between themselves and emancipated slaves.

The aristocratic plantation owners are back, and in 2009, they have a new batch of people willing to fight their unprincipaled war. These new aristocrats don't grow cotton. They are industrialists who don't want their billions taxed or regulated. They are modern mammoth health insurance companies that own huge portions of America's wealth. They are the petroleum and coal giants who will lose money with a sane American energy policy. And the thing they have in common with the old South slave owners is that they are still willing to divide America by ginning up hate, fear and racism to get what they want.

The Southern Civil War aristocrats orchestrated a virtual suicide mission for rebel "believers" in a way that disguised the aristocracy's selfish interests. To the soldiers, it was in part about impeding the progress of the black man. But to the aristocrat, it was simply about money. When Jimmy Carter made his claim that racism is the driving force behind most of the Obama detractors, he only stated half the problem.

The signs being flashed around at teabagger-type rallies these days depicting Obama as part monkey and part man are being carried by committed racists who originate on the low rungs of our intellectual food chain. But the rest of the story is that America's new plantation owners are helping to energize and finance the crowd that carries those signs.

The 21st Century version of plantation owners were thrilled to see South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson rally their frenzied rank and file. The small irony is that Wilson has the credentials to lead. After all, he was once a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. More importantly, just like the Limbaugh and Beck types, he has always been a voice for racism.

The racism alive in the crowd of unhinged crazies is angrier than it was 144 years ago. Because for this bunch, it's clear that they have lost in the war to stifle progress for black America. After all, they are the ones standing outside the gate of a White House where an emancipated black man sits as the most powerful, respected, and influential leader in the world.

 

 

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Comments

[SewaneeLeftist]

Excellent article, Mr. Papantonio, and good explanation of a perplexing paradox that endures to this day, where those who have the least to gain from perpetuating our current civil war are the most vociferous fighters for the side of racism and hate.

I saw this when we went through the civil rights struggle in my own rural/mountain TN county in the 60's, and it's horrible to see it happen again now.

Keep exposing the hideous hypocrisy of today's version of aristocracy playing on the fears and hatreds of the misguided, misinformed people so that they fight against their own best interests.

[hmfwic]

Here is what Mike Papantonio and Jimmy Carter and the brilliant thinkers on the American Left would have you believe of Americans right now:

* We would be more than willing to welcome cap-and-trade with open arms, even if we paid a thousand dollars or more extra every year for our energy use, if Barack Obama were only white.
* We would be dancing in the streets celebrating the dawning of government control of our health care if only Barack Obama were white.
* It would be just dandy if government bureaucrats rationed health care for our parents, as long as the president is white.
* We would jump at the chance of the government owning ALL of the auto manufacturing companies .. not just General Motors … if the president just didn’t have dark skin.
* Deficits? We don’t care about deficits! Make our children and grand children and great grand children pay through the nose for our president’s spending habits … just so long as the president isn’t black.
* We wouldn’t care if all illegal aliens were counted twice in the next Census … just so long as the president isn’t black.
* Forced unionization? Bring it on! We love card check! We love the idea of union goons threatening and intimidating workers to sign a card saying they want to belong to a union! What we don’t like is that a black president is pushing this idea.

[DreamerWeaver]

That's a very very strange listing that has the feel of hysteria about it. Sorry, but reading it made me feel queasy.

[WhiteNoise]

History not told by the winners...

The "emancipation" of the slaves was a tactic which had the effect of destroying the power base which the southern ruling class derived from slavery and "freeing" millions of slaves who then became available as a cheap labor for northern factories and mills. They augmented the huge number of poor whites, men and women, adults and children, who labored in atrocious conditions for long hours for pitiful pay.

The real reasons for the slaughter of more than six hundred thousand ordinary Americans on both sides were, in fact, just the same two old reasons for each and every war from the dawn of time until today: the insatiable greed of the ruling class for ever more wealth and power.

The northern ruling class, represented by Lincoln, drooling at the prospect of the cash to be made in the kind of large-scale industrialization occurring in Britain, wanted free land, a large pool of cheap labor, a central bank which would operate strictly in their interests and a "free" market surrounded by high tariffs to protect their own industrial operations and maximize their profits.

The southern ruling class, which had largely controlled the federal government since the Revolution, simply wanted to maintain the status quo and, most importantly, wanted no tariff barriers which would increase the cost of manufactured goods imported into the South from Europe which would inevitably lead to other countries putting rataliatory tariffs on the agricultural products exported from the South.

[DreamerWeaver]

I cannot agree with your characterization of President Lincoln. The man never drooled about anything. It simply didn't happen.

[RebaG]

Nothing new here. "Divide and conquer" has always worked well for the powerful. Citizen against immigrant, poor black against poor white, insured against uninsured.­...and on it goes.

[dynwit]

I teach American History at a state college in the Rocky Mountain West, and every semester I show my students exactly how the story was created that the Civil War was about states rights or economic equality. That story was deliberately created in the late 1800s by a group of southern academics who landed at Columbia University after the war. It spread unchecked throughout the nation, and it is repeated in southern schools even today. It was completely false, and it was a deliberate invention in order to rehabilitate the reputation of the South and make them look like the "true Americans" who had been fighting for liberty all along. Historians have only recently started to rectify that fairy tale, but after 140 years, it's a long, hard slog uphill.

[SewaneeLeftist]

Came to your post (and this article) very late, but your points are all good ones, dynwit. I grew up among the inheritors of the literary movement the Fugitives and the Agrarians in Sewanee, writers, poets, and essayists who built on this thinking to perpetrate the fiction of an ideal antebellum, preindustrial paradise. I've seen this kind of revisionist thinking at work my whole life, and we see it again when an Army colonel just in the last months used the old slaveholder idea that it was better for Americans of African descent to be slaves and Christian than be free and not saved. Good for you and your honest teaching.

[tyrdofwaitin]

More truth than poetry, Mike. The aristocrats of the oligarchy have lost the Civil War and now they're trying to undo atttempts at a just Reconstruction. The battle continues.­..