General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
In_The_Wind
(72,300 posts)rug
(82,333 posts)I had never heard of Newton Knight. Amazing amount of class consciousness on display as well, given it's set in southeast Mississippi.
Thor_MN
(11,843 posts)I'm not sure that he would have done what his ancestor did.
rug
(82,333 posts)By comparison, West Virginia was a snap secession. But this was in the deepest part of the Confederacy.
TexasProgresive
(12,158 posts)That would be interesting for a conservative.
applegrove
(118,778 posts)African American DNA.
csziggy
(34,137 posts)Long, but very interesting with a bit of history and a good amount of modern perspective.
A new Hollywood movie looks at the tale of the Mississippi farmer who led a revolt against the Confederacy
By Richard Grant; Photographs by William Widmer
With two rat terriers trotting at his heels, and a long wooden staff in his hand, J.R. Gavin leads me through the woods to one of the old swamp hide-outs. A tall white man with a deep Southern drawl, Gavin has a stern presence, gracious manners and intense brooding eyes. At first I mistook him for a preacher, but he’s a retired electronic engineer who writes self-published novels about the rapture and apocalypse. One of them is titled Sal Batree, after the place he wants to show me.
I’m here in Jones County, Mississippi, to breathe in the historical vapors left by Newton Knight, a poor white farmer who led an extraordinary rebellion during the Civil War. With a company of like-minded white men in southeast Mississippi, he did what many Southerners now regard as unthinkable. He waged guerrilla war against the Confederacy and declared loyalty to the Union.
In the spring of 1864, the Knight Company overthrew the Confederate authorities in Jones County and raised the United States flag over the county courthouse in Ellisville. The county was known as the Free State of Jones, and some say it actually seceded from the Confederacy. This little-known, counterintuitive episode in American history has now been brought to the screen in Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games) and starring a grimy, scruffed-up Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight.
Knight and his men, says Gavin, hooking away an enormous spider web with his staff and warning me to be careful of snakes, “had a number of different hide-outs. The old folks call this one Sal Batree. Sal was the name of Newt’s shotgun, and originally it was Sal’s Battery, but it got corrupted over the years.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-free-state-jones-180958111/#YbTA1uFsdIKHmh72.99
I'm looking forward to this one!
I'm looking forward to learning as much as I can about these people.
Why don't they just teach it in schools?
Hoppy
(3,595 posts)There is not enough time in the school year to teach both so we all know that Newty-toot-toot is too great a patriot to ignore.
csziggy
(34,137 posts)That I didn't learn anything about this. She taught us about the "War of Northern Aggression" and spent six weeks on the propaganda in "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and how unfairly it portrayed Southern slave owners. 
Fortunately I had read enough history on my own to have a better perspective - but many of the students in my school did not. I suspect most of them are now Trump voters. 
DawgHouse
(4,019 posts)I've never actually heard it called the War of Northern Aggression by anyone except Granny Clampett. 
csziggy
(34,137 posts)There was an active KKK group in the area. I always thought one member was my teacher's husband.
Brother Buzz
(36,463 posts)I read it last March in my Podunk library. Good read.
Ex Lurker
(3,816 posts)Brickbat
(19,339 posts)black suffering—and more Matthew McConaughey than you ever thought imaginable?"
http://www.thestranger.com/film/2016/06/22/24257011/matthew-mcconaughey-cant-stop-being-a-badass-white-savior-in-the-free-state-of-jones
What was slavery like for black people? Look at Matthew McConaughey's tortured face as he thinks about how bad it must be and you will know.
Watch Matthew McConaughey beat his chest and tear at his hair in anguish as time and time again his friends and family are killed for his badassery.
Watch Matthew McConaughey slowly fall in love with a slave woman who had previously saved his child with his first wife (whom he still hasn't bothered to ask about), with whom he will eventually enter into a common-law marriage.
Don't watch Matthew McConaughey mention that his to-be wife—the former slave Rachel—was not owned by a random white dude but by his own grandpa (as was the case with the actual Newton Knight, the guy that Matthew McConaughey is pretending to be in this film). They forgot to include that part.
rug
(82,333 posts)Rolling Stone hates it too.
BTW, Moses Washington's body was not simply "mutilated", he was castrated.
Brickbat
(19,339 posts)
rug
(82,333 posts)In the movie Moses Washington was lynched on his way back from registering freed slaves to vote.
it also showed the organizational meetings of the Union League in southeast Mississippi right after the 15th Amendment was passed. I had a vague impression that the Union League was some wealthy social club. Was I ever wrong.
By the end of 1867 it seemed that virtually every black voter in the South had enrolled in the Union League, the Loyal League, or some equivalent local political organization. Meetings were generally held in a black church or school.
The activities of the Union League in the defeated South during the early Reconstruction years did not meet with much favor among local whites. They feared the Union League was dominated by Radical Republicans intent on mobilizing the black vote and disenfranchising white Democrats, in particular former Confederate soldiers whom they characterized as traitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_League#South
AntiBank
(1,339 posts)rug
(82,333 posts)She has great insights about vacuum cleaner salesmen as well.
https://theawl.com/when-a-door-to-door-vacuum-salesman-has-an-existential-crisis-in-your-living-room-749d64cb717b#.mb74kt99l
MinnieBlum
(38 posts)She's just trying to stoke the outrage machine. It's not a white savior movie. And she doesn't speak for all black people.
MinnieBlum
(38 posts)eviscerates the commenters (Blow in the NYTimes, Vann Newkirk and The Stranger's blogger) claiming it's a "white savior" movie. It isn't. He does make interesting arguments. They all ignored the fact that the Knight Company's struggle was essentially a class struggle which crossed racial lines. It's a great movie btw. Great performances and a story that needed to be told.
The right-wing, racialist attacks on the film Free State of Jones
By David Walsh
30 June 2016
The new film written and directed by Gary Ross, Free State of Jones, about a white farmer in Mississippi, Newton Knight, who led an insurrection against the Confederacy from 1863 to 1865, has come under sharp attack by right-wing elements in the American media. By right-wing elements, we mean the “new right” of identity politics advocates.
Underneath the layers of condescension and cynicism one detects in the various attacks on Free State of Jones an abysmal ignorance of American history combined with deep hostility to the working class, and to white workers in particular.
A sprawling industry of race- or gender-obsessed academics, journalists and pundits has come into being in the US over the past several decades. These upper-middle-class elements are engaged in a ferocious struggle for privileges and position. Selfish and blind, they regard race or gender as the essential foundation of society and view all phenomena through that false prism. These petty bourgeois elements make up an increasingly important wing of the establishment; they are one of the pillars of the Democratic Party.
It is only natural that such forces would respond with ill-concealed hostility to a work such as Free State of Jones, which cuts across the racial paradigm and presents an important episode in American history in terms of class conflict. When the various critics decry the film’s “colorblindness” or its “astounding oblivion about race,” this is what they mean: it does not conform to the picture they want to build up, of race as the driving force in social life and of the American population as hopelessly dominated by bigotry and prejudice.
“White Savior, Rape and Romance?,” by Charles Blow in the New York Times is one of the most venomous and symptomatic of the hostile commentaries on the new film.
After blandly noting that the story of Free State of Jones is “quite interesting” and briefly describing the film’s plot, Blow observes snidely, “It is easy to see why this story would appeal to Hollywood executives.”
That’s fine, except the film did not appeal to Hollywood executives, and Ross, despite having directed the enormously successful The Hunger Games, had “a huge difficulty getting it made,” as he told an interviewer. Ross continued, “I had trouble getting it made because it’s a drama, and we’re in a different kind of a popcorn universe now.”
Blow goes on to observe that Free State of Jones, as opposed to Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave, “emphasizes white heroism and centers on the ally instead of the enslaved.
“It tries desperately to cast the Civil War, and specifically dissent within the Confederacy, as more a populism-versus-elitism class struggle in which poor white men were forced to fight a rich white man’s war and protect the cotton trade, rather than equally a conflict about the moral abhorrence of black slavery.
“Throughout, there is the white liberal insistence that race is merely a subordinate construction of class.”
First, there is the matter of historical reality. One has to ask Blow: Is the storyline of Free State of Jones fabricated or did these events take place? Newton Knight and his group, which included escaped slaves, drove the Confederate forces out of a considerable portion of southeastern Mississippi. They had the resources, the supplies, the support and the know-how to do it.
It is not a slight against the enslaved blacks in the South as a whole—savagely oppressed and also widely dispersed, like any rural agricultural population—to point out that it took the Union army, which counted in its ranks free black men and former slaves, to smash the slavocracy and its military forces. These are historical facts, Blow cannot simply have it anyway he likes.
Some 400,000 Northern soldiers, the best elements of them ideologically and politically prepared and motivated, died in the struggle to end chattel slavery. It could not have been destroyed without their sacrifices.
Blow’s reference to the “desperate” attempt to paint the Civil War as “a populism-versus-elitism class struggle” rather than “a conflict about the moral abhorrence of black slavery” is false and misses the point entirely.
At its heart, the American Civil War was a class conflict, the completion of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the establishment of the conditions for modern, industrial capitalist society. The most socially and politically conscious elements in the Union army and the North, along with such foreign observers as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, recognized that the anti-slavery cause represented the line of social progress and would ultimately bring into being or vastly strengthen the force that would do away with bourgeois society and exploitation altogether, the working class. Knight’s elemental, plebeian principle that “No man shall stay poor so that another man can get rich” objectively points in the direction of egalitarianism and socialism.
Blow slightingly refers to Knight as the mere “ally,” as though such an impoverished farmer had no stake in the struggle against the Confederacy. The fundamental cause of the Civil War was the existence of slavery, but that hardly meant the only interested party was the slave population. The yeoman farmer, the small shopkeeper and merchant, the nascent working class toiling in mills and factories, the urban petty bourgeois and, for that matter, the industrialist, all the socially progressive elements in American society, were agreed—with varying degrees of commitment—on the burning need to do away with the slave system. That “national unity” rapidly disappeared, of course, and a new, great conflict arose: between the workers and the rural oppressed, on the one hand, and the big capitalists, on the other.
The “morally abhorrent” character of slavery was bound up with its historically regressive character, not simply its brutality. Slavery in the ancient world was not appalling to the most sensitive and profound of the Greek thinkers, such as Aristotle and Plato, who took it “for granted” and could not “imagine a society without it,” in the words of one historian.
As Engels profoundly explained, the final causes of all social changes and revolutions are not to be found “in men’s brains,” but “in the economics of each particular epoch.” The growing perception that existing institutions are “unreasonable and unjust” emerges from the fact that the social order “is no longer in keeping” with changes in the mode of production and exchange. In the case of slavery in the US, the growth of industrial capitalism signed its death warrant. This is not to denigrate those who were horrified by the slave system, but, in the end, their honorable ethical response was a reflection of the fact that a new economic and social order had come into being and could not co-exist with the system in place in the South.
In terms of brutality, the child laborers in Manchester, England, where the average life expectancy for a working class man was 17 in 1840, who “were harassed to the brink of death by excess of labour ... [who] were flogged, fettered and tortured in the most exquisite refinement of cruelty; ... [who] were in many cases starved to the bone while flogged to their work and ... even in some instances ... were driven to commit suicide” (according to a contemporary commentator cited by Marx), were treated with no more kindness than the slaves.
Blow’s reference to the supposed “insistence” by “white liberals … that race is merely a subordinate construction of class” is nonsensical. In any case, he means Marxism. American liberalism is a corpse. At their healthiest and most positive, liberals in the US viewed racism as a socio-economic problem, bound up with the aftermath of the Civil War and the ideological efforts by the ruling class to convince the white poor that at least they belonged to the “aristocracy” of the white race.
Blow, characteristic of our period and the intellectual degeneracy of the American ruling elite, has embraced a racialist interpretation of history. The Times columnist is not a fascist, but he thinks very much like one. Certainly, an extreme nationalist would recognize and sympathize with his conceptions. His view of American history corresponds to Trotsky’s description of the Hitlerite outlook: “History is viewed as the emanation of the race. The qualities of the race are construed without relation to changing social conditions. Rejecting ‘economic thought’ as base, National Socialism [Nazism] descends a stage lower: from economic materialism it appeals to zoologic materialism.”
Blow was born in 1970. During the entire period of his intellectual development he has seen no significant struggle of the working class and has had no acquaintance either with the great social conflicts of which the civil rights movement itself was an expression. He knows nothing of the impact of the CIO industrial union movement in transforming the black working class and urban population.
Blow appears to be unaware of the critical role played by the Russian Revolution and the Communist Party—without entering here into the consequences of its Stalinist degeneration—in the development of the most important black intellectuals and artists in the US. He seems to know nothing about the attraction of the Soviet Union for figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Claude McKay, Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. And why did James Baldwin join the Young People’s Socialist League, at that time considered a “Trotskyist” organization? Why did Malcolm X reject racially based politics toward the end of this life and engage in discussions with the Socialist Workers Party? Why did George Jackson begin reading Marx and Trotsky in prison? It is impossible, generally speaking, to understand the political development of African Americans without a consideration of left-wing politics.
Many black youth moving to the left in the 1960s read E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie (1957) eagerly and with great interest. In the book, Frazier, a sociologist, offered a critical analysis of the aspiring black middle class. As the University of Missouri Press comments, “The book met with mixed reviews and harsh criticism from the black middle and professional class. Yet Frazier stood solidly by his argument that the black middle class was marked by conspicuous consumption, wish fulfillment, and a world of make-believe.” Oh, what a field day he would have in our time!
It is not Blow’s fault, of course, when he was born, two years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., but he belongs to a generation for whom advancement has been associated with quotas, affirmative action and other perks coaxed out of or extorted from the ruling elite. It is not accidental that this several-decade period has produced no major intellectual or artistic figure, no Du Bois, no Wright, no Baldwin.
Blow (like Vann Newkirk II in his equally repugnant comment, “The Faux-Enlightened Free State of Jones,” in the Atlantic) is offended by Free State of Jones because it argues that great historical events cannot be explained in racial or ethnic terms. On the basis of the Times columnist’s outlook, one simply cannot understand why hundreds of thousands of white people died to end slavery.
And what of the great abolitionists, more mere “white saviors” in Blow’s eyes? The continuity between the anti-slavery fight and the modern labor movement is embodied in such figures as Wendell Phillips, who presided over the Labor-Reform Convention in 1871, which declared “war with the wages system, which demoralizes alike the hirer and the hired, cheats both, and enslaves the working-man; war with the present system of finance, which robs labor, and gorges capital, makes the rich richer, and the poor poorer, and turns a republic into an aristocracy of capital.” Phillips envisioned a society “with no rich men and no poor men in it, all mingling in the same society … all opportunities equal, nobody so proud as to stand aloof, nobody so humble as to be shut out.”
The American Revolution and the Civil War, which completed what had been begun “four score and seven years” earlier, were titanic world events. The very survival of the North American republic and the international project of democracy depended on the outcome of the latter conflict.
In his letter to Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx, on behalf of the International Working Men’s Association, explained that the war of American independence, “the idea of one great Democratic Republic,” had given “the first impulse … to the European revolution of the eighteenth century.” Just as the American Revolution, Marx noted, “initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes.” The Paris Commune, the first sustained effort by the workers to take power and hold it, erupted only half a dozen years later.
One final point:
Blow asserts that the “the most disturbing feature of the film is the near erasure of slavery altogether and the downplaying of slave rape in particular to further a Shakespearean love story.” There is something quite disoriented here. First of all, the film does not erase slavery at all. It is the great social question that hovers over everything, but it does not make every other drama of the Civil War era disappear. The transformation of Knight into an anti-slavery fighter is not insignificant, and it hints at the revolutionary potential of wide layers of the American people. Blow is either hostile or indifferent to this.
Blow wants more violence and brutality, presumably à la Quentin Tarantino’s vile Django Unchained (which the Times columnist “found a profound love story with an orgy of excesses and muddled moralities”). How would that change matters, except to appeal to the worst instincts of the film’s audience?
When he sneers at the “Shakespearean love story” in Free State of Jones, presumably referring to the love between Newton Knight and Rachel, the former slave, one only feels his essential hostility toward the very possibility of interracial relationships.
Blow criticizes Victoria E. Bynum in The Free State of Jones: Mississippi's Longest Civil War (2001) for referring to “encounters” between Newton Knight and the slave Rachel, to “interracial liaisons” and to Rachel having “been ‘initiated’ into the world of interracial relations.” Blow exclaims demagogically: “Encounters? Liaisons? Initiated? Sexual relations? As long as she was a slave this was rape! Always. Period.”
Bynum wrote a strong reply to Blow on June 27. She noted, “In fact, there were many such ‘relationships’—yes, relationships—that were consensual in the antebellum South, and those relationships were forbidden by law (most, but not all, were between whites and ‘free people of color.’) … By mischaracterizing my remark in that paragraph, Mr. Blow charges me with ignoring the sexual exploitation of enslaved women. Anyone who knows my work knows that nothing could be further from the truth. In The Free State of Jones, however, I analyze the relationship of Newton Knight and Rachel Knight on its own terms, and not within the trope of slave rape. The relationship between the two began in the midst of the Civil War. Newt Knight was not Rachel’s slavemaster; they were fighting together against the Confederacy. They lived together until her death in 1889. Not every sexual relationship between a Southern white man and a woman of color was an act of rape, albeit many if not most were exploitative. To level such a blanket charge trivializes rape and ignores the complex stories of interracial relations during the eras of slavery and segregation that historians like myself have struggled for years to bring to light.”
Blow’s hostility toward interracial relationships underlines the extent to which this modern upper middle class identity politics crowd has absorbed the racialist and exclusivist views of the old segregationists.
rug
(82,333 posts)Last edited Mon Jul 4, 2016, 07:23 AM - Edit history (1)
I was surprised that this movie even acknowledged the class aspect of the Civil War. The Confederacy was rotten from top to bottom, explicitly benefiting only the wealthy whose wealth and means of production were land and human beings. The scenes of the Confederate quartermasters seizing the corn and pigs of white farmers to fuel its racist army were eye-opening.
It sounds like Blow was describing the movie Glory
The director did not take this movie lightly:
As the war continued, class divisions were exacerbated and became increasingly hard to ignore. Even the common soldier was known to express anger at the planter class and the cotton economy of the slavocracy. In the film, Newt sarcastically goads Sumrall when he claims they are fighting for honor: “Well, that’s good, Will, 'cause I’d sure hate to be fighting for cotton.” It was hardly a rare sentiment. 4.3
Threatened with the draft, Newt served in the Confederate Army but refused to fight. As he said “I didn’t want to fight. I told 'em I’d help nurse sick soldiers if they wanted.”
http://freestateofjones.info/
MinnieBlum
(38 posts)It was also a story of class struggle as Walsh pointed out.
Brother Buzz
(36,463 posts)A new Hollywood movie looks at the tale of the Mississippi farmer who led a revolt against the Confederacy
With two rat terriers trotting at his heels, and a long wooden staff in his hand, J.R. Gavin leads me through the woods to one of the old swamp hide-outs. A tall white man with a deep Southern drawl, Gavin has a stern presence, gracious manners and intense brooding eyes. At first I mistook him for a preacher, but he’s a retired electronic engineer who writes self-published novels about the rapture and apocalypse. One of them is titled Sal Batree, after the place he wants to show me.
I’m here in Jones County, Mississippi, to breathe in the historical vapors left by Newton Knight, a poor white farmer who led an extraordinary rebellion during the Civil War. With a company of like-minded white men in southeast Mississippi, he did what many Southerners now regard as unthinkable. He waged guerrilla war against the Confederacy and declared loyalty to the Union.
In the spring of 1864, the Knight Company overthrew the Confederate authorities in Jones County and raised the United States flag over the county courthouse in Ellisville. The county was known as the Free State of Jones, and some say it actually seceded from the Confederacy. This little-known, counterintuitive episode in American history has now been brought to the screen in Free State of Jones, directed by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games) and starring a grimy, scruffed-up Matthew McConaughey as Newton Knight.
Knight and his men, says Gavin, hooking away an enormous spider web with his staff and warning me to be careful of snakes, “had a number of different hide-outs. The old folks call this one Sal Batree. Sal was the name of Newt’s shotgun, and originally it was Sal’s Battery, but it got corrupted over the years.”
<snip>
Matthew McConaughey thought the Free State of Jones script was the most exciting Civil War story he had ever read, and knew immediately that he wanted to play Newt Knight. In Knight’s defiance of both the Confederate Army and the deepest taboos of Southern culture McConaughey sees an uncompromising and deeply moral leader. He was “a man who lived by the Bible and the barrel of a shotgun,” McConaughey says in an email. “If someone—no matter what their color—was being mistreated or being used, if a poor person was being used by someone to get rich, that was a simple wrong that needed to be righted in Newt’s eyes....He did so deliberately, and to the hell with the consequences.” McConaughey sums him up as a “shining light through the middle of this country’s bloodiest fight. I really kind of marveled at him.”
<much more, and well worth the read>
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-free-state-jones-180958111/#T2tpEQd8ZXUXB6vq.99
rug
(82,333 posts)rug
(82,333 posts)TexasProgresive
(12,158 posts)In 1961 I asked my 6th grade English teacher to suggest books on the Civil War. One that he recommended was Tap Roots by Mississippi journalist James Street. It is a novel part of a series about the Dabney family. Tap Roots is a fictionalized account of the Jones county secession from the CSA. I didn't have a clue that it was inspired by Newton Knight and Jones county. All I knew is I loved the Dabneys and there courageous fight against the Army of Mississippi. And then along comes Victoria Bynum Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History
Texas State University, San Marcos, TX and her book, The Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War. University of North Carolina Press, 2001. This book told the real story that had entertained me as a child.
I read it and then found a copy of Tap Roots in my local Half Priced Books store. In reading that as an adult with the knowledge of Prof. Bynum's book I began to realize that the "solid south" was a myth. The idea that all people are of one mind is really a falsehood. Agnew (Spiro of the "silent majority)had one thing right there are a lot of people who keep their opinions to themselves, either for lack of courage or some personal reasons.
Prof. Bynum's thoughts on the movie: Why I’m excited about the movie “The Free State of Jones
https://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/2016/06/04/why-im-excited-about-the-movie-the-free-state-of-jones/
As is usual in these things one thing leads to another. In Tap Roots there is reference to a book by Hinton Rowan Helper, 1829-1909 titled The impending crisis of the South: how to meet it. I optained a copy through inter library loan and read it. This image is a samle of Helper's book that was being read by Southerns who were against slavery. One thing to note many were still racists but they were against slavery for their own mostly economic reasons.
Keith Alexander of Tap Roots in reference to the few great land and slave owners in Mississippi:
Bottom of pg 137 to top of 138, Tap Roots James Street The Book League of America 1942"Shall these men be your Masters? Shall this be a government of the minority? The crux of the slavery question is whether or not this institution will be recognized in the new territories. Do you want your children, who must settle these territories, to compete with slave labor? Slavery has doomed the South. We have only three classes - the very rich, the very poor, ad slaves. There can be no prosperity or liverty until we have a prosperous middle class. Our leaders thump their chests and shout the holy doctrine of states' rights. Actually their doctrine is imperium in imperio - an empire within an empire."
References:
Scanned copy of The impending crisis of the South: how to meet it./ By Hinton Rowan Helper.
Helper, Hinton Rowan, 1829-1909.
New York: A. B. Burdick, 1860.
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=moa;idno=ABT7224
Tap Roots James Street The Book League of America 1942
Professor Vicky Bynum's blog Renegade South
https://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/
And her book page:
https://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/publications-2/
rug
(82,333 posts)Somehow, I think we've blown a great opportunity with the centennial of the Civil War to examine exactly how much the cancer of slavery has shaped this country.
TexasProgresive
(12,158 posts)My mother grew up in Frederick, MD which is right on the border with Pennsylvania. She said that they were still fighting the war in that town. Neighbors and relatives were hating each other for their stance on the war, the South, the North, the union, the confederacy and slavery.
But most people today really don't have informed opinions about this period of our history which is a scar healed over a festering infection. It needs to be lanced and brought into the clean disinfecting sunshine of the truth. But what I have learned from history text books is that they report anything but the truth. It is more like somebody's "truth."
Many argue that slavery was the reason for the war. There is some truth in that but like most wars it seems that economic forces play a strong undercurrent. We humans are complex but often we refuse take that into consideration, preferring instead to narrow our view to one or two "facts" that appeal to our sense of justice or whatever. William of Occam that in explaining a thing no more assumptions should be made than are necessary.That is true but to ignore real facts that don't agree with ones sense of things is to make huge assumptions.
Until we look at all the facts and all the evil that came out of the war between the states we will never be healed as a nation. I really think that was President Lincoln's intention but we will never get to know because of Mr. John Wilkes Booth.
Sorry for the rant. I have only wanted to be told the truth about things since childhood.
rogerashton
(3,920 posts)Do see it. I did see a little support for Blow's "white savior" comment -- particularly when Newt is teaching the fugitive slaves (who saved his life) to fire a shotgun -- I read somewhere that slaves in Mississippi were often required to supplement their own food supply by hunting, but perhaps that's not so; but anyway their role in the rebellion seemed to me to be more passive than it might have been -- and on the other side the Trotskyist World Socialist Web Site gives a rebuttal that is a little far on the, well, Trotskyist side. But it is important for white people to know that there were white people like Newt Knight.
I didn't. I grew up in the South at a time when the Confederacy was romanticized everywhere, but I was puzzled why some of my ancestors didn't fight for the "glorious cause" of the Confederacy. I was past fifty when I learned that it was because, as slaveholders, they were exempt.
And a lot of the response on the World Socialist Web Site is absolutely right.
rug
(82,333 posts)I grew up in NYC and the Confederacy was as real to me as Krypton.
Yet it still casts its malignant shadow.
underpants
(182,877 posts)I had heard it was going to be a movie and apparently the director took 10 years to make it. Looking forward to seeing it.
rug
(82,333 posts)underpants
(182,877 posts)Historians were falling all over themselves to declare its inaccuracy. I shortly realized that most of the criticism came from what I call the "Southern excuse industry". This is different than just the "Lost Cause" this is an established current infrastructure to shape how the Civil War is seen. They still have monthly magazines about it.
"Free State" was quite shocking to me because living in Richmond I am literally surrounded by the excuse industry. I drive by statues everyday. They still have the White House museum downtown. Jones showed that there were people, religious abolishinists, who saw past their time. The book pointed out that not all Southerners supported seccession either - two different things. And that the 20 Slave rule (I think it was) crushed the Confederates' spirit from within. The books also pointed out how the middle officers were inept inheritors of position and openly disdainful of the people they commanded.
rogerashton
(3,920 posts)I had to keep reminding myself that the monuments in the village squares were not "Confederate Monuments."
By the way, another group of resisters who should not be forgotten were the German settlers near Comfort, Texas. They had not come to North America to live in a Confederacy but in the American Union. They tried to get away to Mexico but were pursued and massacred by Confederate irregulars, a clear war crime in a war that had many war crimes. My Pennsylfawnische-Dietsch uncle was pretty proud when he showed me their monument near Comfort, where he lived at that time. The monument says "Immer Treue der Union."
underpants
(182,877 posts)Thanks.
One of the more odd stories I ever came across was on my honeymoon 13 years ago. We decided to got to Charleston SC for some reason. One day we want out to Middleton Place. Rice plantation. Signers of the Declaration and act of secession. Part of the presentation was how wonderful life was for the slaves. They had work quotas that could be fulfilled by spouses and then they were free to do whatever interested them. Pottery, their own gardening, music, art, hunting..... hold it. Hunting? Another person in the group stopped the guide there. With guns? Well usually with bows and arrows the guide said but some of the more trusted ones would be allowed to hunt with rifles. Several people laughed out loud. Giving a gun to a slave was strictly against the law.
The young guide had no idea that the story she'd been given was ridiculous. They made it sound like this 21st century outside the box management structure. You just knocked out your rice picking and it was a self fulfillment wonderland.
