The Atlantic - Latest Comments in What if?

Re: What if?

heedless — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 18:00:12 -0000

Wouldn't the vast majority of blacks have simply moved north as soon as the Confederacy ceased to keep them as slaves? Exodus, in other words.

This happened (though not on so massive a scale) in the aftermath of reconstruction even without the national (which would have been Confederate in our alternate history) government backing the Southern States in their race laws.

And Devilbunny, that was the funniest, cruelest put down I have seen in quite a while. Bravo.

Re: What if?

Alan — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 14:32:23 -0000

As Megan's Southernmost fan and also, coincidentally, from the American South, I have to comment on this.

I have no idea if slavery would have ceased to exist in the South in any reasonable time frame if the war hadn't happened. I *can* say, from having studied the history, that had circumstances been a little different slavery could possibly have been abolished in the South in the early 1800's. At that time, before the demagoguing politicians had frightened the masses with the fear of a slave revolt (at least one of which a demagoguing politician fabricated himself) - there was considerable Southern opinion against slavery. However, after half a century of harsher and harsher laws to prevent any possibility of a slave rebellion and hardening attitudes on the part of the public, it is hard to say when that peculiar institution might have ended.

On the other hand, I have seen political posters from 1890's North Carolina where a candidate was endorsed by both freed slaves AND the Ku Klux Klan. This was in the brief period between the occupation and the Jim Crow laws, where blacks and whites in the South got along fairly well. I'm not sure about the specifics of the rise of Jim Crow, but backlash might have been one factor. In any case, race relations in the South have always been complicated, and have seldom been quite the way Northerners pictured it.

What parallels exist in the modern USA? Discuss.

Re: What if?

Devilbunny — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 20:42:07 -0000

To the extent that said crackers would be in a different country, why on earth would Northern industrialists have given a damn what happened to them? Those guys didn't get rich by nursing stupid grudges.

And, for curiosity, why eff the south? Bad specific experiences, or just that you're politically diametrically opposed to them? (I am, as noted, not ignorant of the region's problems. I also see no clear way out. Remember the eugenecist judge who declared that three generations of imbeciles was enough? I've met plenty of families that were fortunate to escape the sterilization era, largely because they lived so damned far out of the way.)

Re: What if?

Eff the South — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:43:34 -0000

Resourceful Northern capitalists and cracker-haters would have gotten weapons into the hands of the former slaves.

Result: More dead crackers!

And good riddance. There is no group that deserved slaughter more.

Re: What if?

Devilbunny — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 01:55:15 -0000

Wow, really useful commentary there. No, the crackers would have won, easily. After all, they were the ones who could carry guns legally.

Re: What if?

Eff The South — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 14:07:35 -0000

It would have ended with a lot of dead crackers.

In other words, the happiest ending of all.

Re: What if?

Devilbunny — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 12:49:09 -0000

I'm a southerner, so take this as you will.

Race in the South is a proxy for class and culture in a very deep-seated way that is difficult to understand for those who have never lived here. A tremendous amount of nominally racist feeling is really more akin to keeping the Italians out of your neighborhood in 1920 New York. That isn't to say that there isn't genuine, hard-core racism here -- there is. But it's only one aspect of the whole race issue, and there are significant network effects to racist behaviors.

My house, for example, is a 3BR 2.5BA 1800 sq ft home with a 2-car garage on 1/3 acre in a neighborhood mostly inhabited by couples and families in their late twenties to early forties. An identical house in a neighborhood that was equally safe - but black - would be worth a third less. An identical house in one of our 97% white suburbs - where you can send your kids to public schools - would be worth about 20% more. A lot of families lost the value of their home because they didn't move out in time; the neighborhoods went from white, to mixed, to black, to ghetto. You can buy those houses now - not that they're in good shape - for under $25 000.

That didn't have to happen, and there are two ways in which it could be so: either people could all simultaneously stop being racist, classist, and wanting to live with "people like us"; or you could just ban the blacks from going to your schools or moving into your neighborhoods.

I'll let you guess which one would have happened in the CSA.

I don't think the Civil War was the best way things could have ended, but the best way wasn't going to happen. It would have been interesting to see different plans for the aftermath of slavery, as opposed to simply saying "Well, you're free!" But there were plenty of reasons why that wasn't going to happen, and didn't.

Re: What if?

Rob Lyman — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 12:20:40 -0000

Joe, Josh's point is not that slavery is the greatest evil the world has ever known, but that this argument for the Civil War seems to suggest that it is. We wouldn't spend so many lives to end (what amounts to) slavery in North Korea, so why is the intervention in the South justified?

Re: What if?

Joe Grossberg — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 10:54:51 -0000

"Why is it that the American South is the one place where the world's greatest prejudice ever can be found?"

On what basis do you rank this "greatest prejudice" as worse than, say, Nazi Germany's treatment of the Jews, Hutu-Tutsi slaughter or the Turkish massacres of Armenians?

Heck, slavery isn't even the worst atrocity in US history; the centuries of genocide against Native Americans were even worse.

Re: What if?

Josh — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 09:18:01 -0000

Why is it that the American South is the one place where the world's greatest prejudice ever can be found? People of different races, colors and religions have been living together for thousands of years, often enslaving each other, often hating each other, and yet today most of those slaves and much of that hate is long gone. What special circumstances led to this one place being so bad that it needed intervention when there are so many other enslaved people who did not require 1/2 million dead to be freed?

That's the question I want answered, because then I think we'd be able to come up with a rule as to when intervention is required. As in "In the American South we saw situations X, Y and Z, from which no humanitarian good can ever emerge without massive intervetion from the good guys." Then we can look to N. Korea or Darfur or any of the other places where evil seems to exist (or the hundreds of places where evil used to exist and now doesn't) and say "See, this only has X but not Y and Z so there's no reason for intervention here."