Georgia
Sen. Robert Toombs of Georgia delivers his farewell speech to the U.S. Senate:
“Very well; you not only want to break down our constitutional rights; you not only want to upturn our social system; your people not only steal our slaves and make them freemen to vote against us; but you seek to bring an inferior race in a condition of equality, socially and politically, with our own people.
Well, sir, the question of slavery moves not the people of Georgia one half as much as the fact that you insult their rights as a community. You abolitionists are right when you say there are thousands and tens of thousands of men in Georgia, and all over the South, who do not own slaves. A very large portion of the people of Georgia own none of them.
In the mountains, there are comparatively but few of them; but no part of our people are more loyal to their race and country than our bold and brave mountain population: and every flash of the electric wires brings me cheering news from our mountaintops and our valleys, that these sons of Georgia are excelled by none of their countrymen in loyalty to their rights, the honor, and the glory of the Commonwealth.
They say, and well say: This is our question; we want no negro equality, no negro citizenship; we want no mongrel race to degrade our own; and as one man they would meet you on the border with the sword in one hand and the torch in the other. They would drive you from our borders, and make you walk over the blighted ruins of our fair land.
We will tell you when we choose to abolish this thing; it must be done under our direction and according to our will; our own, our native land shall determine this question and not the abolitionists of the North. That is the spirit of our freemen; beware of them.”
They would run into Connie Chastain at the border marching at the head of a negro regiment to the tune of John Brown’s Body.
“but no part of our people are more loyal to their race and country than our bold and brave mountain population: ”
that my people. I’m inordinately proud of my Southron mountain heritage and that great men have spoken so well of us over the years
Hunter, I haven’t delved into the very long HW vs CC threads but can you quickly encapsulate what is going on for the others. I have read some of her stuff and I can’t say that I find her to necessarily be an ‘anti-racist’, whatever that is supposed to mean, and she is a defender of the flag. Should we not support these people against yankee trash like that guy from Massachusetts instead of tearing our own down?
Not looking for a flame war but I am trying to formulate my own thinking about this issue and I admit that your school of thought is much better documented than the ‘heritage not hate’ crowd with the search for Black Confederates. They are interesting in the few cases they have evidence only as historical novelties and nothing more.
…With William Wilberforce and Oludah Equiano bringing up a battery
of black artillery and Will Smith with a squadron of cavalry on the flank.
Amazing post, Hunter! It’s incredible how some things never change.
I watched LOTR “The Two Towers” last night with my son and couldn’t get my mind off the West’s current situation–so many parallels. I see non-DWL, straight white males as Eomer and the army loyal to their people who were “banished forthwith from the Kingdom of Rohan” by Grima Wormtongue (DWL crowd who pretend to speak for the founding fathers and were simply enriching Rohan with Uruks, Orcs and Wild Men diversity). King Theoden I see as the white elite, whose minds are held in thrall by the DWL spells. Finally, I see websites like yours as the Aragorn/Legolas/Gimli team who face off with Grima Wormtongue. I’m still wondering who will be our Gandalf, that frees the white elite from the DWL spell, leading to the expulsion of DWL’s from Rohan.
You know it’s bad when I can’t even watch a movie without worrying about this stuff.
Who are Hobbits then?
I’ve always seen them as the country folk around Oxfordshire.
I think we are the Elves always pushed west.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/03/07/30-students-in-racial-brawl-at-california-high-school_n_1327722.html
when you see what we have been forced to leave behind, we are rapidly “heading west”.
Let the Latino’s have at them. We get to stand back and watch the show unfold.
John, the Hobbits are alive, as are the Ents, and when they’re sufficiently stirred and convinced they will be, as M.F. fears, most persistent and virulent.
Wayne, I fully agree, except that I think there may never be any one, individual Gandalf, and let’s not look for or believe in any magic.
Mosin Nagant: Agree 100%, and I don’t believe in magic. It’s not as simple as casting out some spell.
I think the hobbits could represent our children and grandchildren, maybe. Not sure about Ents.
It just amazes me when I watch LOTR how a movie like this slipped past, that’s what intrigues me.
Yes, how did it manage to slip by the media censors, so far, and with so little corruption of the original?
The Ents are the most interesting analogy, I think: Once numerous and active, but for a long time mysteriously declining, dying out childless (WHY did their WIVES desert them?) and intensely rational, taking endlessly long to decide anything, but when they finally DO become fully convinced, they take action immediately, heedless of danger.
Ents are the Deus Ex Machina. Something of a cop out. I grew up around people like Hobbits. The farmers around Oxfordshire, Hampshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire. Very food oriented: market gardens, sheep, local beer. The good life
generally. Overlooked rustic yeomen who mind their own business and look after each other. Same people who captured Pegasus Bridge, defended La Haye Saint, captured Quebec and then promtly dissappeared back to their cherished obscurity. The fictional Sharpes Rifles was based on their regiments.
No Navy in LOTR though.
Wow, that was a hard-core speech and entirely stirring. I love when he talks about our ‘brave mountain population’ and how the South would determine the eventual end of slavery on its own terms rather than being dictated to by Yankee abolitionists.
“Kingdom of Rohan” by Grima Wormtongue”.
Jack ryan responds:
Grima Wormtongue definitely represents the Court Jew – the Jewish advisors that always sit close to the White throne, pouring poison in the ear of the old, White kings under the Jews’ spell. Think of Whites like Dick Lugar, Old Reagan, Old Religious leaders of “White” Evangelical Protestant churches like Pat Robertson.
I suppose the Ents who survived returned to their work in the forest again as soon as possible, and back to obscurity, like the Hobbits, right after executing justice on their local adversary. Bound to their duty, serious, slow to anger but unshakeably resolved to go when fully convinced of a just cause, and whose superior line has been dying out ever since all their wives left them, for greener grass or better times elsewhere, men like that are uncommon but they’re not unknown. On the other hand, Gandalf’s magic and other magic coming to the rescue seems contrived (Deus ex machina) to me, but Tolkien wrote for children, and magic and other fantasy are naturally well suited for children.
What does an Ent do?
All they need to do is breath and put a few roots down. Just exist.
I thought they were a representation of American democracy.
But they simply overwhelm the Orcs and Saroman’s tower. Definitely a Deus Ex.
Gandalf appeared and really seems to perform very little magic. Charging over a hill with the sun at you back is a well worn tactic. Beware the Hun in the Sun.
Anyway the Hobbits are the most human. Even if they are not.
I must admit I cannot stand the books. Literary crap for the most part.
I couldn’t read two pages of it. Films were very cool though.
Chastain is a cargo cultist who defends symbols of the Confederacy while rejecting their substantial meaning. She has made it clear that she rejects our noxious vile racism. People are telling me this has been her position for a long time now.
Rhett, Yancey, Ruffin, Toombs, Davis, Stephens, Lee, etc. … were always candid about their beliefs. The one exception was Longstreet who became a Black Republican after the war and was reviled as a traitor to the South for generations.
Even if you look at the scalawags, Andrew Johnson was impeached for opposing the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866. The South was divided over slavery, but white supremacy was almost unanimously supported.
What an insane event that civil war was. Monsterous stuff. It wasn’t even about the supremacy of a king or a parliament. Plain stupidity. All done so 150 years later their great great grandchildren would self imolate and erase themselves from history.
John, I suppose that explains the difference in views, whether based on the author’s characterisation, or solely on the films. It was relevant to note the analogy (not shown in the films) of their dying out, with no children possible since all the wives moved on. They are agrarian, essentially forest farmers, tied by duty and affection and bound in blood to their land of trees, moved to action finally only by recognition of the threat to their “soil.” With no women, they remain and continue their work until the last of them dies off.
Not really an “insane civil war,” like Liberia’s, but called accurately “the war of northern-states-supported Federal aggression against the rights of (the people of) southern states,” which states in itself the reason for southern resistance.
Two wars. Fight past each other.
It does begin to sound like that. Now Detroit has been mau maued perhaps some northerners are awake.