What does the South have to be "proud" of?

They perversely view it as being proud to have stood up for themselves, even though they were standing up to step on the necks of an enslaved people.

They view it as pride in Southern Gentility, which was only enjoyed by plantation owners.

They could be proud of being part of the United States, yet they were traitors to the United States.

Great literature and music.

Like…what, @janbb?

Everyone I’ve ever known in the U.S. has pride in where they come from to some degree. Why should the south be any different?

I’m not particularly proud of Kansas.

Maybe not you personally, but I bet you anything that you can easily find plenty of people proud of being from Kansas. Proud Kansan

@Dutchess_III I’m also sure that you can think of music and literature that sprung up from the south that people might be proud of. Just because you personally don’t like bluegrass or Capote doesn’t mean that you can’t recognize them as being stuff people might be proud of.

If you fixate on slavery, you’ll likely never get it. I suspect the Germans are proud to be German even though there are blemishes on their past. The British are quite fond of their monarchs even though they have a very checkered past. The pride doesn’t come from the things that were bad but rather from the things that were good. A more friendly and polite atmosphere. A slower paced lifestyle. A stubborn self reliance. A rich history in music and literature. The Grand Ole Opry, blues, and Rock n Roll. Creole and Cajun cooking. Southern BBQs.

There’s much to be proud of, as well as ashamed of. Should the south not take pride in people like B. B. King, Elvis Presley, or Mark Twain, because the south has a checkered past?

The agricultural South represented the existing social and economic model of the United States at it’s founding. It’s history is the original US history.
It was pretty much the standard until the industrial North made it obsolete.

@Jaxk
I think you will find that only a few Germans are proud of Nazi Germany. You will also find that the Nazi flag is illegal.
If modern Germany were like the colonies, a sizeable percentage of Germans would still be proud and unrepentant Nazis.

@ragingloli – I never said Nazi Germany, I said German. I’m sure most are not proud of the Nazi atrocities just as most southerners aren’t proud of slavery. There is still a lot to be proud of for both groups. You only want to focus on the bad and if you do that your missing good.

@Jaxk
”I never said Nazi Germany, I said German.”
And I corrected you, because if you want to properly compare the two, you have to compare “Southern Pride” to Neo Nazi pride of Hitler’s Germany.
Also, modern day Nazis deny that the Holocaust happened, the same way that
Southerners deny that slavery was the main reason for the secession.
Hell, you even have some of them saying that slavery was good for black people

The South also is responsible for a very lopsided proportion of this country’s military talent along with it’s undisputed greatest soldier-Robert E Lee.

It is also important to appreciate the significance of the enormous revenues generated for investment in the building of this country realized through the odious realities of slave labor. Though certainly nothing to be proud of, the country today is what it is in very great part from the brutal exploitation of black folks, and the wholesale extermination of the red.

Cat Head Biscuits and Sawmill Gravy.

@Jaxk The thing which renders that fixation on slavery next to impossible is the difficulty in picking a single tradition, legend or stereotype that doesn’t find slavery lurking behind it. True or not, who exactly is it likely to deserve the credit for the colonel’s “secret ” recipe, or for that matter “Southern” fried chicken itself? There’s no getting around the fact that it is slavery that is the single word defining every aspect of the antebellum South, and there is not a single topic that can be discussed at length that doesn’t eventually arrive at the topic and the persecution of its descendants for better than 100 years after its supposed elimination.

@stanleybmanly & @ragingloli – You paint with too broad a brush. If anything southern is about slavery, there’s not much chance of discussion. I’ll never believe that nor will I ever convince you otherwise. Best to leave it at mutual disagreement, if that’s possible.

ok

Once you try biscuits and gravy, you will realize @rojo speaks the ultimate truth.

I think it’s a bit of a stretch to call Mark Twain a southerner. Not that it really matters much one way or the other.

This is one of those uncommon instances where I agree with @Jaxk. As much as I diss the South, there are some things about the South that are good. Of course, those things often get overshadowed by the bad so they’re easy to dismiss. It’s a matter of whether and how much one focuses on the negative.

Of course there are good things about the South, and I will not argue (nor never have) that there aren’t. There are some WONDERFUL things which have resulted from and are directly attributable to slaves and slavery. But it’s the comments like Jaxk’s “if you fixate on slavery” that set me off. Consider that statement, then look at his list of admirable Southern traits. What was it that allowed for that “slower paced life style” (for the white folks)? And all that polite gentility associated with a bygone leisure class based on exactly WHAT? The BLUES!!!!!!!!!, Rock n roll, CREOLE and Cajun cookin? This is my point. There is no Southern history or tradition possible devoid of black folks, and there are no black folks involved without slavery.

@stanleybmanly

Greatest soldier Robert E Lee? But he lost.

And I would put George Patton and Omar Bradley ahead of him any day.

Both Southerners! And you’re wrong, as both of them would tell you in a hot minute. Patton may have been born in California, but he would be loathe to admit it.

@stanleybmanly

George Patton was from California. Omar Bradley was from New York.

Bradley was born in Missouri

Eisenhower was from Kansas. Dorthy was from Kansas.

Nobody likes to be told or forced to do something they don’t. The South wanted to be individual states and decide each state for itself what was best, not some centrally based Federal Government telling them. I guess they’re proud of their steadfastness on being stubborn in that sense.

Yes @kritiper, nobody likes being told what to do, like being forced by southern states to ignore one’s own state laws and return fugitive slaves without due process.

@zenvelo True enough, I suppose. But remember that slavery didn’t become a Civil War issue until Lincoln read his Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Initially, the Civil War was about state’s rights, as if each state was a single, separate, independent country.

@kritiper

No, slavery was an issue from the start. Hell, the reason the South seceded in the first place was not because Lincoln wanted to interfere with their system of slavery, but because he didn’t want slavery to be expanded into new states and territories. Southern politicians and plantation owners had this romantic notion of a huge, glorious nation of slave states. And many of them didn’t want to stop at just the new territories, but wanted to annex Mexico and the Central American and the Caribbean countries into one great ’Golden Circle’ of slave holding states.

@Darth_Algar You are wrong about that. People in the North had a fit when it was revealed in 1863 that slavery was now something that was actually being fought for. Check your history books. It might have been an minor unimportant issue at first, but not a major, widely known one. It had always been an known issue, actually, one our founding fathers swept under the table for some other generation to work out four score and seven years earlier.
“After the Emancipation Proclamation, the weeklies seldom missed an opportunity to remind their readers that slavery had become one of the main issues of the war.” -from “The Civil War in Pictures”, copyright 1955 by Fletcher Pratt, Garden City Books, Garden City, New York

@Darth_Algar Also, “Emancipation Proclamation. Presidential decree issued 22 Sept. ‘62 to take effect 1 Jan. ‘63, freeing all slaves in those parts of the nation still in rebellion.
In July ‘62 Lincoln had proposed such a move to his cabinet and read them a preliminary draft of the proclamation. Seward suggested that he wait, believing that such a dynamic change in the war’s focus (heretofore fought to preserve the Union and not to disrupt the South’s social fabric) would be little more than a plea for support without a military victory. The battle of Antietam, while hardly decisive, gave Lincoln that opportunity.” -from “The Civil War Dictionary, copyright 1959, 1988 by Mark Mayo Boatner III, Copyright renewed 1987 by Mark Mayo Boatner III, First Vintage Civil War Library Edition, October 1991.

@kritiper

I don’t care what newspaper readers in the north thought or did not think, the fact is that slavery was an issue from the beginning. It’s why the South seceded. It’s explicitly mention in the proclamations of secession of the various southern states and it’s explicitly mentioned in the Confederate constitution.

(BTW: It may surprise you to learn that history books are rarely unbiased, objective recitations of historical facts. They’re always written and framed with the author’s own biases and ideas leading the pen.)

The true reason for the civil war was economics; a more and more industrialized North trying to wrest further control over an South that had an agrarian based economy but was acquiring more and more sway within the federal government. The North knew that the Southern economy was much more heavily dependent upon slave labor to produce than the North was and the elimination of it would wreak havoc on the Southern economy. In a way slavery was just a side issue, they did not care about the people enslaved only the work they did “for free”.
And in wanting to stop the use of slaves in Southern states only and keep new states, ones that would also have a similar agrarian economy, from gaining access to this supposedly cheap labor base they were attempting to impose furhter economic sanctions upon the South leaving the Southern states no choice but to retaliate.

We did the same thing to Iran and we can see how well that is working out for us.

Yes the war was about economics, but the economics of the South was about slavery. The wealth and prosperity in the South was in its slaves and the free labor they provided. I used to believe all of the other reasons given for the conflict worthy of consideration until I came across the mind blowing fact that at the outbreak of the war the financial value of the slaves in this country exceeded that of the combined assets of the United States. Their value was greater than the remaining net worth of the ENTIRE COUNTRY.

I think in all this South-bashing, and i am no defender of it, we have to remember that the whole country benefited from the slave system. There were slaves in NYC and other parts of the North until earlier in the 19th century but more importantly, slave ships and the slave trade played an important part in both the economies of the North and of Britain until there was a switch to industrialization.

Lincoln was elected Nov 6, 1860
He was sworn in March of 1861.
He read his Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863.

He ran on a platform that vowed not to end slavery, but not to extend slavery

I guess South Carolina read it differently because it was the first state to secede, on Dec 20th, 1860, just barely a month after Lincoln was elected, and before he was sworn in. “Within three months of Lincoln’s election, seven states had seceded from the Union.”

Lincoln didn’t originally plan to outlaw slavery, until the South turned into such an asshole. I guess by then he figured he had nothing to lose by outlawing it.

I find this question in such bad taste, revealing so much ignorance, and so hypocritical, that I can’t bring myself to answer it.

The question is that, for some Southerners, the Confederate Flag is a point of “pride.” What is it that the Confederate Flag represents that some people are proud of? Those are narrow parameters. The question doesn’t encompass everything about the South.

Nashville

The Grand Ole Oprey!

There is no doubt in my mind that the Confederate Flag belongs in a museum. Besides everything else, it represent a government long past; a government and military which essentially became irrelevant on April 9, 1865. I believe it should be preserved, as all American history should be preserved, if only that we remember and never repeat that part of our history ever again. But I question whether or not many people in this debate have actually done a modicum of research on this flag. It only takes a few minutes to be the least bit informed and a knowledge base is everything in a debate—unless the intention is that the issue should deteriorate quickly into the modern equivalent of a fistfight.

The question itself does not address the flag, which could be easily done if the author actually wanted opinions of any Southern perception of pride in it. But the author didn’t do that. She chose to address all of Southern culture and history instead, and did this with unbound arrogance and hypocrisy, then CYA’d by addressing the flag in the details. I know cheap bait when I see it. You really have shown your cards here.

“She” would be me.

I did not address all Southern culture, and I am sorry if my wording was that easily mis understood. I specified ”...many Southerners don’t see the Confederate flag as a racist symbol, but as a point of “pride. What are they proud of ?”

There are a lot of people trying to justify the flag’s meanings. Not one person has ever said one thing that ties it in with something to be proud of. It’s tied in, indelibly, with slavery, and with the loss of their economy and their way of life when they lost the war.

However, there was this bit of absurdity that I came across yesterday.

Doc Watson