"New Book: The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones" Topic

Dan:
I don't understand your statement, "Lost Cause" is alive and thriving in the US today as it existed 100 years ago and under its new guise."

Could you elaborate? Are southerners still for slavery? Are you speaking of classical liberals (conservatives)? Are they really for the reinstitution of Slavery? Perhaps, Republicans? Is this simply most white people. Please help me with this.

Joe Collins

Joe Collins

The "Lost Cause" is the created myth of the ACW created by those who at the time were southern sympathizers of the Confederacy and it's claimed reasons for why they'd fought, their heroes and how they'd suffered by an oppressive federal government that was infringing on their right to own slaves, that then and is expanding since the war, nothing more, nothing less.

It is hard to not see a Confederate battle flag anywhere in the US, from the far south states to the farthest corner of the nation, waving from homes, business, cars and trucks, let alone the bumper stickers and on jackets and caps.

As to who wears or waves the symbol, I'll let you decide who the folks are that carry or wear it as a totem.

Dan:
I don't understand your statement, "Lost Cause" is alive and thriving in the US today as it existed 100 years ago and under its new guise."

The Georgia Citizens arrest statute the McMichaels relied on in their justification to corner and murder Arbery dates to 1863 and was passed primarily to recapture and even lynch escaped slaves. Which isnt quite Lost Cause but it is full throated Secession.

Seems parts of the Confederacy do indeed still walk among us.

Could you elaborate? Are southerners still for slavery?

Obviously not because they convicted the McMichaels and rejected their defense that the three of them needed guns and trucks to protect them from one unarmed black man.

Are they really for the reinstitution of Slavery? Is this simply most white people. Please help me with this.

Joe Collins

Most white people dont seem to be in favor of reinstituting slavery but some do seem to exist in a state of denial and lash out against books they havent read because they consider it a social threat.

I personally do not think being white is a state of unity. However, I have often wondered about those that do believe this.

Hopefully, this helps.

Thank you for exposing your views.

It does help. It really does. I now better understand the statements and attitudes.

I was hoping for some wisdom, insight, and understanding.

Silly me.

Joe Collins

Joe – I don't think the Lost Cause of today represents all Southerners by a long shot. There are elements of it that play out, including racism and hero worship, among some, along with a slanted history of slavery and the war. I don't think anyone wants slavery back.

One of the most gut wrenching sights of Jan 6 was the Confederate flag flying thru the Capitol. After hundreds of thousands fought and died to keep it out. That's were the Lost Cause is truly lost as a set of beliefs.

Yes, if I was not clear, I was not pointing a finger at "southern" states. Today the carrying of the Confederate battle flag or wearing of it (or the entire roof of a large warehouse beneath the flight path into Atlanta's airport painted on it years ago that may still be there) are a statement by certain groups in this country. I've seen it flown by pickups in WY in the middle of nowhere, on caps in the Midwest, bumper stickers on cars, pickups and semi-trucks nearly anywhere, etc.

One can argue about why it is still being used as a political statement, but it's pretty clear who is using it as a group identification.

"but it's pretty clear who is using it as a group identification'

What's clear is your view of those who fly it. What's not clear by any of your posts is what they believe.

So, what do they believe?

I expect a range of folks, from radical right wingers to those who are attracted to the sanitized, romanticized view of Gone With the Wind. A complex range of modern beliefs about the federal government and Yankees. A curious affinity for the former guy.

But I really am just guessing. I keep thinking that the war never ended and resentment has grown into anger over the years, not about slavery, but about the perceived alternative reasons for the war. I never heard of the "War of Northern Aggression" as a kid.

But if somebody knows better, I would be interested how the legacy of the war has kept the resentment going for some, and how it symbolizes the new conflict we face for them.

Most of the resentment is what you would normally find in a country where they were burned and pillaged (regardless of what the original causes were).

My dad's family left Virginia in the 1890s for California. Things just never bounced back after 1865.

It has been the case, up until my lifetime (born 1946) that America always had more work to do than hands to do it. Land and other natural resources were abundant; labor was in very short supply. And of course in the early decades of Virginia the margin between starvation and economic collapse, versus survival and prosperity, was very small. Without the constant importation of starving Englishmen from the London slums, to replace the deaths, the colony would have collapsed. During the first 20 years about 10,000 whites landed; at the end of thta time fewer than 1000 were still alive. It is in that context that the first Africans were welcomed. And for about half a century blacks worked alongside whites in the tobacco fields, with (as far as we can tell from available records) little difference in legal status and treatment.

Bacon's Rebellion in 1676 changed that, because white indentured servants proved too fractious (especially since they were armed, due to the Indian threat). Virginia moved to a reliance on black chattel slavery rather than white indentured servitude. See Winthrop Jordan's WHITE OVER BLACK for the full story. Black slavery ALLOWED white freedom; plantation staple crop agriculture REQUIRED an unfree labor class, and without Africans it would have continued to be Englishmen.

I wouldn't bother with the 1619 book, but if anyone is interested in the subject this is the book to read:

White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press) 2nd Edition, Kindle Edition
by Winthrop D. Jordan (Author), Christopher Leslie Brown (Foreword), Peter H. Wood (Foreword) Format: Kindle Edition
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In 1968, Winthrop D. Jordan set out in encyclopedic detail the evolution of white Englishmen's and Anglo-Americans' perceptions of blacks, perceptions of difference used to justify race-based slavery, and liberty and justice for whites only. This second edition, with new forewords by historians Christopher Leslie Brown and Peter H. Wood, reminds us that Jordan's text is still the definitive work on the history of race in America in the colonial era. Every book published to this day on slavery and racism builds upon his work; all are judged in comparison to it; none has surpassed it.

If you don't, or refuse, to read a book then there is little or nothing you can say to counter anything in it that is counter-factual or inaccurately revisionist.

Isn't Jordan's book a secondary source?

Yes, it is. A very fine one.

And there are doubtless a million books I have not read. One must be selective. If someone asks me to review it, and it seems worth my time, then I would read it and critique it in specific terms.

Well, it is number one on the best seller list and as I check reviews and learn more about it in general, I see that it appears to be a series of essays by people from different walks of life rather than historians.

I feel like I was judging it in the wrong light, and some of the contributors are good writers and thinkers I might want to read, whether I agree or disagree with some of their points. If I got through Mark Levin I can certainly give this a look.

I wouldn't bother with the 1619 book, but if anyone is interested in the subject this is the book to read:

And there are doubtless a million books I have not read. One must be selective. If someone asks me to review it, and it seems worth my time, then I would read it and critique it in specific terms.

This is a problem. You constantly throw books/papers at people as a form of expertise on the subject inferring that until those books are read either no one can opine on that subject or that your knowledge has hegemony over that of everyone else.

Now, you are telling people not to read a book you yourself haven't read and saying it doesn't need to be read for you to opine definitively on the both the author and the subject?

What exactly is going on here?

@Tortorella

Some of the 1619 essays are quite good and provoke thought. I think some conservative voices are terrified about the subject of the discussion and want to shut it down. Ironically that kerfuffle is directing more attention to the essays and the book that wouldnt otherwise occur.

Dan Cyr: "but it's pretty clear who is using it as a group identification'

Dn Jackson: What's clear is your view of those who fly it. What's not clear by any of your posts is what they believe.

You know what Dan Cyr is thinking but no one can know what those who show the Confederate battle flag's views are?

A symbol may not represent the view of the wearer but it can still have an effect on the observer. If that reaction is consistently upsetting, eventually the wearer has to address that symbol's impact.

The Confederate flags are nice looking and I suppose there are times when the symbol carries no meaning for the wearer but there have to be more times when the wearer knows that the symbol represents the Confederacy and all it stood for. It's definitely a question of time, place and manner.

It can also be a case of ignorance about the symbol. Perhaps people that put confederate bumper stickers on their vehicles are ignorant about any negative symbolism but that then says something about how deeply ignorant they are. It also makes one wonder still, even considering their ignorance on matters ACW, why they would choose that battle flag over thousands of other potential bumper stickers.

It would be interesting to legally examine confederate flags from a 13th Amendment standpoint

Jordan's book is indeed important, but it should not replace or be compared to 1619, a collection of essays by multiple authors meant to offer different perspectives. So much has happened since Jordan's book. And giving black writers a voice in today's world is part of coming together. You don't have to agree with their points. But dismissing them may leave you with a smaller picture.