The South Was Right

I'm not sure if I'm in the right area however, I have just read a book by James and Walter Kennedy titled 'The South was Right'. Their view of the war is very interesting. Can anyone comment on the book, the Kennedy's and what they are thought of in the US?

Prepare yourself. I like the book and am in agreement with most of the content, with some exceptions. There are a number, though, who are vehemently opposed to everything in there. You should hear from them shortly.

I've read the Kennedy boys and have to say I've enjoyed their books. But then again I've always been a sucker for a good work of fiction.

"Beloved, the South might not always be right, but we ain't never
wrong!"
Brother Dave Gardner

CSA= a group of whites demanding their God given right to self determination while insisting they have the right to deny self determination from people based on skin color. Sorry, but that is what it boils down to, they wanted the right to discriminate, the right to own people based on skin color and race, the same argument Hitler made.

But wasn’t there a certain self-righteous element outside the South engaged in much hand wringing and eyes rolling toward Heaven, as long as the sin involved somebody else’s wealth and property. Don’t you think your condescending remarks about the CSA were just as applicable to the USA as well during that period of history?

“Revisionist Leon Litwak of San Francisco State College combed newspapers, letters and legislative records of pre-Civil War days for his North of Slavery, which contends that anti-black prejudice existed on a much wider scale than has been suspected. Litwak found less racism in the South than in the North and West, where many localities enacted laws to keep Negroes out. Americans outside the South objected to the spread of slavery not so much because they thought it was evil as because they were terrified that the despised black man would move to their part of the country.”

What was condescending? The thread wasn't about the North, it was about the South and I addressed the subject of the foundation of the CSA. Do we really have to relive this? All we have to do is read the secession declaration of each state that formed the CSA. In every case slavery based on the principle that blacks were inferior and that whites had a God given right to "own" them is the main topic. Hitler believed Jews should be slaves and that the state had the right to do what they wanted with that select group based on predjudice, what was different?
But you will come back with the charge that because everyone was predjudice the South was exempt from guilt. I could give a dam about "guilt". The fact is a political movement based of self determination while denying self determination from others is based on a lie.
If you are saying the problem started with the FF's and their failure to address slavery I agree.

They key, though, is to compare free blacks, north and south. I think you'll find there was about as much legal limitation of free blacks in both places.

In the south, if blacks were in their place, serving at table, playing with the children, raising the children, there was a fondness in the south that one rarely saw in the north. That's usually where the "less racism" argument comes from. How can you call someone racist, if they're a poor white farmer working in the fields beside their slave, or a white woman working all day in the kitchen with her black helpers, or a boy raised with a black playmate?

But if blacks were outside that mold, free, thinking and living independently, competing for paid work with the lowest class of whites, that's when one saw the laws being enacted to control them, both north and south. Laws that kept free blacks out, or required slaves to leave the state as soon as they were freed, were common in the south, and hardly unique to the north. Here's just one example from Mississippi.

In the north of course there was little chance for the kind of control that slavery brought, nor for the familiarity, so one had only the single category: free blacks, who lived under restrictions similar to free blacks in the south. I think it's disingenous not to do an apples-to-apples comparison of both places, since the comforting control of slavery put blacks and whites on a different footing than if both were free.

I understand that you are trying to make some personal CSA comparison to Hitler’s Germany. It is my opinion that such comparisons are inane, if for no other reason than the sheer enormity of Hitler’s crimes against humanity. My point to you is why single out the CSA for such enormities. While it is true the Confederate people were willing to fight for their slave based economy and way of life, it was equally true that the USA, at the same time, were slaughtering native American for no other reason than they stood in the way of that government imperialist westward expansion. Why is it, it in your mind, The CSA is more Hitler like than the Lincoln regime in the 1860s?

"If slavery were the real issue, then slavery among flesh-and-blood human beings alive today would arouse far more outcry than past slavery among people who are long dead. The difference is that past slavery can be cashed in for political benefits today." Thomas Sowell

I think this is a very fair question. In doing some study on municipalities in Ohio, namely Cincinnati and Columbus, I found both cities had very restrictive ordinances on blacks, not as stringent as what most southern states as far as legal entitlements to own property, speak for themselves in trial etc, but they were not as free even there. The city laws were tightened with the start of the war as they feared an influx of destitute beings. In McPherson's The Negro's Civil War and Claxton/Puls Uncommon Valor there's a fairly good picture of northern attitudes towards free blacks in general, a sort of not in my neighborhood view of slavery in the south.

The Met at Shiloh, a historical novel available in both print and Kindle editions. Check out my blog, a place for civil war short stories and news/views. Phillip M Bryant, author blog

Don't know much about Columbus, but Cincinnati had a long love-hate, or I should say, tolerance-hate relationship with free blacks. They would let things slide, then there would be a race riot, and the laws on the books would be enforced stringently. About half the free blacks moved out, mostly to Canada, around 1830ish as I recall, then there was another big riot in 1841.

In the south, you had the bizarre situation of blacks asking to become slaves, when laws were passed requiring them to leave the state. In this case, anti-free-black laws hit harder, because blacks were already residents and might have family ties to enslaved people, so dividing them into two classes, free and slave, one that had to leave and one that had to stay, meant tearing them from their home and/or family, without regard to age, illness or poverty. Becoming voluntarily enslaved was apparently the best choice for some of them, if southern states wouldn't let them simply live out their lives where they were.

Getting back to the original purpose of the thread...

Alex, this is as good a place for your thread as any. As you see, you already started some heated "discussions."

You'll probably get two widely divergent opinions on the book. One view will support the book's premise wholeheartedly, while the other will strongly condemn it. This points to the continued sectional split in the US; there are some in "the South" (the area which encompasses the former Confederate States) who believe strongly in the idea that the war was not ultimately about slavery but was about the North's aggression toward the southern way of life (peaceful, agrarian, wanting very limited federal government interaction). The mainstream body of historical literature does not support the Kennedy's ideas and would describe their work as part of the "Lost Cause" ideology. (The southerners, however, would likely describe the "mainstream" works as northern propaganda.)

The problem with this topic is that it has so many nuances; e.g. the "reason" the states of the deep south seceeded is a little bit different from the reason the other southern states seceeded, both of which are different from the reason the North decided to fight for Union, which may be different from the reason the soldiers decided to fight for their respective sides. As you see in the disagreements above, the arguments start going astray and lose focus, becoming mere jabs the other side's weaknesses; one pokes at southern slavery, the other pokes at northern racism, neither of which really addresses your question.

Let's just be obvious and say the Kennedy's views as espoused in their book remain very controversial and outside of mainstream political science and history. A similar author is Thomas DiLorenzo. The books of the Kennedys and DiLorenzo speak to a very vocal and strident minority of people in the US.

'Revisionist' is right. Every Southern state had laws on the books preventing the entry of free blacks into their state. Most had laws that hindered if did not outright prevent the emancipation of slaves. The Virginia constitution gave freed blacks 12 months to leave the state or else be sold back into slavery. Southerners were just fine with black people...so long as they owned them. Free blacks were feared and hated in the South even more than they were in the North.

Anyone with even a vague knowledge of historiography would know that whatever Leon Litwak might be, he is hardly a mouthpiece for the Southern Confederacy.

“If we were wrong in our contest, then the Declaration of Independence of 1776 was a grave mistake and the revolution to which it led was a crime. If Washington was a patriot; Lee cannot have been a rebel.”
Wade Hampton

I have read the book, The South Was Right, by the Kennedy brothers.

My only real learning experience I got from the book was that I was glad that I had checked it out from my local library instead of spending any of my hard-earned cash on it, as it was worthless if anyone was searching for any significant historical facts of the period.

Sincerely,
Unionblue

No need to yell. In both cases, Hitler's Germany and Pre-Civil War US, the state supported the idea of genocide. There were so many elements of the turmoil that lead to the split between north and south as you know. Jefferson, one of the smartest men in history could not find a solution to the problem, as much as he disliked slavery he was dependent to it, but by 1860 the issue was insurmountable. The main difference between the US and the CSA is that in the case of the CSA slavery was based on the ideal that slavery was good, and that Africans were sub human and property that the owner should be reimbursed for if slavery was abolished. That should show just how the institution of slavery corrupted the very souls of a predominantly Christian nation. As Jefferson wrote many times, it was a national stain. Sadly that stain still marks us.

The Kennedy Brothers wrote the book to appeal to the Lost Cause crowd, and to make folk think about the South the way they do.
As to the subjects the authors bring up, you need to look at real History books written about them.
THOSE are what you need to be reading.

Bring up a subject, I'd bet folk here could steer you to a book/author worth looking at.
The South Was Right ain't one of em!

Kevin Dally

So many questions. Can anything stated by the Kennedy’s be depended on as gospel? It seems that Lincoln’s real interest was in saving the union and not really caring about the slaves. This is indicated in Lincoln’s belief that the blacks were inferior to the whites. Whilst I recognise all slaves were eventually freed, why did Lincoln, in his proclamation, only free the slaves in the states that had seceded? Like I said, so many questions, the Kennedy’s have raised so many issues from total war conducted by Sherman’s march to the sea with no difference between combatants and civilians to the atrocities committed upon the south during the reconstruction period.