Quote:
Originally Posted by jimjamuser
It IS too bad that the plantations were NOT split up into small acres. Small farms probably pollute less by virtue of being closer to their consumers - and maybe the great numbers of Black ownership farms would have equalized somewhat the wealth between Whites and Blacks. That could have been a good thing. Today we might have less of a wealth gap and less racism. I believe in TIPPING POINTS in History.
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You cherry-picked his comments. He said that most Southern whites were NOT wealthy at the time of the Civil War and afterwards and did not own slaves. It was very costly to own slaves and as he mentioned, most Confederate soldiers did not come from slave-owning families. It's estimated that only a third of Confederate officers, who were mainly from a higher economic class, had any connection to slavery.
It would do you good to read about Southern history, the good and bad, and you will learn that the desire for secession was mainly driven by economics (which included slavery) but also a strong belief that Southerners and Northerners had little in common culturally or otherwise.
I remember many years ago Southerners bemoaning the fact that regional accents were being lost due to the homogeneity that TV and movies brought, especially among the young. Multiply that by a million nowadays because of social media. But there was a time when the South had it's own distinct culture, customs, manners, morals, speech/idioms, etc. even decades after the Civil War.