As a member of the ancient and honored order of Southern White-Trash I must state that I have no prejudices against Black people whatsoever, unless one happens to be an idiot, in which case he or she will get short shrift from me cause I hate idiots and boors of all stripes, but that's just the way I am, and I have never worn a sheet in my entire life, except for that one time on Halloween night when I was ten years old.
Anyhow, everyone needs to get off their soap boxes about this. Slavery was evil, but not all slave owners were brutal beasts. As some of my more liberal college professors delighted in pointing out...there are NO absolutes. During the first two years of the Civil War northerners fought to put down a rebellion and preserve the Union. There was not, in that same period, a strong movement to abolish slavery in the Southern states. Indeed, there was considerable prejudice in many northern cities against Blacks already living there who were competing with white northern factory workers for jobs. Anti-war, anti-draft, and anti-Black feelings boiled over into the New York City Draft Riot that led to the deaths of 1,000 Black people. I don't remember anything similar happening in the South during that time.
I wonder how much different our history would have been if the Confederacy had, in order to survive, promised freedom in 1863 to all slaves willing to don a grey uniform and fight against the Union. Such an action would have deprived Lincoln of the one issue that he used to galvanize public opinion in the North to support the war effort after the victory at Antietam.
Kind of frightening to contemplate, isn't it.
Regards, Shuckins
