Bill,

         What a well reasoned response!

         I am guilty of being from the Mid-Atlantic area, specifically an
area with a unique identity in culture and language but not so much in
politics - the Pennsylvania Dutch.

                                                 Anne

At 10:21 AM 2/8/02 -0500, you wrote:
>In a message dated 2/8/2002 9:44:03 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>[log in to unmask] writes:
>
>
> > I'm not sure that the bloody conflict still scars the nation's psyche so
> > much as it scars the southern psyche. Northerners tend to consider the
> > civil war as one of many wars fought during the nation's history, not as
> > THE war. Slavery certainly scarred the psyche of African Americans, as did
> > the legal discrimination fostered by the Jim Crow laws in the south and the
> > ghettoization in the North.
> >
> >
>
>Anne - This ranges deeply into area of opinion on my part, but I think that
>the psychic scars are just different for all involved. Certainly, many white
>Southerners muse on what might have been and elaborate exercises in
>justification such as "it wasn't really about slavery." Nobody wants to feel
>as if they (or the ancestors) were on the wrong moral side. Many Southerners
>wear their scars as battle ribbons for all to see, almost a histrionic need
>for justification and redemption. Notice that I said many -- not a few and
>not all.
>
>For black Americans the impact is much more a continuing part of life. It
>started with slavery and went through an emancipation movement to a civil war
>to reconstruction to political betrayal by their allies to a long-term civil
>rights movement to the still sneaking suspicion that full acceptance is a
>relative thing.
>
>As for "northerners," I have trouble conjuring up just what they are. I think
>that southerners and westerners have some broader and more distinct sense of
>identity, both to themselves and to others. Northerner is a somewhat limited
>description, because the culture and heritage is both more diffuse and
>obscure. Certainly the New England heritage is something that we can see and
>feel as having a continuity, but the mid-Atlantic and Midwest seemed to have
>melted into a bland sameness of identity and thought, almost as if they were
>hiding from the rest of us. And just maybe part of that obfuscation is a way
>of dealing with the guilt of the betrayal side of the outcome of
>reconstruction. If the Civil War was really about slavery and civil rights
>(which has always been my opinion), then why did the North make the
>reconstruction about economic retribution and the subsequent betrayal of the
>Southern black American about political advantage? History took from the
>North the advantage of moral argument in the Civil War. Much of the South
>wasted seven generations searching for that moral argument when there was
>none on their side. Far better for the country -- and the South - had the
>time and energy been spent on unification and moral reconciliation.
>
>Bill Russell
>
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Anne Pemberton
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