The War of Northern Aggression

I've read enough history about the Deep South and the Civil War that I am comfortable stating the war absolutely was NOT started by high minded Northerners hellbent on freeing Black slaves from unjust bondage like it tends to get framed after the fact.

Northerners kind of made up a lot of crap after the fact to trash talk the South and justify what Southerners viewed as an invasion. That's why Southerners called it The War of Northern Aggression. 

Sometime DURING the Civil War, two Black slaves sought asylum at a northern fort and ultimately the base commander granted their request, after sleeping on the decision I believe. This was a turning point politically and in terms of PR for the Civil War. 

It was AFTER that the war became about "freeing the slaves." So our history books remember it as being about human rights and ending slavery, but that's not where it started. 

I don't actually know what really started the war. My guess is probably jealousy.

While I'm glad slavery ended, it's not reasonable to assume that slavery was the sole reason for the war nor even the primary reason. I also don't think it's reasonable to claim that slavery is the only reason the South was apparently outperforming the North.

General Lee was a brilliant tactician. No northern General was remotely his equal. 

They eventually made Grant kind of the head honcho in the North. Northerners saw him as a monster and wanted President Lincoln to FIRE him.

The ONLY advantage the North had was numbers of bodies to throw at the war effort and Grant was enthusiastically using the one advantage he had. Northerners were sick to death of their sons coming home in caskets by the droves. 

Let's restate that: The North had a larger population which allowed them to establish a larger military force. And with MORE people to choose from, the North couldn't find ONE man who was Lee's equal, much less anyone better than him.

The best they could do was a ne'er-do-well alcoholic callous jackass willing to let it be a meat grinder as his only hope of winning. (On the upside, when Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Grant broke with the long human tradition of demanding war reparations and, instead, insisted the South allow the North to help them rebuild which is almost certainly why the US has so far only had one civil war.)

Furthermore, Southerners are so bitter about the war in part because they burned Atlanta to the ground. Southerners carry a grudge about that.

Why did they do that?

They did it because Atlanta was a manufacturing center unmatched by anything in the North. Until they burned it down, no matter what the North did, Atlanta just resupplied the troops and they stood their ground.

The current mental model is that historically Northern cities were important manufacturing centers in the US. This became true in the 1900s AFTER the Civil War, in part because Black Southerners moved to Northern cities, not for factory jobs per se, though they typically worked such, but for a better future for their children. 

Slaves were forbidden from learning to read. Somewhat similarly, the post Civil War South rarely offered education past eighth grade to Blacks. 

This may not have been an intentional effort to keep Blacks illiterate. It may have been partly an unfortunate side effect of segregation because if 70 percent of the people are White and you only have enough money for one high school, you build a White high school.

This may sound like racist asshole behavior but my father was born in the 1920s, grew up on a farm and was a high school drop out. Historically, if you weren't planning to go to college, most farm kids dropped out after eighth grade, regardless of skin color.

Plus, the South was extremely poor after the Civil War for a long list of reasons.

To give some general context, the GED was invented by the American military because being a high school drop out used to be extremely common across the US which was a largely agrarian culture until sometime after my children were born. My high school drop out father took GLEE in taking a red pen to the notes sent home by college educated public school teachers and marking all their mistakes in spelling, grammar and punctuation. 

He wrote rhymes he made up for notes he sent to my sister instead of letters after she moved out. He taught ROTC at a college as part of his military career because he was the only guy in the battalion with all the military schools they wanted for the position.

Being a high school drop out didn't mean you were dumb. My father dropped out because it was The Great Depression, he was a big guy and capable of earning money like a man.

So Blacks who wanted a better future for their children somewhat frequently left the South to enroll their children in high school. In fact, some of them had a child repeat eighth grade to make it easier to transfer to an unsegregated Northern high school while trying to make arrangements to move. 

Thus after the Civil War ended, the demographic doing a lot of the manual labor in The South moved north in fairly large numbers and most likely this fostered manufacturing success in Northern cities. Before that, Atlanta seems to have been vastly more productive than probably ANY other American city. 

I have no idea how much Black productivity was rooted in African tribal culture and how much was due to training by White overlords in the Deep South. 

Education is for learning to think. Training is for learning to work at specific jobs and be more productive. While they denied Blacks education, they apparently didn't deny them training to enhance productivity. 

But wherever it came from, the South seems to have had skilled labor prior to the Civil War and then exported it to parts of the US that apparently couldn't compete with Atlanta prior to the burning of Atlanta. 

You can't have a successful business in manufacturing without a work force with adequate skills. The Blacks leaving the South for educational opportunities for their children were not only exporting something from the South, these would have been "the cream of the crop" of Black Southerners.

They would have been the most skilled, the hardest working, the most talented and the most ambitious. It was a manual labor equivalent of a brain drain. 

And I believe this was a significant factor in Northern cities becoming manufacturing centers. Detroit, the car capital of the US, has a LOT of Black people (it was ~77% Black in 2020).

The South has never really recovered from the Civil War and its consequences. What many people don't seem to realize is that taxes in the pre Civil War Deep South were paid almost entirely by wealthy plantation owners. You were taxed for how many slaves you had and they didn't tax too many other things.

Southerners were uncommonly happy with their tax system and poor Southerners and rich Southerners weren't arguing much about how to fund the government "fairly" as is typical of most places the world over. But when slavery ended, Southern governments were gutted and had to rebuild from scratch because the foundation of government funding was slavery.

Without money, good luck providing ANY government services, much less rebuilding after a war largely fought on Southern lands. The burning of Atlanta was not the only damage to the Southern economy and Southern landscape and carpetbaggers were typically looking for business opportunities to get rich by rather than the do gooder opportunity to rebuild the South out of the goodness of their hearts. 

Plus Southerners got mud slung all over them as being fundamentally immoral for having been slave states. And never mind this is a country that brags about Manifest Destiny as evidence of what visionaries our Founding Fathers were rather than criticizing that as a bunch of racist assholes openly planning to simply TAKE the lands of the Natives.

Southerners have a rich cultural history that includes defacto honorifics and a tradition of diplomacy ("Southern hospitality") imported from the culture of European nobles. 

So Southern Manners and Southern Hospitality is also a political heritage, not just a religious heritage, and is shaped by the culture of European nobility who weren't simply wealthy upper classes, they were the ruling class politically and their children were expected to be officers in war, married off as defacto ambassadors to other countries, etc.

My understanding is Southern egalitarianism has been borrowed by feminists:

I once heard from a credible source that Mz. didn't begin as a feminist thing. Instead, it started in The Deep South as an artifact of Southern manners because it's rude to inquire about the marital status of someone you barely know and it's rude to call them the wrong thing... so they just created a word that sort of smooshed the two words together (Miss and Mrs.) and gave the honorific without requiring that information.

Supposedly, feminists picked up on it later, presumably as a means to object to marital status being a primary identity for women.

The Deep South also has a tradition used by upper class women of changing your middle name to your maiden name to use both your maiden name and married name without a hyphen which likely predates modern feminism. 

Rock and roll was born of a fusion of African music and European lyrics because some parts of the South allowed slaves to keep their culture alive one day a week. This became jazz and later birthed rock and roll.

The South has world class educational institutions, gave rise to successful blind singers, is where Habitat for Humanity started and generally has markers of hitting a very high bar for civilized development and culture.

Yet, Southerners get viewed predominantly as racist poor White trash and The South gets treated as a generally culturally backwards region full of ignorant rednecks.

The Blacks who stayed behind faired poorly in part because of the manual labor version of a brain drain. Those that stayed were on average less competent than the ones who left.

Yet The South is not credited as elevating the North by exporting its skilled labor and culture to Northern cities. It just gets looked down upon.

Footnote 

For the record, I was born and raised in The South but neither of my parents were. So you can shove your idiotic assumptions I'm some White Apologist due to having slave owner ancestors back up your ass where you got it.