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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29304 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I know that slavery was integral to the economy of the southern states, but when people say "slavery built America", it seems like they're implying that it was integral to the northern states, too. My biases, which I am actively seeking to counteract, tell me that anyone who says slavery built America is ignoring history.. but y'know, I don't actually know that much about history. I just remember learning in high school that the southern economy was agricultural and sustained by unpaid labor, while the north wasn't agricultural and didn't have any financial need for slavery.

How important was slavery to the north, financially speaking? If the textile factories weren't able to get cotton from the south, would they have ceased to be, or would they have just gotten cotton elsewhere? (Like from overseas?)

If the question is whether slavery and associated industry was a large portion of the national GDP, it was.

If the question is whether anyone else built anything, yes, they built most things. Slavery didn't build anything except some very nice houses and a lot of graveyards. The whole reason the South gets trounced in the war despite better tactical leadership is that they don't have anything close to the numbers of people, factories and equipment that the North does, and virtually none of that can be attributed to slavery. In fact, it can and has been argued at length that slavery kept the South from industrializing and that this crippled their economy up into the 1980s.

The claim that slavery was in some way underwriting the free states is ahistorical stupidity, and a slanderous historical insult to the people who died to end slavery. There isn't a person alive today who has done as much for black americans as the lowliest, whitest, most racist private in the Union Army.

There isn't a person alive today who has done as much for black americans as the lowliest, whitest, most racist private in the Union Army.

Somewhat related, I thought the vandalism of the Hans Christian Heg statue in Madison captured the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement better than anything else that happened that summer. Let's understand who Heg was:

Hans Christian Heg (1829-1863) was a Norwegian American abolitionist, journalist, anti-slavery activist, politician and soldier. He was born at Haugestad in the community of Lierbyen in Lier, Buskerud, Norway, where his father ran an inn. His family emigrated to the US in 1840, and settled at Muskego Settlement, Wisconsin. After two years as a Forty-Niner in California following the California Gold Rush, Heg returned to settle in Wisconsin.

Heg is best known as the colonel who commanded the 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Regiment on the Union side in the American Civil War. He died of the wounds he received at the Battle of Chickamauga. A 10 ft (3.0 m) high pyramid of 8 in (20 cm) shells at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park marks the site on the battlefield where Heg was mortally wounded.

Let's understand that Wisconsin was not a slave state, never had slaves, and frankly had no material stake in the fate of black Americans. Heg fought and died to stop what he regarded as a moral atrocity. He is memorialized at one of the corners of the Wisconsin State Capitol because these are exactly the traits that any decent person would admire. When the Summer of Floyd commenced, the statue was treated thusly by rioters:

On Tuesday, June 23, 2020, the statue was vandalized by protesters, incensed by the arrest of a member of Black Lives Matter, as demonstrations in Madison turned violent.[16][17] Vandals used a towing vehicle to pull the statue down. It was then vandalized, decapitated, and thrown into Lake Monona. The words "black is beautiful" were spray-painted on the plinth, just above Heg's name.[18][19][20]

...

Unlike Confederate statues removed during the George Floyd protests, this statue was of a Union soldier and abolitionist,[23][24] The Associated Press reported that "it seems likely that few Wisconsinites know Heg's biography".[23][24] Protester Micah Le said the two statues paint a picture of Wisconsin as a racially progressive state "even though slavery has continued in the form of a corrections system built around incarcerating Blacks."[21] Two protesters interviewed by the Wisconsin State Journal said that toppling the statues was to draw attention to their view of Wisconsin as being racially unjust.[25] Black student activists had called for the removal of the statue of Abraham Lincoln at University of Wisconsin–Madison in early June 2020, and repeated those calls after Heg's statue was toppled.[26][27]

I can think of no better representation of this movement - ignorant, entitled, ungrateful, destructive, and aggrieved. I cannot capture the prevailing mood of the movement better than they did themselves in destroying and discarding a statue and replacing it with "black is beautiful" - they made the world uglier in a small way and told us that it was beautiful.

I cannot capture the prevailing mood of the movement better than they did themselves in destroying and discarding a statue and replacing it with "black is beautiful" - they made the world uglier in a small way and told us that it was beautiful.

I think it is more like "this statue says that equality and justice is important to you, but we judge that to be a lie, and we will prevent you from having nice things that imply that equality and justice are important to you for as long as we do not think that the world is just".

Still a destructive mindset but I don't think anyone was trying to say that the spray-painted plinth was more beautiful than the statue, just that nobody can have nice things until all of the perceived injustices of the world have been corrected.

That is truly disheartening. And also about sums up why I never liked Madison. Did they ever restore the statue?

Yeah, that's the one bit of happy news - both that statue and the vandalized Forward statue on the opposite side of the capitol have been returned to their places.

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