Plantation Owner Mentality:

I grew up in what was a border state area during the American Civil War. Then my family moved into what in civil war days was call the Union. Only when I was of age to attend college did I venture into the Deep South. I cannot begin to tell you how profoundly different the mentality is in these two sections of America some 140 years after the civil war. I have tried to understand this difference in attitude and see it from both points of view.

The fundamental difference seems in retrospect to be how labor and the working man are regarded. In the American Deep South there had always been a feeling that leaders did not work and that anyone who earned a living by the “sweat of his brow” was somehow inferior. Some might say that was an off shoot of the main economic engine of the American south since the beginning. The large farm was given a new name of plantation. Plantation owners became the aristocrats at least in their own minds they did. The black slaves and white indentured servants became the new serfs to these would be aristocrats. While this was never spoken out loud it is definitely reflected in everything that was said and done. One major element of this society is that the master is always right.

Coupled with deeply wrong point of view there was the desire to extend westward and so we have America from 1787 until 1860. All the while these aristocrats gave lip service to America’s Constitution. The deep dislike of the working man grew over the years to become intuitionalized into an attitude towards any member of the so called “working class”. I don’t want to pour gasoline on a smoldering fire but much of Smirking Chimp has the ring of truth to it.

What we are seeing in America today we saw in the days leading up to the American Civil War. I pray that the lessons of 1856 to 1860 have not been lost on America. I urge all citizens to cool their rhetoric before such heated talk once again pushes America over the edge of civility and into a conflict that will only serve to tear our nation asunder.