What is the "heritage of the south"? Can I tell you what I think?
The heritage of the south is an economic system where people believed that hard work and getting your hands dirty is for poor people and slaves only. This is UnAmerican.
That may be what the heritage of the sourth means to
you. But consider that a lot of the southerners who are the most proud of their region are lower/working class types. They take
pride in the fact that they work hard and get their hands dirty. They actually mock those who
don't do that. They see themselves as hard-working, self-sufficient, and independent. I think you're making the mistake of ascribing to todays working-class southerners the attitudes of 19th century plantation owners, who did look down on both poor/working class, and slaves. That's transposing not only a century and a half, but jumping social classes as well.
Saying that the "heritage of the south" is distain for those who work hard and get their hands dirty is fundamentally misperceiving a great deal of southern culture. That's actually how they see us
Yankees.
This is the opposite of the American work ethic and self determination. They believed in generational wealth and superiority a lot like England and royalty....Dave said he believes in the bill of rights which is probably the most important cornerstone of democracy.
The southerners who you are describing would argue -- with some justification -- that
self-determination is the most important cornerstone of democracy. And that's the stone on which the whole argument gets complicated, because
absent slavery, the principle of self-determination (and reread the Declaration to get the point) would argue that the South had the
moral right to secede from the North, in the exact same way the colonies had the moral right to secede from Great Britain. That's how
they see the argument.
Obviously, the retort is "but what about self-determination for the slaves", and again, I've been down that road with them. And they'll argue that the Yankees didn't even want to free the slaves, much less give them the actual vote (self-determination), when the war began, so
that's not what the War was about. They see that as after-the-fact justification/moralizing from the North to cover up for what they consider to be imperialism. Again, I think they're wrong, but it's not a ridiculous argument. The historical record is jumbled enough that there is some support for that argument -- it all depends on which contemporaneous sources you cite.
