The South as I know it

Say old man, what’s got you so deep in thought?

Well, I’ll tell you Corrina-Corrina I’ve been thinking about my early years on the farm and all the PC crap today about the War Between the States.  No, there wasn’t no damn Civil War. That term means some faction is out to over throw the government.  The South didn’t have any thought about that they just wanted to be left alone to make a living.  In the 1850s the South didn’t have cotton mills or the ability to make steel.  That was all from the northern industrialists.  When we went to buy steel plowshares we were giving a price and that price was a gouging.  We said “That’s not fair.”  The Yankees would say “Take it or leave it.”  When we went to sell our cotton and was told the price we said “That’s not fair.”  Again, they said “Take it or leave it.”  These Yankee industrialists owned the good-for-nothing Congress of the time and could do as they pleased. 

The South was able to make cast iron and tried to use that for plowshares.  Cast iron being soft and brittle they wore fast in the sandy soil and hitting a large root they would break.  Those plows were called “The Dixie Plow.” To sell the cotton at a fair price the south tried to export the cotton to Europe.  They laid rail track to Savannah and used cotton barges to float the bales to the Gulf on the Flint and Chattahoochee rivers for export.  The Yankee industrialists got their bought-and-paid-for congress to levy heavy export duties on cotton exports since the exports would hit the cotton mills and steel foundries in the pocket book. This put the South between a rock and a hard place.  Get gouged by the industrialists or gouged by the government.  What could the South do but try to get out?  

My father was 65 when I was born in 1935.  That would make his birth about 1870 and his father, my grandfather, born before 1855.  They were raised in Iowa a free state. There are no slaves on my paternal side.  My maternal grandfather was the caretaker of the Jekyll Island Club.  That was the social club for the moneyed big wigs from the North.  He was born in 1865 and since he worked for a living he didn’t have any slaves either.  I am also sure that I never had any.  As I look at the current crop of yahoos in Washington it looks like 1855 all over again.  Stick it to the working man he can’t do anything about it.  Damn, I’m pissed.

I remember when I was about 6 walking in the furrow behind my dad as he plowed a mule.  He turned up a piece of cast iron and said to me “Son, that’s a piece of a Dixie Plow.”  I assume some pieces are turned up today by the row-crop farmers.

Wonder what’s the chance of succession today?

Just some bitchin from a wore-out-old man.