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Americans who fly the Confederate flag don’t understand the nature of tyranny in the antebellum South, writes Forrest A. Naborsin From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction.
In a 10-minute conversation with The Bookmonger, Nabors explains the goals of Reconstruction, why so few people truly understand its era, and whether we should regard it as a success or failure.
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And where are we today?
I completely agree with this author’s assessment, harsh but fair. People look at the antebellum south as comprising only plantation owners, the richest of the rich. But that is not the case. I don’t know the actual percentage, but I imagine that plantation owners constituted less than 1 percent of the white population. This is not to condone in any way the southern institution of chattel slavery—which set the South back economically at least a century, if you want to be self-critical rather than merely moral about it—but to emphasize its existence as an institution through which the lives of the great majority of white southerners were controlled by local police power wielded both directly and indirectly by the plantation owners. (See, e.g., The Long Hot Summer, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and the like: Big Daddy as oligarch a century after the war.)
But then there’s the rest of us from the Deep South, those whose people came to America after the war and for whom the Old South story is as dead as a statue and as foreign as a myth but who, by virtue of our skin color, are judged in accordance with it.