Over at civilwarhistory2 (open archives), the always charming Helga Ross asks:
What if our favorite professor had been born a plantation slaveowner in South
Carolina or Mississippi leading up to the 1860′s…..?
It’s easy to say what one would do and value today, 150 years removed. But,
who’s to say it would be true, at the time; and not in hindsight?
Honored as I am to be this group’s “favorite professor,” the question seems problematic. First, let’s observe that it would be highly unlikely to be born a plantation slaveowner. I don’t know of any southern newborns who at the moment of their appearance on earth instantly had ownership of land and slaves. Perhaps Ms. Ross’s reliable research assistant can document one.
Second, of course, if I’m that person, I’m not me, so what’s the point? For example, if I were such a person, I could not be a New York Yankees or a New York Islanders fan, because neither existed at that time. And, folks, it would be hard to be me without being an Islanders or Yankees fan.
Third, this question seems to presuppose a bit too much. It’s not enough to have me transported back in time to be a southerner, even a southerner of means: Ms. Ross also stipulates that I must be a slaveholder who owns a plantation (she does not stipulate that I should be white or male). What if I asked Ms. Ross: “Suppose you were a Nazi concentration camp commandant in 1943? How would you feel about the Holocaust?” What exactly would be the point of that question? What would we learn from it? Would we seriously remark, “It’s easy to say what one would do and value today, 70 years removed. But, who’s to say it would be true, at the time; and not in hindsight?”
I could with as much reason ask, “What if Helga Ross were Brooks Simpson? What would she/he think then?”
And who would care? What would we learn?
Returning to the original query, maybe I’d be James L. Petigru. Maybe I’d be James L. Alcorn. But if I were them, I wouldn’t be me, and that’s why the question as posed seems pointless.
The problem with playing that stupid game is that it gets us nowhere. What if Helga were born as a slave and forced to labor as a chambermaid and otherwise keep Massa happy in the pantry before she got too old and banished to the cabins? Of course, maybe there is a point to all of this. If “our favorite professor” had been born and raised in N.E., he’d be wearing a sweater with the 8-spoked B and be a much happier hockey fan these days
We will see who is happier tonight … although the odds favor you.
Hey, we’re exhausted from that rigorous Florida trip. Never too late to get on Facebook and ask your new G to emerge from his Colorado bunker and take the ice tonight.
Yahoo groups like this seem to be a waste of time and bandwidth. Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Lincoln question spins off into this is a perfect example why they are a waste. To answer her question, I would have taken my slaves to see Django Unchained.
Interesting that “everyones favorite professor” (I believe I coined that term) wastes his time there. As far as debating goes,more of a bare knuckles, much more challenging then a blog..Though we have lost some of our best of late.
When people ask me to look at something, I look (the archives are open). The question of what one would do in another’s shoes is not unique to Ms. Ross.
One might ask why anyone is a member of that group given the tenor of the discussion, but to each his own. Maybe membership has its privileges. I wouldn’t know.
Some of us like it bare knuckles,though we haven’t had a real dust up in some time.There is some interesting information at times,Eddie is posting on the confederate supreme court or lack of,theres the daily Civil War from Bob,much of it is just chatting.
Thanks for the morning guffaw! Hilariously ridiculous proposition…in so very many ways…
I mean, what if she had been William T. Sherman in late October, 1864? Would she have ordered the evacuation of Atlanta prior to burning parts of the city and leaving for Savannah?
Really, ridiculous!
James L. Alcorn wasn’t born in Mississippi, but in Illinois. He didn’t move to Mississippi until he was an adult it seems.
You better hope you had been born James L. Petigru!
Perhaps Alcorn’s birthplace disqualifies him in the minds of some.
She also said that she didn’t have to ask this question of true southerners, although she’s north of everyone but Sarah Palin. But I wonder what she meant by that … and whether, once more, she doesn’t see African Americans encompassed in the term “southerner,” or at least, to use her term, “born and bred Southrons.” Otherwise, however, she believes that geography is destiny, period … so it makes no sense for her to ask a question (however problematic) to which she believes that she already has the right answer, regardless of what anyone else might say … which overlooks the inherently speculative nature of counterfactuals.
It’s a veritable cornucopia of fallacious assumptions.
My hypothesis, based on casually taking note of such things when I notice them, is that the desire to do this comes in part from popular literature and, more recently, movies and television. Taking a character and placing that character’s mind in another character’s body is fictional trope older than Freaky Friday. Like most things Disney, the idea was stolen from popular culture.
And when it happens, the person it happens to always gets taught a lesson of some kind.
So, rather than even attempting to discuss anything relevant, those who find their worldview challenged often resort to this little fantasy of seeing how you’d like it if you thought like them. Sometimes they articulate via an absurd distraction by asking *you* to fantasize along with them, their assumption being that you will fell as properly chastised as they have chastised you in their own minds.
However, they never consider the reverse … that, given their assumptions, that if they were in your place they would also think and act like you do. That would tend to eliminate the smugness in most reasonable people who might reflect a moment on the purpose of the exercise, but some folks just want to be judgmental.
What if Helga Ross had been born in 1845 into a Michigan family that was strongly abolitonist and involved in the Underground Railroad?
I believe she would not be on a Yahoo discussion group today.
Someone once wrote that those who enjoy imagining themselves in the past almost always imagine themselves to be in a position of agency, if not power; such a person is never Olga Svensdotter, serf, but always Dronning Margrete of the Two Kingdoms…
My guess is these Confederate wannabees always imagine theirselves as Scarlett O’Hara, of Tara, not Molly Jones of the log cabin up in the holler somewhere…
Best,
I love Counter-factuals can be fascinating but many of them drive me crazy.
What If SO191 hadn’t been lost? What if Phil Kearny hadn’t been shot? What if Joseph Hooker hadn’t been relieved before Gettysburg or Reynolds had accepted the promotion instead of deferring to Meade? What if Lincoln hadn’t been assassinated? Those are all useful counter-factuals to explore how a different course of events could have lead to a different outcome (or sometimes to essentially the same outcome).
But the Alternate History community would rather write about time traveling white supremacists giving AK47s to the Confederacy or a modern day town in West Virginia being transported to 1630s Europe or Napoleon somehow being born in the days of the Roman Empire.
Frankly, Brooks, I always had you pegged as James Henry Hammond. But the fact that you are wallowing around with such material as those folks seem to generate has me now thinking Edmund Ruffin might be closer to the mark.
Maybe John C. Breckinridge. I played him in an eighth grade class exercise on the election of 1860.