Across America's "Deep South"

There doesn't seem to be an exact definition of what exactly America's "Deep South" is. This visit does not correspond exactly to what might be generally considered as being part of this region. This visit includes the U.S. states of Arkansas and Tennessee but not Georgia and South Carolina.

Little Rock is the state capital and largest city of Arkansas.

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Baton Rouge is the state capital of Louisiana.

Southern Louisiana has a considerable number of people of Cajun ancestry. These are descended from French Canadians who left for the former French territory of Louisiana. There are radio stations today in "Louisiana French" is spoken. The name of Baton Rouge means "the red stick" in French.

Cajuns are especially known for their cuisine. It is not often that I remember a restaurant but when I once passed through Baton Rouge there was a place called Po' Boys that had some really good food.

We saw in the compound posting on this blog, "America And The Modern World Explained By Way Of Paris", that Napoleon sold the vast Louisiana Purchase, named for a French King, to the U.S. in order to concentrate on Europe.

Louisiana is a little bit different from the rest of America's south due to this French heritage. For example, the counties of Louisiana are called parishes.

Louisiana and New Orleans has a colorful charm that just draws people in. As a child that had recently landed in America, I first became acquainted with Louisiana by way of the 1969 song, "Polk Salad Annie".

If the question was asked who was the most colorful governor ever of a U.S. state, the first name that might come to mind is Louisiana's Huey Long. He was the left-leaning governor in the late 1920s and early 30s who famously built a bridge low so that tankers couldn't sail up the Mississippi River past Baton Rouge.

Huey Long was eventually assassinated. How often do you hear of a U.S. state governor getting assassinated? But that's how colorful Louisiana is.

Anyway, here is Baton Rouge.

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Jackson, in the state of Mississippi, is the state capital.

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Mobile, located on the Gulf of Mexico, is a port in the state of Alabama that began as a French settlement.

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Moving northward in Alabama, Montgomery was the original capital of America's Confederacy. Ironically, it was also where the Civil Rights Movement began a century later.

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Birmingham, in Alabama, is an industrial city from after the U.S. Civil War, that was named for Birmingham in England.

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Huntsville, in the far north of Alabama, could be said to be the birthplace of NASA. It has a history of being a center for the testing of military missiles.

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Chattanooga is in the south of the state of Tennessee.

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Memphis, in eastern Tennessee, was named for the city in ancient Egypt. One of the most famous streets in America is Beale Street, with it's blues music clubs.

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Nashville is famous as the world capital of country music. Memphis is named for the city in ancient Egypt but Nashville has a copy of the Parthenon, from Athens.

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Knoxville, in northeastern Tennessee, is a seriously nice city that I once passed through. Like Nashville, it dates back to the early days of America.

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THE U.S. CIVIL WAR

A discussion of America's South must necessarily include the Civil War of 1861-65. The southern states seceded to form a separate country, the Confederate States of America, primarily over the issue of slavery. By this point, world opinion had turned against slavery but the southern states thought that slaves were necessary for their primarily agricultural economy. The most common task that slavery was applied to was picking cotton.

I am mystified by the logic behind slavery. Slaves have to be housed. For people to do physical labor they must be well-fed and healthy. The Bible tells how much the Israelites missed the food after Moses led them from Egypt. Slaves have to be guarded to prevent escape, and caught if they do escape.

Considering all of the expense required, as well as the negative connotations of slavery, wouldn't it be better to just have employees? Even if employees did cost more than slaves it would mean more money would be spent in local businesses.

Practicing slavery also makes a country vulnerable to potential enemies promising freedom to it's slaves if they will revolt.

The first state to secede from the Union was South Carolina. Five other states joined and more would follow later. But there were federal forts within the states that seceded. One such fort was Fort Sumter, on an island by Charleston, South Carolina. The Confederates, the South, demanded it's surrender, which was refused. A bombardment of the fort began. These were the first shots of the Civil War.

The Confederacy undertook an offensive northward, from the Confederate state of Virginia into the Union, northern, states of Maryland and Pennsylvania. This offensive was led by the famed Confederate general, Robert E. Lee.

Considering that both sides were American, this led to the bloodiest single day ever for the U.S. military, the Battle of Antietam in Maryland.

While Robert E. Lee would be known for his offensive skills another Confederate general, "Stonewall" Jackson was known for defensive skills.

This northward offensive by the Confederacy culminated in the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, in southern Pennsylvania. A charge up Cemetery Ridge cost the Confederacy heavily, with horrific casualties, and might be considered as the turning point of the war. Never has a ridge been so aptly named.

My feeling is that the reasoning behind this northward Confederate offensive lay in the Appalachians, the system of ridges and mountains across the eastern U.S. This range was much more of a physical barrier in those days than it is today and if the Confederacy could occupy the lowlands to the east of the Appalachians then the mountains would act as a formidable barrier to the Union, northern, forces on the other side.

Aside from this Eastern Theater of the war, there was the Western Theater, on the other side of the Appalachians. The combat there was much more spread out in areas that were then much more sparsely populated. The forces of the Union had a very difficult time but were generally victorious, advancing deep into the South. Union forces captured the largest Confederate city of New Orleans.

The Confederates fought with determination and almost turned around the Union advances in the Western Theater with a victory at Chickamauga, in northern Georgia, as the Union had earlier turned back the Confederate advance in the Eastern Theater at Gettysburg.

But the Union had just about every possible advantage in the war. The world opinion had turned against slavery. The Confederacy printed money but, since no outside nation gave diplomatic recognition to the Confederacy, the money wasn't worth much.

While the best-known general of the war was the Confederate Robert E. Lee, Union president Abraham Lincoln was certainly a better leader than Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Ironically, Lincoln and Davis had both been born in Kentucky not far from each other. In his later years, the former Confederate president spent a lot of time in Britain.

The advantage that the Confederacy had was what I call the "situational advantage". The Confederacy was trying to separate from the Union. This meant that the Confederacy didn't have to conquer, or even defeat, the Union to achieve it's goal, all it had to do was to survive. But for the Union to succeed at it's goal of preventing the succession it had to conquer the Confederacy.

Maybe the story of the U.S. Civil War comes down to the story of two ridges. The Confederacy initially tried the northward offensive east of the Appalachians. That culminated in the very costly and unsuccessful charge up Cemetery Ridge. The numerically superior Union naturally wanted to widen the combat front and began offensives west of the Appalachians. This culminated in the charge up Missionary Ridge, near Chattanooga, which was successful. This opened up the advance into Georgia, just as the earlier charge up Cemetery Ridge would have opened up advance into Pennsylvania for the Confederates, had it succeeded.

The mobile warfare of today favors the momentum of the aggressor, but the static lines and fortifications of that day favored the defender.

What came next was the Union campaign to break what remained of the Confederacy. This was the very destructive "March to the Sea", led by Union general Sherman through the Confederate state of Georgia. The message being, "The Confederacy is finished. We can march right through your country, and destroy it along the way, and there is not much that you can do to stop us".

I believe that the motivation behind this destructive "March to the Sea" was anger at the surprise Confederate victory at Chickamauga.

General Sherman telegraphed President Lincoln that he had the coastal city of Savannah, Georgia as a Christmas gift for him. America's Civil War was over but this notorious "March to the Sea" was a harbinger of the extremely destructive conflicts that were to come in the following century.

The Union general who led one branch of this destructive "March to the Sea" as Henry Warner Slocum. We met him in "The Second Niagara Prophecy", in the compound posting on this blog, "The Aztec Prophecy". He would be the mover behind getting the Brooklyn Bridge built. A ship would be named for him. Just after the ship passed under the Brooklyn Bridge it would turn into one of the worst disasters in American history and the worst thing to happen to New York City before 9 / 11.

The notorious Confederate POW camp at Andersonville was also a look into the following century.

At sea, the war saw the first battle between ironclad warships, the Confederate Merrimac and the Union Monitor, in the Battle of Hampton Roads. The battle was inconclusive. The Merrimac was later deliberately scuttled and the Monitor sank in a storm. But this naval battle between ironclads was yet another glimpse into the following century.

The leading Union general, Ulysses Grant, would go on to serve as president, setting the stage for Dwight Eisenhower in the following century. Had the Vietnam War been popular, William Westmoreland might have followed the same path to the U.S. presidency.

An inevitable result of the U.S. Civil War was to shift the balance of the country northward. The place that gained the most from the war was New York City. When waves of immigrants came to America in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries they virtually all landed in the north, rather than the south.

The Civil War, of course, gave a lot of people experience with guns. As we saw in the posting on this blog, "The Would-Have-Been Nation Of Westland", July 15 2017, it is no coincidence that America's "Wild West" began just as it's Civil War ended. Former soldiers whose homes and towns might have been destroyed in the war moved westward.

The traditional western resistance to the authority of the eastern establishment is certainly rooted, at least partially, to the Confederate resistance to the Union. No real organized secession movement ever arose in the west primarily because it was too vast and sparsely populated. Also the kind of people who went west tended to be individualistic, more interested in their own lives and fortune and religion than in creating a new social order.

It tends to be somewhat oversimplified that states either wanted to stay with the Union or secede with the Confederacy. Actually opinion was often very divided. When Tennessee seceded, there was an attempt to separate the eastern part of the state, where opinion favored remaining in the Union. The only part of a Confederate state that managed to separate, in order to remain in the Union was the western part of Virginia, separated from the rest of the state by the Appalachians. It remains today as the state of West Virginia.

This shows again how important the Appalachians were to this war, and I have written before that it should be called the "Appalachian War".

One state that was bitterly divided was Missouri, and both sides would claim it as one of it's own. After the war, a Confederate guerrilla from Missouri, having gained experience with guns, would turn into America's most notorious killer. His name was Jesse James.

There was one good thing to emerge from the U.S. Civil War. It seems to me that, more than any other people on earth, Americans have the ability to "let bygones be bygones", taking a recent enemy into a new era as a friend. I believe that this stems from the need to immediately reconcile after the Civil War.

One thing that has never gotten back together is the Baptist Church. There is still the organization called the Southern Baptists from when the two were split by the war.

This was yet another look into the following century. Consider how quickly, after the Second World War, Germany and Japan quickly became U.S. allies after having been enemies a few days before. Compare this with the vengeful French and British after the First World War, imposing the extremely harsh terms on Germany that would help to bring about the Second World War.