That night my major emphasis was to help improve our Georgia work force in order for Georgia to attract more sophisticated industry, thereby improving the standard of living for all Georgians. I told why the South – Georgia in particular – was so far behind the Northern states in per-capita income, which has resulted in many socioeconomic problems, including very poor race relations.
I said we had been, and still were being, exploited by the Industrial North to keep the 11 Confederate States subservient, and in reality, as a “colony” of the Industrial North.
That point, “being a colony of the Industrial North,” was recently reinforced in an article in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Professor Emeritus Carol E. Scott. She quoted the great English writer, Charles Dickens who in the late 1860s, wrote, “The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal its desire for economic control of the Southern states.” (I think Charles Dickens knew what he was talking about.)
Professor Scott followed that positive statement with, “Just as eliminating slavery may not have been the North’s prime motivation, the fact that late in the war, Confederate soldiers successfully petitioned their Congress and President to allow the enlistment in the army of slaves who would be promised their freedom, suggests that preserving slavery may not have been the most important reason for Southern states fighting for their independence.”
It is obvious that the South did not fight to keep the blacks in slavery nor did the North fight to free the blacks. It was just as obvious that the North was fighting to preserve the Union; which is a very noble, worthy cause. But! It was a perverse Union with one group of states dominating another group of state – the North dominating the South.
The South fought the war because they, the Southern states, were being invaded by a much superior force and because the states of the South believed they had a right to secede from the Union to preserve their rights and prevent being completely dominated. It was the old story of the Colonizer over the Colony; England over the States. But now, the people of the North fought against their own blood to hold their Southern colony.
Before closing my talk that night back in 1971, I said, “Let me add a warning. Remember there are still many people in America who would like to see the South remain an economic colony to the Industrial North; people who would like to keep wages in the North high, while depressing ours.
"In 1931, the Davis-Bacon Act was introduced. The Act was named for its chief sponsors: Senators Davis of Pennsylvania and Bacon of New York. The law was designed to address what its big labor supporters described as the “growing menace” of black workers who were depressing the wages of employees working for government contractors.
"The law, which is still in effect, has cost the federal government billions of dollars and kept both black and white southerners “down” because they could not get into the protected unions, where the higher wages are being paid.
I personally am afraid that Davis-Bacon is a continuation of the same old practices of the past, “To keep us as the special private colony of the Industrial North.” And! What I fear most – to be successful they will continue to promote and exploit strife between the black and white races. I hope that I am wrong, but as Davis-Bacon is still on the books, I feel that I am right.
There are other warning flags for the future. Let us take heed. When I made that statement in 1971, I had no idea that “warning flags” might in themselves be the catalysts for continuing the denigration and exploitation of the South and its people, by the rest of the United States, particularly by the Northeast and West Coast.
The question is, why should a flag be such a divisive issue: not between the North and South, but within the South; between the blacks and whites of the South who should be walking together to eliminate the cause of the destructive divisiveness?
A brief outline of what has occurred in the South from about 1800 will give us the reasons for the animosity which exists between the South and the North of our country; which in turn has led to sometimes terrible divisiveness between certain elements of our black and white societies.
With the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton became king in the South. In the early 1800s, the demand world-wide for cotton became so great that the price of cotton skyrocketed. The South, especially Georgia, prospered. With money to spend, and cotton to trade, the South became the envy of the rest of the United States.
With the demand for cotton came the demand for laborers. England and New England supplied the answer to the labor shortages – black African slaves.
A Yankee slave ship’s captain, sailing out of Boston to the African west coast purchased slaves from African Chiefs for trinkets, or whiskey; crammed the poor humans below the deck like sheep; sailed for America; dumped the dead and dying overboard while out of site of land; sold the survivors in a Southern seaport where he was not allowed to pull his ship into the dock because of the terrible stench and filth. The captain then sailed with his blood money to Boston where he and his crew rested a few days before sailing again to Africa for another cargo of “black gold.” The purchase price of the black gold became a part of the capital base of the North, never to be used for repatriation or repayment when the slaves were freed.
Over a period of about fifty years, the South prospered economically. The standard of living for the human debris from Africa, in most cases, was better by far than any place in Africa; better than that of the poor immigrants and the child laborers of the North. Even so, the South was still far behind the North in that vital economic requirement – manufacturing. And! The Industrial North wanted to keep it that way.
It was a vicious cycle. Slavers from New England sold us salves so we could produce cotton; so that they could manufacture cotton cloth and clothing and sell it to us. But, the same arrangements working so well for the North were also working well for England. The competition from England was too much for the Industrial North.
With England as the North’s only competitor, the answer was simple for the North’s protective tariffs – tariffs in reality aimed at England and one section of the United States – the eleven states of the cotton belt. From that time on, the break-up of the Union was inevitable. In 1861, the eleven Cotton States legally seceded from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America.
The resulting War of Secession or Civil War really ended with the fall of Atlanta in 1865. Sherman’s March To The Sea, which devastated Georgia, was anti-climatic and horrible to Georgia. It was the March of Infamy. The scar of the march remained for a hundred years and in some cases are still with us.
Sherman’s refusal to exchange prisoners of war created terrible problems for a Confederacy that no longer had the means to feed its own soldiers or prisoner of war. The needless death and destruction of the last month of the war made it almost impossible for the South to recover, and integrate over three million freed slaves into a non-existing economy. At the war’s end, the South was no more than a vast tenement farm with the tenants having no money to even buy the seeds to plant for future crops – crops that might pay for the seed, feed the people and perhaps, do something for the freed slaves, and for the equally impoverished southern whites.
Inept government at state and local level; a federal government with an overriding desire to punish the white people of the South; an invasion from a vindictive North of carpetbaggers and charlatans; military governments controlled by the dregs of the Union army; and the outright purchase or confiscation of Southern Railroads by Northern industrialists; combined to be more devastating to the South than Sherman’s "Genghis Kahn" March To The Sea had been.
This 12-year period (1865-1877), which should have been, and could have been, a period of peace and unification of a torn nation was instead a period of strife and Northern vengeance-seeking, actually condoned and fomented by the “occupying” military forces. A prostrate, broken South, black and white, was plowed into the red clay of Georgia.
In retrospect, had Germany and Japan at the end of World War II been treated as horribly by the Untied States as the South was treated by the victorious Northern States and the United States Congress; today there would be no Germany or Japan as free countries. And all of Europe and a great part of Asia would be Socialists – dominated by the Soviet Union.
At the end of the Northern military occupations in 1877, Georgia was allowed to form a much needed militia. The Gate City Guard of Atlanta, a military company formed in 1856 to defend Atlanta and Georgia against invasion, was reconstituted. The Gate City Guard became a major component of the Georgia Militia in Atlanta.
In the late 1870s, antagonism between the North and South was still rampant, inflamed by a carry-over of wartime propaganda used so effectively by both sides; before, and during, the war, but after the war, only by a vicious Northern press – a press which published articles and editorials against the South in nearly every issue of the Northern newspapers. For example, stories about Andersonville placed all the blame for the hunger and starvation of Union prisoners of the Confederates, never mentioning the fact that General Sherman had refused to accept his own Union soldiers in exchange for Confederate prisoners, and finally, even when there were no Confederate prisoners to exchange, he refused to accept Union prisoners under any conditions, thereby forcing the Confederates to feed hapless Union prisoners. The Confederate guards themselves were on the same rations as the Union prisoners. The types of food were the same; perhaps the Confederate guards could tolerate the different foods better than the Union prisoners. During World War II, American prisoners died in Japanese prison camps or on marches because they could not tolerate Japanese food. To this day, the true story of Andersonville and other prisons, North and South, has not been told.
In 1870, Captain Joseph E. Burke, Commander of the Gate City Guard, decided in order to obtain enduring peace and reconciliation between the North and South, that some “magnificent gesture” on the part of the South was required. He determined that a Peace Mission to the North with the Gate City Guard in full uniform leading the way, no matter what the anticipated danger, would be the conciliatory action vitally needed.
To the surprise of many, Captain Burke and the Gate City Guard found a hardy welcome for the “Peaceful Invasion” of the North. Thousands turned out in major cities to cheer the “Best Drilled Company in the World.” The national press followed the Guard’s friendship tour closely. The Gate City Guard and its mission became known to people all over the country. The mission was pronounced a great success everywhere and was described even in the hostile Northern press as the final real move to reunite the states. Had there been a Nobel Peace Prize at that time, Captain Burke and the Gate city Guard would have deserved the reward, and justly so.
Many more visits between North and South were exchanged over the next decades, including Atlanta’s famous “Cotton States Exposition of 1895,” which has been planned as a continuation of Captain Burke’s Peace Marches. By 1910, it was decided that a monument to the first “Northern Mission” should be erected in Atlanta, the home of the Gate City Guard. The cost of the monument was quickly raised through private subscription. On October 10, 1911, 75,000 people watched a splendid parade of military units from all over America participate in dedication ceremonies which concluded with the presenting of the monument to the City of Atlanta by the Gate City Guard.
Each year, the Old Guard Battalion of the Gate City Guard conducts a rededication observance at the monument at 2:00 p.m. on the Saturday nearest October 10th. The public is invited. The Peace monument is located just inside Piedmont Park at the 14th Street entrance.
In spite of the healing effects of the Peace marches, the individual states of the Old Confederacy suffered as vassal states, dominated and controlled by the “Union” states from 1865 until WWII and in many ways until today, 2005.
Northern control of Congress; establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce discrimination freight rates; (a disguise tariff); and a vindictive Northern press made it nearly impossible for the South to survive as a viable part of the Republic; but the South did survive, because of the indomitable spirit of the people – black and white. Outstanding freedom fighters and patriotic institutions, and universities who fought so valiantly for freedom and equality were and in some cases still are:
- Henry Grady, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, who wrote the “New South” and lectured in many Northern cities about the problems and opportunities, the despair and the hopes, of the South.
- George Washington Carver at Tuskegee University, who developed farm products and procedures which helped to bring the south out of the devastation caused by the one-crop economy, the King Cotton Syndrome.
- The discovery of oil and natural gas in Texas and Louisiana.
- The development of Georgia Tech and other engineering and architectural institutions throughout the South, including the Universities of the Research Triangle in North Carolina.
- The “invention” of Coca-Cola, which created a tremendous “manufacturing” profit flow into Georgia; almost alone, making Atlanta the banking center of the South. Coca-Cola’s charitable and benevolent foundations helped to make Emory at Oxford into a great medical and liberal arts college, which indirectly brought to Atlanta, the National Center for Disease Control and the American Cancer Society.
- Robert (Bobby) Tyre Jones, who won the Grand Slam in Golf in 1930. He capitalized on his fame by establishing the world’s most prestigious golf tournament – The Masters, in Augusta.
- The founding of Delta Airlines with Atlanta as its headquarters, which, in turn brought other airlines to Atlanta, making Atlanta one of the Great Airline hubs of the world.
- William Hartsfield and his recognition of Atlanta as the strategic base for a national and world air transportation center.
- Dr. Hert (?) of the University of Georgia, for his work on “making paper from Georgia pines,” creating a new industry in the South, particularly Georgia. His work helped change worn out, eroding, cotton land to lush, oxygen-producing, soil-building pine forests. In the 1970s, there were over 150 million more pine trees growing in Georgia than there had been in the 1930s.
- World War I opened the eyes of million of Southern soldiers to the advances the North had made since 1865; but, “The War To End All Wars” also opened the eyes of millions of Northern soldiers who saw the South as it was, minus the propaganda that had been spread for over 50 years. Each side, at the level of “real people” liked what they saw and the healing process between the North and South really advanced. It was hard for a soldier from Georgia and one from New York, standing beside each other, knee-deep in mud, in a trench 25 yards from a deadly enemy, not to like each other and carry their likes back home when the war ended.
- World War II was a great economic stimulus to the South. Great training camps for the Army and Army Air Corps, Navy and Marines opened in almost every Southern state. Aircraft manufacturing and shipbuilding and support facilities created job opportunities for millions of people. World War II caused the South to prosper economically as never before, perhaps as much as the industrial North. In spite of great losses in our military forces, it began to appear that the South was no longer a colony of the North.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. for raising the issue of racial equality and opportunity to the highest plane; thereby opening a vast reserve of talent with opportunities for all, black and white, in harmony, tolerance and peace; marred only by extremists in both races and by the liberal northern media and even some of the southern media, either profiting from the strife or continuing the vendetta against the South.
- The unsung heroes of the south, who fought so hard to eliminate the "differential freight rates."
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