There\u2019s no question but that a lot of what\u2019s going on today reminds me of the Cotton Kingdom, the principality of sorts that tore our country apart over 150 years ago in a terrible Civil War. The Cotton Kingdom had a relatively small group of people\u2014we\u2019re talking about white men, of course\u2014who owned almost all the wealth of the South in the form of land and slaves devoted to growing King Cotton. They got richer and richer while the rest of the South stayed poor. Remind you of something?<\/p>\n
One of the reasons the South lost the war (thank God!) was because its industry lagged well behind that of the North. The army didn\u2019t have enough guns and ammunition, and since the mills that made cloth were all in the North, clothing and blankets were in short supply, let alone proper boots. You\u2019d think the lords of the Cotton Kingdom would have thought of all that before they sent their soldiers off to war, but given most of those soldiers were expendable poor whites I guess it never crossed their mind.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s true that some of the planter class fought and died in the war\u2014myself included, if you consider my father\u2019s 1,000 acre cotton farm a plantation\u2014but mostly the Confederacy drafted poor white men, those \u201ccommon men\u201d I talk about so much, to fight the war on their behalf. And don\u2019t ask me why, but those common men bought it lock, stock and barrel, or at least most of them did for a while, until close to the end when \u201cA rich man\u2019s war and a poor man\u2019s fight\u201dbecame a popular saying. They died like flies defending their homes and farms from the Yankee invasion, despite the fact that most of their holdings were mere crumbs (there\u2019s that word again) compared to the wealth of the Cotton Kingdom\u2019s plantations.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll have more to say later regarding people\u2019s misconceptions as to who their friends and enemies really are, along with the age-old problem of whose children are sent off to die when there\u2019s a war\u2014and the ramifications of both for America\u2019s military in the 21 st Century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There\u2019s no question but that a lot of what\u2019s going on today reminds me of the Cotton Kingdom, the principality of sorts that tore our country apart over 150 years ago in a terrible Civil War.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":208996,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","pgc_sgb_lightbox_settings":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1424"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":208997,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1424\/revisions\/208997"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thegallantpelham.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}