The Bigot’s Guide To Hating Southerners

A CNN travel editor named Chuck Thompson has established himself as a one-man hate group in writing a short book entitled Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession.” He advertised his book in an October 20 article in Salon entitled “Just Secede Already.” Oh, if only we could.

Hatred of and bigotry toward Southerners is of course nothing new. The New England “Yankees” of the early nineteenth century thought of themselves as God’s chosen people and deplored the immigration into the country of lesser humans from parts of Europe other than their own little section of the British Isles – especially the loathsome Catholic immigrants from Germany, Ireland, and Italy (See Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fisher).

The early nineteenth-century New England descendants of the Puritans so hated Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, and its prospects for accommodating masses of God’s un-chosen people, that they spent a decade plotting secession. This plot culminated in the 1814 Hartford Secession Convention at which the New England Federalists issued severe criticisms of government, but decided that their political and economic fortunes would be best served by undermining the government of the founders from within rather than seceding. Their political descendants (The Whig and Republican parties of that century) succeeded beyond their wildest dreams in creating a centralized, bureaucratic empire that would rival the British and Spanish empires.

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