“If there is to be a separation, then God bless them both. And keep them in the Union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better.”
…Thomas Jefferson on the New England Hartford Convention of 1814.
This is Charlie Lee with Springtime of Nations talkin Dixie today. I would like to make clear from the beginning that this will NOT be a defense of the Confederate States of America of 1861-1865. The purpose of this video is, like the rest in our series, to cover a distinct nation that is or has struggled against a larger state to achieve independence. The nation we will be covering is the American Southerner or Southron. The so called American Civil War or as professor Walter Block has pointed out the Southern War for Secession, was not the first or the last outcropping of nationalist fervor among this People. So what is the history of the Southerner? Why did he fight the Union, and why is there a newfound interest in breaking from the United States in the last 20 years?
The tale of the southerner begins with the beginning of the tale of the United States, in 1607. The private Virginia Company was chartered with the right to develop and govern a large section of the eastern seaboard of North America (this would later be significantly divided up into other colonies). The first settlement, Jamestown, endured incredible adversity and famine to become the center of the southern American colonies, which by 1632 included the province of Maryland, by 1663 Carolina, by 1712 South Carolina, and 1732 the province of Georgia. All of these colonies, though they had plenty of internecine differences, had a great deal of similarity in their religion (primarily Anglicanism before the first Great Awakening of the 1730s and 1740s), their economy (mostly engaged in cash crops such as tobacco, indigo and rice with much of the work undertaken by indentured servants and later slaves), and even ethnic makeup: In contrast to the corn producing, Low Church New Englanders who came primarily from East Anglia, Southerners came broadly from, coincidentally, rural south England.
