Sidney Andrews Quotes
Charleston has much intelligence, and considerable genuine culture; but go twenty miles away, and you are in the land of the barbarians. So, Raleigh is a city in which there is love of beauty, and interest in education; but the common people of the county are at least forty years behind the same class of people in Vermont. Moreover, in Macon are many very fine residences, and the city may boast of its gentility and its respect for the nourishing elegancies of life; but a dozen miles out are large neighborhoods not yet half-civilized. The contrast between the inhabitants of the cities and those of the country is hardly less striking than that between the various classes constituting the body of the common people. Going from one county into another is frequently going into a foreign country. Travel continually brings novelty, but with that always came pain. Till all these hateful walls of caste are thrown down, we can have neither intelligent love of liberty, decent respect for justice, nor enlightened devotion to the idea of national unity.
Sidney Andrews, Mid 19th Century, Investigative Journalist of the Post Civil War South, “Three Months Among the Reconstructionists” The Atlantic Monthly, February 1866
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The Union troops had just been routed at Bull Run. Many in the North thought that the war would be a short one with little disruption of loss of life. Here Norton, like so many others, provided a a more realistic assessment. Also note the reference to “barbarism” in the South, When the Union was formed, the Southern states were not as well developed as the North from an industrial, educational or cultural perspective. There were vestiges of aristocracy, crude law enforcement, and much more poverty (Virginia excepted) than in the North. Most Northerners thought that the South would reform—modernize and become more like the North, but instead the gulf became greater as the North itself developed and changed rapidly while the South was mired in its traditions with their aristocracy gaining more political, economic and cultural control. This attitude of Northern superiority, objectively valid though it may have been, was sorely resented by the South and this resentment has persisted into relatively modern times.
Garrison and some of the other radical abolitionists actually argued for dissolution of the Union as a means to end slavery. These abolitionists were convinced that if the United States split in two, slavery would end. See {613764} & {613626} for a description of the logic.
This was not an original notion with Abraham Lincoln. Seward and most of the “Radical Republicans” believed that the slavery issue had to be resolved and attempts to compromise were futile.
Tibet and some other ethnic enclaves of China have been almost impervious to the general improvement in the standard of living that China accomplished at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. China is not the only nation to have this difficulty. Some would argue that America still has it with some of its Native American nations. The great challenge is trying to develop and modernize a culture that does not want to be modernized at the moment but still wants many of the benefits of modernization.
Paz was the Ambassador to India. The caste system in India was outlawed by the Indian Constitution, and the government has made many effort at affirmative action to eliminate it put as Paz observed it is so ingrained in Indian tradition, culture and religion that it continues to persist.
