Excellent observations, BMcK. A week or so ago in another thread about I mentioned Noam Chomsky and his philosophical followers, the "general semanticists." One of their basic ideas is that the person who is most successful is the one who manipulates symbols best. I don't know if you were actually drawing on their ideas, but your post certainly dovetails with their thinking — on that score, at least.

That some people understand it as a statement of racism is certainly true. What I was trying to get across is that (in the south, at least) the vast majority do not consider it that.

And many historians argue that while racism was the hot-button issue used to march many northerners and some southerners off to war, the actual cause of the war was a clash between the economic needs and wants of the agrarian South and the industrial North. The South tried to exercise it's constitutional right to secede and the northern textile mills didn't want to lose their supply of cotton.

The slavery issue was used in the North to demonize southerners and whip up enough anti-rebel sentiment to get people to enlist in the army. In the south the issue understood by most was that the increasingly populous northern industrial states were beginning to dictate all kinds of terms (markets (domestic and foreign), movement of goods, currencies, political ideas, etc.) to the southern states, who were not willing to relinquish that degree of control to a completely different society. The average Rebel soldier understood the war to be about states' rights, not slavery (which was a small and meaningless part of the overall picture to people who were not slaveholders).

I would put all that forward with the caveat that "racism" is not interchangeable "slavery." Either can stand by itself; the slavery in the U.S. just happened to combine the two for a lot of economic, social and technical reasons.

What I find irritating now is that many who decry slavery and racism ignore the fact that while the North ostensibly fought a war to end slavery, the population of the North was a vehemently racist as any Southern redneck. Witness the demographics of New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, etc. about 140 years later.

cheers,

david