Dec 10, 2010

War Coverage, 150 Years Later

     Not unexpectedly, I've seen more comprehensive coverage of the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War in the Northern (OK, Yankee) Media than here in The South. Slavery is the sticky issue.
     Officially, Alabama is lumping the Civil War Anniversary in with those the Indian Wars and the Civil Rights Era. "Becoming Alabama" is the umbrella title.
     Let me recommend to you an interactive map in the Times (the one in Yankee New York) that  is based on an original that apparently was a favorite of Abraham Lincoln.
     It shows the numbers and proportion of the slave populations in the Southern States in 1861 as the war started.
    Alabama's population was 45.1% slave...and five Black Belt counties had populations that were 3/4 or more slave: Greene, Sumter, Marengo, Dallas and Wilcox.
    The entire State of South Carolina---the first to leave The Union, was majority slave.

[UPDATE: an AP story about the very topic of slavery and South Carolina is in the Montgomery Advertiser here.]

3 comments:

  1. Which department of our state government came up with this tripartate anniversary?

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  2. T'was the Department of Archives and History.

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  3. Reminds me, somehow, of the old adage that a camel is a horse built by a committee.

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