Why is Southern History so Romanticized?

[hifiguy]

38. I think you're on to something.

Reconstruction should have lasted until 1900 or so. The South never truly accepted that it was defeated in the Civil War.

Compare Southern intransigence, which exists to this day on many issues, to what happened in Japan and Germany after WW II. The Japanese and Germans were forced to confront the fact that they, and their ideologies, had been totally defeated. Nazism and militant Japanese imperialism were destroyed and cast on to the ash heap of history and Japan and Germany became responsible, democratic world citizens and dynamic economic miracles in the post WW II era. The South never went through that process and, as soon as the federal troops were gone, promptly reinstated the closest thing to slavery they could in the form of Jim Crow, which dominated the South for the next 100 years.

Lincoln was a great man, a great leader and a great President but his attitude towards the postwar fate of the South was far too charitable.