03-23-2017, 12:28 PM
It's an old and insular culture, one shaped in part by its incompatibility with three other threads of early-American settlement. It distrusted Big Government which sought to put an end to its ways in the wild Borderlands between northern England and southern Scotland. It had no use for the high-minded community-building of the Puritan settlers of New England, the prudery of the Quakers and their German Pietist allies in southeastern Pennsylvania, or the semi-feudal hierarchy of Tidewater and other planters. The southern and central Appalachians and the Ozarks were suitable refuges -- places with few resources suitable for making big, easy money for outsiders. Their world attracted few immigrants who might bring some exotic ways of life much unlike theirs.
During the Civil War they turned on the slave-owning Planter culture on behalf of the Union. They didn't like the Planter intrusion upon their turf (or really the slaves that came with that expansion) ... and gave the Union Army a chance to take over the commanding heights of the South. They separated West Virginia from Virginia in 1863, and made possible General Sherman's devastating 'March through Georgia' that may have been the death blow to the Confederacy.
During the Civil War they turned on the slave-owning Planter culture on behalf of the Union. They didn't like the Planter intrusion upon their turf (or really the slaves that came with that expansion) ... and gave the Union Army a chance to take over the commanding heights of the South. They separated West Virginia from Virginia in 1863, and made possible General Sherman's devastating 'March through Georgia' that may have been the death blow to the Confederacy.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.