unionist emotionalism

[Hugh Lawson]

The unionist emotion on ACW issues has interested me since I first
encountered it in this newsgroup about 12 years ago. Before then, I had
believed the myth that the emotion was all on the pro-rebel side, that
northerners won, and forgot about it. The pro-rebels were often
described as eaten up by sectional resentment, an emotional search to
rake something from the ashes of rebel defeat, fanatical racism and so
on.

Why the unionist emotionalism?

After reading authors like Jennifer Greeson, David Jansson, and Susan
Mary Grant, I have concluded that this emotion results from way many
northerners (aka non-southerners) construct their American identity: for
them American identity is a matter of belonging to a spiritual community
that I sometimes call "True America", which defines itself in contrast
to "the South", conceived as Jansson has put it as an internal-other,
even internal-foreigners you might say.

Then they encounter the spread-eagle, chauvinistic, patriotic element of
the southern population, who are quite complacent about their own
Americanism, and who seem not even to recognize this North=True-America
doctrine as existing at all. Not only that, but the CSA
sentimentalizers won't stop preaching their doctrines.

The unionist emotionalism used to bother me, especially when it became
incorporated in silly passionate screeds against me personally. We used
to have a guy here who called me "Saddam Huey" hundreds of times, if not
thousands. But after a while I concluded that this northern unionist
emotional exists in issues of identity, supported not by science but by
myth and ritual.

So instead of getting mad, I started to study Northerners who repeat
these South-as-Opposite-Other ideas, and to look for authors who study
this. It has been interesting.

hl