Why I am a northerner- a post in progress

When my family moved from Pittsburgh Pennsylvania to Maryland my mother Sylvia said "That is as far south as I'm willing to go."  I never asked (at age 8) what that meant, or why she was averse to living in the south, but the message was still clear. We are of a different breed, so different a culture that there is a line that cannot be crossed.

Indeed at that time in 1963, the area of Virginia around Washington still had a southern atmosphere, more rural than suburban, with architecture that shown of a agricultural time i.e. plantation time. Visiting Mt. Vernon was a benign excursion to another time and culture with little awareness of the practice of owning slaves even by such iconic heroes as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
How lovely and quaint were the herb gardens and the view from the mansion.

My family is from another era and part of the globe-Eastern Europe, so the notion of having great-relatives choosing sides in this great war is not something I have had to think about. But the very idea of slavery is abhorent, and imagining how anyone could conceive of and defend capturing human beings and dragging them by boat in chains from their nations, their families, their culture and language is one that I cannot see choosing in any era.

I learn through  my readings that many northerners were not anti slavery, but pro North. They were concerned not so much with human slavery as with industrial protection and economics. So to be a northerner at that time meant for some to be only slightly more enlightened than not. It was as brave an act then to be an outspoken abolitionist in the north as it was to be for civil rights in the south in the 20th Century.

So to be from Maryland was confusing. As it should be. Here was a  divided state , a slave state even after Lincoln's Emancipation proclamation. It is where the state song adopted some 70 years later,  sung so enthusiastically by us school children in 5th grade is actually an anti northern  song, And where Montgomery County seemed like an island of progressive wealth surrounded by backwards southern ideals even in 1964.  I used to tell the story that when George McGovern, a progressive anti war candidate ran for president, that every county in Maryland except Montgomery County voted for George Wallace, the rascist governor of Alabama. That story is grossly incorrect by 4 years, as George Wallace ran against Nixon and Humphreys in 1968 not in 1972 against McGovern. The story is totally false, but the underlying pride is evident. We were not the bigots.

Despite the mythical story, Wallace's influence in the late 20th Century according to a notation in Wikipedia was so  strong that "First Nixon, then Ronald Reagan, and finally George Herbert Walker Bush successfully adopted toned-down versions of Wallace's anti-busing, anti-federal government platform to pry low- and middle-income whites from the Democratic New Deal coalition". Dan Carter, a professor of history at Emory University in Atlanta added: "George Wallace laid the foundation for the dominance of the Republican Party in American society through the manipulation of racial and social issues in the 1960s and 1970s. He was the master teacher, and Richard Nixon and the Republican leadership that followed were his students."

I've lived in Seattle and Ohio as an adult, spent 10 months in Israel where I still have family, and travelled to many countries in Europe. I've lived in Philadelphia for 24 years, one brother has lived in California for more than 25 years, and the other lived overseas and lives in the Maryland suburbs. So, it is hard to say that we have a loyalty to a cause other than being an American.  But I still have my mother's voice in my ears that "Maryland is as far south as I am willing to live."