It's become very fashionable to ask us to walk a mile in a man's moccasins without wondering what it's like to be chased by someone with a tomahawk.  Nearly everyone feels comfortable condemning Andrew Jackson for how he treated the Indians – and condemning him at least partially rightly.  What they have not felt comfortable doing is asking themselves how it would feel to be born in a country you didn't found and have a strange-looking group of illiterate, jobless, pagan wild-en show up at your neighbor's house and scalp all your best friends.  Whether or not this is Jackson's experience is irrelevant if this was the experience of many American settlers.  To have a savage at your doorstep, ready to strike at night and oftentimes beyond the reach of the law, would eventually affect your psychology in ways a modern man would consider unfavorable.

The only good Indian is a dead Indian is a cruel thing to say.  But we wonder how many cruelties a man had to witness or hear about (I'm speaking of the unmentionable tortures practiced by many of the Indian tribes on their enemies) before he was capable of saying it.

With our view of the Southerners we find almost exactly the same problem.  Alexis de Tocqueville notes in Democracy in America that the majority of the Southerners he spoke to, who were not even in favor of the slave trade or happy about its results, were terrified of the dangers of emancipation.  In a South where blacks constituted at least half of the populace in many places, the Southerners lived in constant terror of both spur-of-the-moment riots and well planned revolts, and they felt forced, by a mixture of not only self-interest, but self-protection of their friends and family, to propagate systems of social policy and government that shielded them from an almost ubiquitous danger.

Nobody good, at this point in history, can argue that the slaveholders were right for holding slaves.  Tocqueville's impression was that many of the slaveholders wouldn't argue that they were right in holding slaves.  But at the same time nobody is considering that the terrors of an emancipated and rightfully angry populace might make you less guilty for not letting go of the slaves you inherited and never wanted to have.

We oftentimes say it's wrong to paint an entire people with an unfavorable (but general) characteristic.  To my knowledge, a leftist has never applied this popular rule, so oftentimes used in defense of blacks and Muslims, to Southerners in general.

When we judge the settlers or the Southerners or even go as far back as the Romans, we oftentimes forget that of all the people in existence, a people from another world are the people we should judge the most carefully.  Inconsiderate of an infinite slew of circumstances, invisible to the eye and shrouded in the impenetrable darkness of unrecorded history, we forget our ignorance while pretending our superiority, and we condescend to censure things we may not ever properly understand.  The overwhelming majority of history, comprising glances between lovers and stories shared at fireplaces and little hatreds of horrible things, has been lost to us forever, and the few things we retain are not a picture of the way things entirely were, but a representation of a people for a certain moral and spiritual purpose.  Even a good historian never gives us history as it entirely was.  He paints a picture for us with the imagination he has, highlighting the few and almost isolated things that he knows.

What our leftists have proved to us is that even our sympathy, which is worshiped at the expense of all reason and goodness, is selective.  And the people we choose to sympathize with tell us almost as much about ourselves as our hypocrisy about our sympathy.  With some men we'll dig through centuries of history, trying to find them a reason for doing what they did so we can say who they are.  With others we say that they did what they did because they are who they are.  The truth is that men are almost always responsible while almost always having an excuse.  We simply choose to regard them as responsible one day and excuse them another.  We most likely do it according to the more fashionable morals of the day, and even then according to the morals that highlight the morals we're best at – oftentimes because we have nothing at stake.  We would have lived in peace with the Indians.  We would have set all the slaves free.  If we were King David, we would have easily killed our son Amnon after he raped his sister Tamar.  If we were Peter, we would have never denied Christ.  If we were smart, we would keep our mouths shut.

We often hear that history is written by the winners and that we ought to hear the perspective of the unheard.  What they have forgotten is that the Southerners were (and in many ways are) the losers.  They've forgotten that the children of Andrew Jackson and the successors of his own party are terrified of being associated with him.  We forget that Rome was destroyed centuries ago, and that the Romans' successful enemies weren't necessarily any more kind than they were.

In many cases, we are not more kind.  The difference is that we had the advantage (if it can be called such) of being taught, by incessant indoctrination and an innumerable series of emotional impressions and without any of the incentives to think otherwise, to think the way we do – which in many instances is less helpful and less moral and more murderous than the ways men used to think.  We say judge not, lest ye be judged.  And then taking Jesus in the worst and most literal and most non-contextual way possible, to that short and brutal sentence we added an asterisk that filled a book and included almost the whole of our dead and mysterious white ancestry.

Jeremy Egerer is the editor of the troublesome philosophical website known as Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter and Facebook.