Respect for the Confederacy?

Didn't we settle our issues and kiss and makeup a long time ago?

 

The North was hardly altruistic in this regard. They weren't angels. And they had more reasons than slavery to go to war. For the South, however, it wasn't really so complicated. Secession was about slavery.

But I absolutely agree about loving the South. I've been offered many chances to leave. I don't want to. I love the food, the music, the wildlife. That's part of why I always hate equating the Confederacy with the South. I've owned my Yaris for longer than the South was the Confederacy, but I wouldn't let my Yaris define me. So silly.

I disagree, however, that mechanization would have ended slavery. The cotton gin was the primary reason why slavery was on the rise again, after all.

 

Not for the revisionists trying (and quite successfully) to erase history.

 

VERY well said! It's nice to see someone who actually understands the history and the various issues surrounding the South's secession, the formation of the Confederacy, and the subsequent war that took place, rather than parroting the lies that indoctrination centers ram down people's throats about it...

 

Heaven forbid we actually read what they had to say for themselves about the subject at the time. Letting them speak for themselves must be parroting indoctrination, right?

 

Well, you needed the right kind of mechanization. Which probably could have easily been invented with all the wasted resources spent on the war.

 

It might be parroting indoctrination, but it would also reduce mischaracterizing them 150 years later. Our Founders suffer the same fate today. People just know they were racists if the current media gets to tell you about them. Read what they wrote, and you'll find a lot of the Founders, even if they owned slaves, wanted to get rid of it. Hypocrites? Sure. We all are.

 

... even though such people have absolutely NO reason to apologize for it. People who are alive today are not accountable for what their ancestors did 150+ years ago. I am not accountable for what anyone did in the 1860s.

 

But the Confederacy didn't want to get rid of it. They openly admitted that they seceded to preserve it. To be clear: I'm just using this to judge the motivations for secession. I'm not advocating that we judge any of these individual figures based ONLY on their support for slavery, just Confederate imagery itself.

 

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/histo...-resource/statistics-slaves-and-slaveholdings

This source shows 75% of white southern families owned no slaves. Another 15% owned 6 or fewer. Predictably, the top 1% owned the vast majority of slaves.

Additionally, of the 1 million or so white men available to fight, 750,000 of them actually did.

...i don’t think it’s a coincidence that 750,000 is 75% of 1 million.

Additionally, the CSA government allowed a white man to stay behind for every 20 slaves, as they still needed to control the slave population, not to mention have some semblance of an economy.

The point I would make is this: the men who actually went to war and fought for the south were the lower middle class and lower class. Those who stayed behind were the slave holders.

Even if we were to assume that every soldier who owned a slave therefore fought BECAUSE of slavery, which is a ridiculous assumption imo, we have to conclude the vast, vast majority of southern soldiers didn’t own slaves. 75-85 percent. The number increases even further as many of those who did own but chose to fight did so for reasons other than the fact they owned slaves.


SO, why did they fight?

Believe it or not, when forced to make a decision between fighting your country or fighting your state, the vast majority of them chose to fight their country. Makes sense, considering you live in your state and have your family there. The idea of invading your own state and killing your neighbors and family is the greater of the unconscionables, and it is that decision which made the war a tragedy and also the reason IMO those southern soldiers ought to be considered as Americans and not traitors.

We should all thank god none of us have had to make the decision to either fight our country or fight our state and family. A damn shame so many of us are not only completely ungrateful of that fact but cast their judgement on those who did for the decision they made.

The CSA was terrible.
The vast majority of its soldiers were not.
Everyone on both sides were racist
The CSA flag can fly in a legitimate setting like a memorial.

 

Maybe they fought because the CSA would have executed them if they didn't. Which is why flying CSA symbols in order to honor those same soldiers is bat **** insane.

 

this is the real Confederate flag

 

You're talking about the European/American slave trade which ended 150 plus years ago. Who's addressing the Arabian slave trade that's still gong on today? You never hear anything about it.

 

Liberals love it, so I'm guessing not them.
We should address the voter slave plantation Democrats have, too, while we're going.
Oh, and the slavery the Chinese use to make iPhones.

Even in antebellum south, slaves had an ongoing cost to their owners. Likewise, Democrat voters have an ongoing cost to Democrats. Democrats, like the slave owners, give them just enough to get by (and keep voting Democrat).

 

we all support the removal of the racist Confederate flag... any further than that is ridiculous

 

This works on a lot of levels. The Stainless Banner (if you also count the Bloodstained Banner version with the red stripe), was the longest-flying flag of the CSA. The red stripe of the Bloodstained Banner was added because the original Stainless Banner kept getting confused for a flag of surrender. According to the man who actually designed the flag, however, the white symbolized the supremacy of the white race.

 

And yet, if cooler heads had prevailed, the war could have been avoided.
I'm fine if we get rid of Confederate "imagery". As soon as liberals acknowledge racism isn't really the problem they make it out to be and stop supporting policies that enslave African Americans.

 

that is the white flag of surrender....

 

And here's today's Democrat flag:

 

what policies of the lefts do you think enslave African Americans?

 

But the hottest heads were the ones that were "hot" for preserving slavery. So it couldn't be avoided. They rebelled and began stealing Federal property. The only options the United States had were to bend over and take it or prepare for war.

 

Nah, Lincoln himself (and I like Lincoln) was a hothead, lol.

 

Yes, I get that. I mentioned that it worked on a lot of levels because the Confederacy actually had a flag that was mostly white (meant to symbolize white supremacy), that was actually mistaken for said white flag of surrender on the battlefield. They had to add a red stripe to it to try to curb that.

 

Not nearly so much as those who seceded . . . they seceded before he was even inaugurated . . . because they thought he was a threat to slavery. He even tried to placate them.

 

Welfare for one.
Housing policies.
Educational policies.

Hell, we're dumbing down educational standards because right and wrong answers are "rayciss" now. That isn't helping blacks at all.