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Desert I've asked them to air whatever else they think the civil war was about and get no answers that are direct. There is no point in arguing over who won what battle where how and who had the high road. The meaning of that confederate flag is... ? When I've listened to so many import a meaning that reinforces the notion that the south feels jilted over what might have been? I think our constitution is for the most part sound. Coon dog seems to disagree. Anyone else disagree?
Generally you'll get some prattle about states' rights and the 10th Amendment and damned Yankees when you ask that question. In fact it was about slavery. They decided that the best way to ensure the continuation of slavery was to secede from the union and become their own separate little countries. They were forced into a loose confederation to fight the hated Yankees, but that wouldn't have lasted once the war was over (had they won).
It's no accident that the Union army was 'The Grand Army of the Republic'. Lee's army was 'The Army of Northern Virginia'. Notice any difference?
Gee, a white guy who never encountered racism. Go figure!
Excuse me--I said EXCEPT when I was in the Navy, and it was directed towards me. I never saw it directed to the Filipinos, or the Hispanics, or the Asians, or the blacks or anyone else--and I grew UP in the South and didn't see the racism you claim is rampant down here.
The people I know, they take everyone as an individual. Color doesn't matter to them. Could there be racists here? Sure, there could be someone as racist as an Archie Bunker living here, or Queens, or anywhere in the world. But I don't know them or associate with them. I've never SEEN anyone treating people differently because they were of a different race here in the South--only when I was in the Navy, and again, that was BLACK people being racist towards ME for being white. Just a few, most I got along with just fine.
Generally you'll get some prattle about states' rights and the 10th Amendment and damned Yankees when you ask that question. In fact it was about slavery. They decided that the best way to ensure the continuation of slavery was to secede from the union and become their own separate little countries. They were forced into a loose confederation to fight the hated Yankees, but that wouldn't have lasted once the war was over (had they won).
It's no accident that the Union army was 'The Grand Army of the Republic'. Lee's army was 'The Army of Northern Virginia'. Notice any difference?
Nope, it was about freedom. The government was taking on too much power, and when the government becomes tyrannical, it is our DUTY to rebel, to revolt, to throw it off. Read your Declaration of Independence.
And I see the difference. The former was about propaganda, and the latter was about truth. Lee ONLY joined the Confederate cause when the Union Army invaded his home state of Virginia.
So after all these wild detours we finally get an inkling about what the confederate flag is defined as by southerners... defiance of the constitution. You're telling me you'd prefer not to abide the constitution, to 'rebel' against it, when you fly that confederate flag. Have I misinterpreted something? My ears are open.
Defiance of the government.
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
To others it might symbolize racism, pride, gooberism, and who knows what else. Symbols are personal, after all. But to those who proudly wear the stars and bars, you need to be aware that outside of your small circle of pals, it's looked at negatively even by many if not most in the "old South."
Consider this; all of the rights and priveleges that any American enjoys today are a result of the US Costitution and our system of laws. The Confederacy only existed for a few short years, led to the destruction of the "old South" and represented the only real threat to America's continued existence in the past century and a half. And no one alive today has a grandfather who fought in that war.
I see the confederacy as the last hold out of agricultural feudalism and slavery in this country. I have always wondered how the local plantation owners convinced the farmers they were under cutting prices by exploiting slaves to fight the good fight for the Cavilers. The Neocon Republicans are doing the same. It never made sense to me.
I despise feudalism and slavery and see either flag as am abomination.
So after all these wild detours we finally get an inkling about what the confederate flag is defined as by southerners... defiance of the constitution. You're telling me you'd prefer not to abide the constitution, to 'rebel' against it, when you fly that confederate flag. Have I misinterpreted something? My ears are open.
I think there is a larger context that gets forgotten when discussing the Civil War, a tendency to see the trees, and to be blind to the forest. When Americans first fought for independence from the British, it was ostensibly because of unfair taxation, but it was fought for other reasons as well. The northern colonies had largely been settled by people who had a history of being oppressed by European governments, by people who were fleeing Europe to build for themselves a better life. The southern colonies, on the other hand, were genuine colonies, extensions of Europe, with political and economic relationships, with cultural and social ties that were more integral to the fabric of their lives than the European ties of the northern colonists.
And when the Revolutionary War was fought, we like to see it as they do in the movies, all the Americans rising up in righteous anger against an unjust British ruler, but the reality was that a large proportion of the colonists didn't support the war at all. They weren't particularly loyal to a monarch that didn't have much of a role in their lives, but they weren't particularly disloyal either. But the northern colonists had, in many ways, severed ties to Europe when they set foot on ships to take them to the American colonies, and were more prepared to declare independence for the sake of independence. Ben Franklin with his pragmatism exemplifies I think the northern rebel.
And by contrast, Thomas Jefferson exemplifies the southern rebel. The southern rebels were led by men like Jefferson who saw in independence a chance for an ideal. They were influenced by the writings of Locke and Descartes, they were humanists, who thought, finally, in the history of men, that it was a time for men to rule themselves, without monarchs, without dictators, a humanist government.
So, right from the beginning, you have two very different perspectives on what the two regions of the new country wanted. And the compromises that were hammered out in the Constitution reflected the different perspectives, but also reflected the plain and simple truth, in a democracy, whether it is a representative democracy, a democratic republic or a true democracy, urban populations have a distinct advantage over rural populations. The Senate, the electoral college, counting slaves as part of the population, are all part of the compromises to the physically larger, but more sparsely populated South.
From the beginning, the North found itself having to negotiate and compromise with the South, sometimes quite unwillingly. Hence New England's discussion of secession in the 1830's. Followed by the threats of secession by South Carolina in the Congressional debates over tariffs. And always, the fundamental truth of democracy, the advantage of urban populations, looms over Southern relations with the federal government. The demographics of the time, when 6 out of 7 immigrants to America were to the North, where smaller states (consider the size of Georgia to Massachusetts) had much higher populations, and the trend was a growing one, spelled out to Southern politicians that their ability to negotiate with the North was dwindling.
Then 1860 rolls around. The Republican party was brand new. They offer up as candidate for President a little-known backwoods lawyer named Abraham Lincoln. The Republican party itself is an outgrowth of the abolition movement. And the Republican party doesn't even appear on Southern ballots. Abraham Lincoln doesn't run for President in a single Southern state. He is purely a candidate of the Northern states. And he wins. Nothing could be more telling of the Southern states eventual irrelevance in the federal government than a President being elected without any input from half the country. It wasn't that Southerners lost the election. It was that their votes were irrelevant.
Not one hundred years earlier, these people had gone to war to fight for a government where the people's voices would never be irrelevant. And now they were faced with a fact of democracy, that their rural voices were increasingly irrelevant as the country would continue to develop. Adding salt to the wound was that the tariffs and excise taxes that financed the federal government was largely a Southern burden. Suddenly, the situation that had sparked rebellion from Great Britain was being mirrored by the situation facing Southerners.
And the issue of the day, slavery, was dividing the country. Northern capitalists felt that the South was enjoying a labor situation that gave it too much of an advantage. Northern abolitionists decried the situation from a moral perspective. And even some Southerners concurred. But slaves weren't just a labor source, slaves had become part of the financial system. As property, slaves were insured, and slaves were used as collateral to borrow capital from the banks. Freeing slaves wasn't just a moral imperative, it had serious ramifications from a financial perspective. Northern shipowners had benefited greatly from the slave trade, and had continued to be involved in the slave trade even after Northern states had began distancing themselves. And while the myth of the wealthy plantation owners prevails, the economic reality of the period was that Southern wealth was in the land and property. Wealth in the South was land wealth, not capital wealth, in stark contrast to wealth in the North. And so if the North had obtained a significant degree of capital wealth from the slave trade, should they then force the South to absorb all of the economic loss from freeing slaves?
And yet the political reality was that they could, indeed, do so. So a few Southern states decided to secede. To protect slavery, yes, but also to protect their economies, and to protest a government where they were supposed to have a voice, but the realities of democracy made their voice irrelevant. They seceded peacefully. Sending representatives to Congress to negotiate the process.
And Abraham Lincoln, a man of vision, could see that secession was disaster for the union. He couldn't let it continue peacefully, and many Northern legislators agreed. He also couldn't pursue remedy in the courts, because Chief Justice Taney on the Supreme Court was a Southerner and had indicated that secession wasn't Unconstitutional in his opinion. It was not accidental that Lincoln settled on a provocative path with the South, knowing that they would consider supplying forts an act of aggression, proceeding with this plan while Congress was not in session, focusing his attention on a fort in a state that had already displayed some recklessness in their defiance.
So, while some Southerners certainly fly the Confederate flag for racist reasons, and some Southerners fly the flag because they see it as an act of defiance, still others fly it because it they understand the complicated history that led to the Civil War and they want to honor the heritage of independence, not the heritage of slavery, which they feel the flag represents.
I read most of these posts but not all. (So I may have missed a similar posting..)
Anyway, and more people have been assualted, killed, raped, run off their land, robbed by people flying the following, then by anyone flying the Confederate flag..
Generally you'll get some prattle about states' rights and the 10th Amendment and damned Yankees when you ask that question. In fact it was about slavery. They decided that the best way to ensure the continuation of slavery was to secede from the union and become their own separate little countries. They were forced into a loose confederation to fight the hated Yankees, but that wouldn't have lasted once the war was over (had they won).
It's no accident that the Union army was 'The Grand Army of the Republic'. Lee's army was 'The Army of Northern Virginia'. Notice any difference?
For the millionth time, anybody that know anything of History knows slavery was not the deciding issue when the South Seceded. Also for the millionth time, Abraham Lincoln didn't intend to end slavery. He was against it spreading to any of our newly formed states, but that was it. That goes for the whole Republican party, not against the practice of slavery just against the expansion of it.
The Army of Northern Virginia was just the name of the Army group. Army groups usually have individual names, Have you never heard of General Meade's Army of the Potomac? Are we to assume the Army of the Potomac was a separate army from the rest of the Union Army made up of river people?
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What does the Confederate flag represent to you?
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