Texas may be getting ready to honor the red, white and blue flag. No, not that one. No, not that one either.
The Houston Chronicle reports the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles license board is one vote shy of giving its blessing to a state license plate adorned with the Confederate flag.
Texas is often referred to as a Petri dish for bad ideas (see State Board of Education) but this time, while we’re no less embarrassed — we’re actually a little bit late to the party. Texas would be the tenth, and by far the biggest state to slap a symbol of slave ownership on a license plate (or a symbol of “states’ rights,” if you want to accept the arguments of some SBOE members and others who downplay the role of slavery in causing the Civil War).
The license board took a vote on the plate earlier this month, but the result was a tie. The potential tie-breaking vote will come from the person appointed to fill a vacancy created on the board when one of its members died. Guess who gets to make the appointment? C’mon, guess. Yep, Gov. Rick Perry, who has flirted with secessionists.
The Chronicle mentions the appointment will likely happen in the fall. We’ll find out then if Texas once again joins the Confederacy.
Like it or not, the Alamo and the Confederacy are parts of Texas history and it’s culture. The problem of putting Texas culture on it’s license plates includes cowboys, the Alamo, oil wells, and other such nostalgic stuff.
Banning one symbol and not others leaves a simple choice, no symbols at all, or coutner-symbols for thsoe who want to make a stateemetn against the Confederacy. Or combine the two and make a plates with all six flags.
To see the response of one TFN member, see the letters to the editor in today’s Chronicle.
The reason Texas and the other Confederate states seceded was to preserve slavery.
That’s not my opinion; that’s what those states said in their declarations of secession. Yes, they mentioned states’ rights, but the rights of a state to keep slavery legal and to prevent slaves from escaping were the ones they mentioned. They also mentioned the right to “property”– human property, also known as slaves.
If you’re proud of that, then by all means, put Confederate symbols on your license plate.
That IS your opinion, and you’re entitled to it, even though it is WAAAAAAA-AY out of whack. I AM PROUD of the Confederacy and I think that your bunch is so brainwashed that it is nearly almost hopeless for this great country. Take a good look at the USA today, losing freedoms on a daily basis, edging toward communism, marxism, each and every day, and tell me honestly you think the way we are headed is the answer. YOU CAN’T … unless you are so screwed up you don’t believe in democracy.
You’re “proud of the Confederacy”? Most folks see no reason to be “proud” of treason and the defense of slavery.
Yeah, Dan, I AM PROUD of them. I would never defend slavery, but I believe it would have ended on its own anyway. And I truly believe they were fighting for states rights first and foremost. Take a good look at our country today and try and tell me we’re headed in the right direction. Unless you’re legally blind, YOU CAN’T.
Actually, you are defending slavery if you’re proud of the Confederacy. That’s what the Confederacy was about. In any case, one of the nice things about running a blog is the ability to bar someone from posting when they’re abusive and insist on making personal attacks. That would be you.
Texas may have fought with the South, but it’s people and culture are not Southern. Why should it honor the cause of Virginian slaveholders?
@SSCD: Texas was just supporting those who support slavery. Here’s an excerpt from the Texas declaration of secession:
“[Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery—the servitude of the African to the white race within [Texas’s] limits—a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should continue to exist in all future time.”
The full declaration can be found in many places, including here:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Declaration_of_the_causes_which_impel_the_State_of_Texas_to_secede_from_the_Federal_Union
The South thought that slavery was at risk at some time when in fact it was not at risk if they had stayed in the Union. Abolishing slavery required a Constitutional Amendment which required three quarters of tthe state’s legislatures to concur. There were 33 states in the Union of which the 15 stave states could have stopped abolition dead in committee.
Seven states seceded shortly after Lincoln’s inaugural (including Texas) with four more after the Unon commenced military operations on the occasion of Ft Sumter, SC. The latter included Virginia. Twenty five states stayed with the Union including four slave states. The total number of Union states after Sumter was thirty three (one third were slave states that were in rebellion) followed by the admission of Kansas and West Virginia to make thirty five states of which the Confederacy had eleven, enough to forestall any Constitutional Amendment forever.
The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves in the states and parts of states still in rebellion. That did not include the four slave states that stayed in the Union nor in those parts of the Confederacy under Union control. While this may be facetious of Lincoln, the Proclamation had the effect of gutting the peculiar institution in fact. The 13th Amendment abolishing slavery was ratified on December 6, 1865 but had been put into effect by a resolution of the Congress on February 1, 1865.
During the elections during the Civil War aka War Between the States, the issue of restoration of the Union without abolition had enough votes to make Lincoln and the Republicans some serious concerns. But the bottom line is that slavery was not abolished under the Constitution until well after the Confederacy had folded.
It was “fire eating” rhetoric of the kind we hear from the Tea Party that cranked up the South to secede to protect a way of life that wasn’t at risk.
Oh hell! Just what this screwed up state needs. Bachman, an idiot of the first degree, just like Palin, said that George Washington fought to stop slavery. HUH? He owned them! Then she rambled about some other early president’s sons fighting against slavery. The question being asked is, “Is she a flake?” My vote? Duh!
As soon as another idiot, Perry, decides to run (as if he hasn’t already), the RepubliCANTS will do to him what they did to Dubya. The fact that he murdered an innocent man on death row may not mean much the the RepubliCANTS. He is a hypocrite and a liar. Just the thing the RepubliCANTS like in their president. Oh, and he is “White.” As soon as we Americans voted for the first African American president, the far wrong started to pull the rug from under him.
Now they want the damned Confederate Flag on license plates? They have zero feelings for our black brothers and sisters, every time one of them sees that plate they will suffer heart burn and so will this white gal.
It is funny that the first human beings came from Africa…we ALL have black blood running through our veins and yet there are those that are hollering for WHITE POWER. What a pile of Steer Stool.
If I had any representation in Austin, I’d ask them to try to block this travesty, but I don’t. For that matter I don’t have any representation in Washington either.
I wonder how many more centuries we will have to go through before bigotry will finally cease. As a member of an unrecognized minority–I am a Jew–there are only fourteen million of us and for any bigots who might read this, I live on less that nineteen thousand dollars a year, so much for all Jews being rich.
Oh, why did I call Perry a hypocrite? Because in Matthew chapter 6 Jesus told his followers NOT to pray in public as did the pagans. Need I say more?
Oh Christ … Palin, Bachman are idiots?? Take a good look at this president …. The most divisive, arrogant, inept, piece of crap to EVER lead this country. He has the maturity of a 2-year-old, blaming everyone but himself for his MASSIVE FAILURES. Give me a break … I didn’t read all of your comment, I COULDN’T … the first sentence convinced me YOU ARE A COMPLETE IMBECILE.
Some of you well meaning people need to go and read the history that lead up to the Civil war The reason for the civil war was not because of slavery but because of exactly what the feds are trying to do to us now .. Cramming their crap down the peoples throat ,, those of you that can read please do so , You would never take my word for it anyway , go and find your own answers .. If you are an Obama supporter , dont bother to read . you are already beyond hope ..
I just never cease to be amazed at what goes through the minds of pointy little heads. It really takes an amazing person of squeezingly stultifiying limitations on gray matter to want to relive the Civil War. It happened. So did the War of 1812 and I don’t see anybody celebrating any of those victories of ours. In fact the UK is our best buddy in the world. Over a hundred thousand people died in our Civil War. It was horrible. Company fronts firing on each other. Cannonballs being lobbed everywhere. Hand to hand combat and soldiers being stabbed by bayonets. Blood everywhere on this beautiful land. Horror of horrors in North America. I don’t know why anybody wants to TALK about it, much less try to remember it or relive it. It WAS about states’ rights. The rights of states to preserve slavery. Pure and simple.
I grew up in Chattanooga. The town is virtually wall to wall with Civil War Monuments. There were Confederate Cannon in the front yard of my elementary school on Missionary Ridge. When I spent my first day at school there as a 7 year old, kids asked me whether I was a “yankee” or a “rebel”. It was the mid-fifties, and I didn’t know what they were talking about. I was born in WV, so they told me I was a “yankee” and bad. That blew over after a few days, but those kids’ minds were really messed up when a new kid started the second grade in January. They posed the same question to him. He looked quizzically at them. They asked where he was from. He said “Arizona”. The tables were turned and THEY had the quizzical looks on THEIR faces. Arizona wasn’t even a state until the 20th century.
Fact is, we are all Americans. United we stand, divided we fall. General Lee surrendered at Appomatox long ago. The South went through the horrors of Reconstruction. Former slaves and their descendants suffered mightily from injust and inhuman racism that is a major stain on our nation.
A stupid Confederate battle flag needs to go into the dustbin of history. Venerating it is a waste of time and a corruption of everything America stands for. We need to look to the future or the future will simply overtake us and overrun us. Those who have attempted to overthrow the Government of the United States, whether by war in 1861, or by gunfire at Blair House in Washington when Puerto Ricans attempted to assassinate Harry Truman, are traitors, pure and simple. I refuse to honor the memory of traitors. And so should you if you care for the United States of America.
There’s a reason the Articles of Confederation didn’t work and the Continental Congress wrote and ratified our Constitution. Nobody in his right mind wants to go back to the Articles of Confederation and states running supreme. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.
The Confederacy:
It was all about money folks. In 1861 nearly two-thirds of all real property value in the Confederacy was in human beings owned by approximately twelve percent of the southern population. Both sides were profiting from slavery. Northern bankers loaned money to southern plantation owners to buy slaves, who used them to grow cash crops to pay the northern bankers. Furthermore the southern aristocracy was very angry about trade tariffs. High tariffs were instituted to protect the fledgling northern industries. The higher prices paid for American manufactured goods were considered an undue burden imposed by Congress. The white ruling class wanted out of the union, so they stirred up popular opinion and appealed to “states rights”. When sending young men to die for you “States Rights” sounded so much better than the truth.
Slavery in America was an evil institution supported by both northern and southern rich white men alike. It lasted as long as it did because it was so profitable. Slaves were money.
Two quotes to ponder:
Stephen F. Austin wrote in a dispatch from Mexico City in 1822. …
“The principal difficulty is slavery, as the law is all slaves are to be free in ten years, but I am trying to have it amended so as to make them slaves for life and their children free at 21 years – but do not think I shall succeed in this point, and that the law will pass as it is now, that the slaves introduced by the settlers shall be free after 10 years,”
Gen. Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna y Perez de Lebron, 1836.
“Shall we permit those wretches to moan in chains any longer in a country whose kind laws protect the liberty of man without distinction of cast or color?”
In our culture, like it or not today the Confederate battle flag is a symbol often associated with white supremacy and slavery. Symbols are messages. The wearing or displaying of symbols that are widely recognized in a culture sends a clear message about who the wearer is. It’s no different than wearing a Christian cross, a Muslim star and crescent or the hammer and sickle of the former USSR.
Fortunately, in this country you can choose whatever symbol you want to display. However, don’t expect others to not make value judgements about who you are based on the symbols you display.
My point to the story of the Arizona kid above, is that talk of the Civil War is irrelevant, meaningless and not applicable to the future unless we try to re-fight it. People need to DROP it already. It generates ill will. It is stupid. It is divisive. And that includes our Governor and his asinine secessionist remarks.
Dorothy writes at about a sixth-grade level, yet she is lecturing us on educating ourselves. Oh, the irony.
Excuse me folks. We appear to be talking about the CAUSE of the Civil War. Slavery was probably the key factor leading up to the war. States rights was a key factor leading up to the war. Problem is—“these are all leading up to’s (LUTs). The LUTs are important to be sure, but they alone do not get you a war.
What will get you a war with the United States? The thing that will get you a war with the United States is seizing American property or some A-hole firing guns at U.S. soldiers or unarmed civilians. See Pearl Harbor. See the following:
http://www.civilwarhome.com/ftsumterevents.htm
That is how you get a war with the United States of America. Just one of those would get you a war today.
@Dorothy Morgan
1. If the Civil War was not about slavery, then what was it about? Why did the South seceed? For “states’ rights”? A state’s right to do what?
2. I have noticed that the people who complain the loudest about the government “Cramming their crap down the peoples throat” are people who want to cram their own “crap” down people’s throats. Usually religion.
People like Dorothy just feel that their essential southern culture is being stolen from them. It started with the Civil War. Then came the carpetbaggers and the Scopes Trial. It proceeded on to allowing what the locals in my hometown called “having to go to school with those dirty, rotten n-words.” Then the evil government told them that they had to eat with the n-words and hire them in their businesses. Then they had the audacity to step in and tell the local school systems that they could no longer be Southern Baptist parochial schools. Then they did the worst thing of all. They sawed off two of the four major legs that support the whole stool of southern culture: liquor, coffee, tobacco, and driving without a seat belt. The list goes on and on and on…
As a person whose ancestors have been citizens of the 13 colonies and the United States since the 1600s, I kind of feel like this about it. If you want all of that back again, you are not a true American, and I just wish you would go find some other country that would let you live out your dream. Libya will be available soon, and the populace is already preconditioned for tolerating oppression. You should feel real at home there—or maybe Somalia or Cuba?
The idea that states rights don’t exist is not as certain as some would like to think. The states that could not legally secede were barred from seating their congressmen and senators elected in the elections after those states had been defeated in battle. Lincoln’s second inaugural spoke of malice towards none and charity towards all. The surrender documents signed by Grant and Sherman said nothing about ending slavery or of not being admitted to the Union, that all happened after Ford Theater.
The states that could not leave the union were kept out of the union until those states met certain reconstruction goals including freedmen in office. Reconstruction ended in the dirty deal of 1877 in which Reconstruction was ended and Rutherford Hayes elected to the Presiidentcy. As soon as the troops left, White paramiliary insurgent groups, teorrirized freedmenm scalawags, and corpetbaggers and wrote new codes tokeep blacks i line until 1855
Lurker,
Thanks for the link. I’d seen that declaration before, but it had been a few years, and I guess I’d forgotten about it.
I found this interesting:
The word “slave” or “slaves” is mentioned 21 times.
The word “right” or “rights” is mentioned five times. Most of those mentions are in relation to slave-holding:
“…thereby annulling a material provision of the compact, designed by its framers to perpetuate amity between the members of the confederacy and to secure the rights of the slave-holdings States in their domestic institutions…”
“By consolidating their strength, they have placed the slave-holding States in a hopeless minority in the federal congress, and rendered representation of no avail in protecting Southern rights against their exactions and encroachments.”
“That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.”
That last one really gets me. I can’t recall seeing a more direct statement that basically says, “Christians are entitled to slaves because God wants it that way.”
Dorothy Morgan, who hints that she knows the truth with her very words. Deep down she knows she’s wrong and that it’s she that is spouting flagrant falsehood.
The problem with the argument that people just want to respect their ancestors and heritage is that they’re taking up a cause, (the continued imposition of a symbol of slavery), that has been a favorite of KKK-leaning groups for decades.
The symbol has evolved. It’s no longer simply a symbol of the southern states of the confederacy, and simple economic slavery. It’s a symbol of retrograde xenophobia, virulent racism and the rallying flag of those who want an excuse to carry a legacy of brutality and hatred into the future. It has little to do with the confederacy now.
People who were born in the north were more likely to support the economic system and the set of beliefs that went with it. People who were born in the south were more likely to support slavery. There was a percentage of people who were free-thinking enough to question the dominant world-view. There was a percentage who exploited the system purely for their own best interests.
Someone born into a comfortable middle class, Christian family is likely to support a white-bread, WASP view of the world. Someone born into an evangelical household, to (possibly 12 step) born-again parents who are trying to erase the immoral excesses of their own lives in the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s are more likely to be drunk on the anti-abortion, creationist, “literal” interpretation of the Bible Koolaid.
People born into poverty in the Muslim world and forced into a madrassa education is more likely to strap on a suicide vest.
People born into the elite or commercial class in the Muslim world and are educated in western universities are more likely to dedicate themselves to convincing illiterate poor people to blow themselves up. For power.
The Inuit are more likely to wear seal skins. People in temperate regions tend to wear layers of knitted and woven cloth.
People in desert regions wear loose fitting cotton that covers almost the entire body.
People in tropical rain forests wear little or no clothes, considering that they rot so readily in that environment.
In other words, the world is getting crowded. We are having growing pains. We can no longer support culture that is based on leveraging our difference from the other, from the foreign, etc.
We have to have a culture and a social system which supports tolerance for the other. We will in spite of the whining and hate-mongering of the Dorothy Morgans in our world.
The Tea Party and their Confederates speak loudly of “taking back America” or “taking America back” which begs the question as to what does “back” mean as in taking something back from someone, or from some time deemed that moment of national purity and grace,
I know of no known person or place that is specifically related to as in “which decade?”. We can rule out the back ten years because thier pitch started over twenty years ago. Does that mean:
The Eighties- the Me Decade of indulgence and extravagance
The Seventies- The tie dyed mind, macrobiotic food, and the Manson family?
The Sixties – Protest, turn on, drop out.
The Fifties – A brief attempt at normalcy after the preceding forty years of chaos,
The Fourties – War and Recovery
The Thiries – The Great Depresson
The Twenties – Great Party, hell of a hangover
Fhe Teens – Over There, while over here Prohbition, and equal suffrage
The First – The Golden Years of Disney and no union,
Any one older than that doesn’t renenber.
It might help to note that although slavert was nade un-constitutiona in 1865, but after the Reconstruction, came the Black Codes which effectivley put the blacks back into bondage. The state penetentiary system was created to displine the black sharecroppers. Neo-slavery lasted until Brown vs the Board of Education where Segregation died.
Given the racist tone of the Tea Party, particularly it’s hysteria that a black was elected President, it’s just a hunch that someone thinks they can reinstitute segregation and poll taxes again. And reinstate miscegnation laws to keep the races pure (inbred).
Here’s a link to the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union:
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp
Some highlights:
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows: “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.
……
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.
…..
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
…..
A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that “Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free,” and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
Gordon, they want to go back to the 50’s which is well documented in that early reality show, “Ozzie and Harriet.”
Not the real 1950’s.
The 1950’s of their imagination.
Here’s an interesting editorial in a South Carolina newspaper dated November 3, 1860. The first sentence of text says, “The issue before the country is the extinction of slavery.”
Hope this link works:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=5_9kAAAAIBAJ&sjid=lHYNAAAAIBAJ&pg=6164,4398487&dq=slavery+south-carolina&hl=en
Got any response, Dorothy? Sorry to shove facts and reality down your throat.
@Dorothy: I see where several folks have already jumped on you, so I’ll limit myself to one observation:
You’re saying, then, that if slavery had never existed, the Civil War would have happened anyway?
@Ben: Thanks for the follow-up commentary–interesting.
The rebel flag may be a symbol of a part of the south but to a lot of people it brings up a lot of negative feelings. The SBOE here in Texas voted to take out the phrase “slave trade” and rename it the “Transatlantic Triangular Trade” in the history books here is Texas, so as far as downplaying the role of slavery as being the cause of the Civil War, I am not surprised. I am from Texas and hell will freeze over before I bought that license plate. Perry is an idiot and he is playing up to his possible campaign donors with things like his national day of prayer sometime in August.
I would be curious to see if someone could now get a swastika on their license plate too. After all, it has more than the meaning Hitler and his cronies have put on it, but I equate the rebel flag and the swastika as being pretty much the same thing.
sSlavery did not cause the Civil War. The fear of abolition did. For slavery to have caused the Civil War it must not have existed before the Civil War, and imposed on the North, which clearly is not the case.
The fear of abolition in the South as evidenced in the link provided by Ben above, is a clarian call for the South to take a united stand which threatended economic chaos if the cotton trade were curtailed, and the capital investment on and in slavery of both the North and South were imperiled. The cotton crop createdd an increased demant for slaves which increased in the USA when it was declining every where else. That Egyptian and Indian cotton replaced US cotton for the looms of Great Britain, made the gamble on cotton one that was doomed in any case. King Cotton was dethroned in the market place/
The fear of the South of the imminence of abolition was pure hype of the kind one hears from the Tea Party about Islam. There was no credible threat against the institution imminent or otherwise. The 15 slave states of the 33 total is well above the 8 states needed to block any Constitutional Amendment at that time (13 states can block any Amendment today).
If one takes into account the consequences of fire eating nonsense of the anti-abolitionists and apply it to the same rhetoric of the Tea Party against Islam, one maybe should buy a prayer rug.
OBTW: I remember my assignment to Ft Sam Houston for medical training in 1957 and noticed for the first time “white only” signs. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. This was another world, It was still around in 1962 when I reported into Ft Benning, GA for Infantry training. It wasn’t in 1962 at Ft Benning on my way to Vietnam.
The Fifties were an aberration, a brief breather from the hectic and hellish days going back to 1915, or before if you were an working stiff. It didn’t last long, actually it was the days of I Like Ike. After JFK, things started to return to the normal upsy daisy.
On the license plate, that gold trim design around the flag reminds me of the Ku Klux Klan every time I see it. It was so troubling to me that I did an on-line search to see if I could determine if the Klan has ever used that symbol. Something from long ago sticks in my head with regard to that symbol, but I cannot quite put my finger on it. Anyone else?
“Slavery did not cause the Civil War. The fear of abolition did.”
Gordon, I’d say you’re splitting hairs, but I’m not going to quibble about it.
May I propose this flag design.
For those in the know it contains all they stand for while the rest just sees the eagle with the lone star (and if they ask, just tell them that the black wing is for oil 😉 ).
That looks like the eagle used in the movie with Michael Caine, Ed Begley, and Oskar Homulka. Instead of the star, it had a W which was a proper substitue for the Swastika. Ed Begley played a Texas Oilman actually born in the Baltics who had a big party in Texas with the Eagle and W insgnia on it. The movie ends with a fleet of oil tanker trucks loaded with tropps dressed in SS style with the W painted on the trucks.
This same symbolism was used in a great eagle behind the Supreme Court pictures in the movie “three days of the condor” with Robert Redford, which was another Leftnik symbol denigrating the United States.
The problem with using such subtleties is that they blopw right past Tea Partistas
If there had been no abolition movement in the North, there would have been no secession in the South. The abolition movement is what was added to the political hustings. Slavery was a pre-existing condition.
That is not an argument for or against either side, it is a basic descriptor of the situation. No split hairs.
Slavery was an issue in the sense of being against it which is what abolition was.
Blaiming slavery for causing the Civil War is like blaming the Fire Department for the fire.
Blaming slavery for the war is like blaming the fire for the fire department.
David, I agree. Well put.
Which state do you think will secede first this next time around?
Analogies are trickey. Slavery pre-existed toe Civil War and required to military action to keep it that way. The South’s fear more than the reality caused seven of their slave states, eight remianed until the incident at Fr Sumter prevoked by fire easting proto Tea Types. The remaining slave states did what is caled the mill around mill waiting near the fence to see what happened next.
The call to arms by Lincoln was the something that cause half the slave states to secede and half to stay with the Union, During the conduct of the war there were political factions, mostly Northern Demoncrats looked for a way to restore the Union status ante bellum (slavery to stay).
Even the Confederate surenders to Sherman and Graant did not specify abolition, The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t apply to the Union nor of Unon controlled terrirory of the Confederacy. As the demobilized Confederate states regurned home, their understanding of Lincoln’s position was to return to status ante bellum, they could elect their own officials including delegates to the US Senate and US House.
When these elected officials arrived to take office, the existing war time membes of Congress denied the elected members of Congress from the former Confederacy. Like England’s Rump Parliament, this Rump Congress went about creating criterion for the “readmission” of the former Confederate states who wrongfully thought they could actually secede. Thus the states who could not seceded, whose secession was illegal, had now to be readmitted,
The readmission process was finally completed when Federal occupying troops were withdrawn in accordance with an agreement that Rutherford B Hayes be elected by the electoral college. The South had already started the dissassembly of Yankee occupation by passing Black Codes, state penetentiaries, and segregation that effectively dismanted abolition until Brown vs the Board of Education a century later.
The devastation that the South suffered was the death of King Cotton and with it, the cash value of slaves. Under sharecropping, black slaves who used to be capital goods, became expenses.
I’m sorry but wrapping yourself in the cloak of “Southern pride” is a BS excuse for trying to legitimize a symbol that brings a lot of hurt to many people and offends many people as well. So should the Germans be allowed to have nazi flags on their license plates because they are “proud of their history”? Disgusting
I don’t get what constitutes wrapping in Southern pride means, but I do understand what wrapping oneself in righteousness. That’s a common gimmick used by Tea Party hacks,
Taking a look at the facts of a case generally don’t work out into neat good/bad dichtomies preferred by those who prefer faith to reason.
When I was growing up back in the 1950s and 1960s, most of the people around me, including my friends, were gungho Confederates. Rebels flags were about as common as American flags. At one time, old Charles himself was actually a member of the Sons of the Confederacy.
There was a reason for that though. Our parents had aunts and uncles who actually fought in the Civil War. Some came back with horrible injuries, healed up, and lived out there lives among the members of our families. You couldn’t just say to Uncle Francis (in front of your mom): “You’re a bad man Uncle Francis. You fought for slavery. You’re a bad man. Leave my house now!!!” The memories and sensitivities of the Civil War were kept alive because so many people had actually known those who fought in that war.
Yankees were always coming down and saying provocative things:
“These southern yokels are still fighting the Civil War down here. That was 100 years ago. Why didn’t you people forget it quickly like we did up north and move on with your lives?”
The problem is that THEY were still fighting the Civil War too—but were just not aware of it. Their parents and grandparents had eaten deeply from the North’s anti-southern propaganda bowl during the Civil War and had passed it on to their children.
The prevailing Yankee belief in the 1950s and 1960s was that everyone who lived in the South, including the people who had graduated Summa Cum Laude from Harvard or Princeton, were poverty-stricken, stupid beyond belief, and hopeless. I personally experienced this verbal prejudice and the outworking of it behaviorally in my own life—on numerous occasions. I still have cousins who visit from Indianapolis with their cultural noses held high in the air. They believe that I am somehow beneath their dignity because I was born in a southern state and did not have the same great advantages that they did. The truth is very different. My list of accomplishments in life leaves theirs behind in a cloud of dust, and I have the documents and other effects to prove it. They cannot see any of that because they were conditioned by the McGuffey Reader and the leftovers from that bowl of anti-southern propaganda from the Civil War.
I think my dad summed it up best about the Yankees of our time who came down to visit, “You know son. These Yankee people just seem to think they were born into this world solely to boss other people around.” You walk into a grocery store. Reach up on your tip toes to pull a jar of pickles off the top shelf–and just as you are easing it down in full control, some old biddy visiting from Wisconsin comes running over yelling, “You’re not doing that right!!! Let me show you how to do it right!!!” I made that up, but numerous other things just like it were always happening to us southern citizens in those days.
Fortunately, most of the people from those generations in both the North and South area dead. Gone forever, and they took all of their prejudices and sensitivities with them. Good riddance to the prejudices and sensitivities!!!!
Therefore, in this day and time, I think we do well to recognize that slavery led up to the commandeering of a federal facility and the start of a Civil War. The southern position was immoral and just plain wrong. It is time for a new generation of Americans to throw the Confederate flag under the train and throw the memory of the Confederate veterans’ sacrifices with it. Sacrifices do not make one’s cause a true and honorable cause. I feel sure that the SS guards at Auschwitz thought they were making substantial personal sacrifices for a noble wartime cause. That does not mean that we have to glorify those sacrifices and honor them for them.
The Civil War started over economics,slavery just happened to become an issue during the same time.The North also had slaves.
No, the cause of the Civil War was slavery. The secession declarations from the Southern states made that pretty clear.
Only the South can deal with the issue of slavery as part of their heritage. Outsiders need not apply. Any more attempts to rub the South’s nose in dirt will continue to light the fires of revenge. And if you haven’t been noticing the South has risen and it’s name is Tea Party.
If you actually want to see history rewritten, try this one out:
http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Main_Page
Im southern, love the south and only the south. Don’t care what judgements are made based on me wearing a confederate flag. Its my right and if you don’t like it, tough. Its suppose to be America.