Respect for the Confederacy?

On one hand...

I have no respect for the Confederacy. I have no respect for the US Constitution's hypocrisy that established as part of the charter of this nation that slaves were worth 3/5s a person and had no rights. For every census from 1790 through 1860 - 8 decades, slaves were counted as agricultural property. In 1861 we began a terrible civil war to end this horrid, disgusting and incredible practice upon which the Union was founded. 11 States broke their vows to the Union pretty much because they simply didn't care for a Presidential election result and feared it would further erode the institution of slavery in the US. Were it not for this rash action among these traitorous States we would surely have had a Constitutional foundation supporting slavery for many more years.

On the other hand...

I have no respect for the free States that colluded to make this disgusting compromise in pursuit of building an empire. New York delegates to the convention all left - leaving the young brash bastard from St. Croix to pursue his dreams of empire, fully supported by Washington and Madison. Optionally to enforcing the pursuit of empire with a horrid civil war the North could have just said ok - you can go your own way. And then, adding insult to injury the North provided a loophole to the South in the 13A. Involuntary servitude is ok as punishment for a criminal conviction. The North cared about the outcome for black Americans for about 5 to 10 years after the war and then decided the South could handle what to do about "free" blacks as the South saw fit to do.

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This is a pic of two flagstaffs at the Perryville Civil War Battleground in Kentucky.
The one on the left in this pic needs to go.

 

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There is an old truism... The winner of the war writes the history.

In spite of the USA's post-Reconstruction promise not to continue to demonzie and punish the former Confederate states who were being readmitted into the Union... and the next hundred years it kept that promise... NOW demonizing and attacking the Confederacy is considered proper sport by cultural marxists and government leaders.

So what does that tell you?

It tells me that there has been a silent coup and cultural marxists now rule the roost.

It tells me the USA is now heading for the dustbin of history... to join the CSA [Confederacy.]

In other words... soon our evil perverted cultural marxist overlords will take down BOTH flags !!

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I judge the Confederacy based on what they had to say about themselves. No need to consult Reconstructionists or Marx. Their secession was primarily motivated by slavery and white supremacism. They said so themselves. There's nothing to celebrate there.

 

You totally missed the point of my post.

Already historic heroes and symbols of the USA have also been demonized and attacked along with Confederate heroes and symbols.

Anyone who thought cultural marxists would stop at destruction of Confederate symbols have not been paying attention.

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Trying to attribute legitimate criticism of the Confederacy to being some kind of Marxist plot? No, I didn't miss it, it's just that it is empty nonsense.

 

Patently false.

 

The confederacy did not go to war to save slavery and the north did not go to war to end it. Furthermore the idea that the southerners were traitors is demonstrably false.

But to answer your question, the flag should stay even if you disagree with it because it’s on a civil war battlefield.

 

I don't know, based on all the confederate statues in the south I would say the losers wrote their own history.

 

Only to those who refuse to study history and just make it up instead. In other words . . . you know, the whole Lost Cause movement.

 

I’ll be more than happy to prove it to you.

 

We can just go ahead and end this convo here. Or you can try to refute anything I said.

I am not interested in putting forth an emotional argument as to why the statues and flags should remain, but a logical one. In order to do so, I am going to address some of the major arguments and illogical positions that the statue removers put forward. This will require me to address some of the rebuttals for these disputes. The entirety of their narrative is predicated upon a false premise that the south were traitors and that the confederacy went to war in order to preserve slavery. These positions are both demonstrably false and easily refuted. I would also like to address a point that, if you haven’t heard it yet, you will inevitably hear. They make the illogical and baseless argument that because these statues were erected during Jim Crow, that they were not erected as a memorial to fallen dead and heroes but as monuments to white supremacy and an attempt to intimidate and suppress black people.

First allow me to address the last of my topics above. The idea that the south placed these monuments, not for their honored dead, but to intimidate blacks because they were erected during Jim Crow is HIGHLY dishonest and one of the most abhorrent untruths that are disseminated about the south, it’s people and their statues. Not only is the lie itself harmful, but the statue removers use this lie as a battering ram in order to force removal of statues under the pretense of a lie. Allow me to explain.

The war ended in 1865 and the North kept a standing army in the south until 1874. Even if the South had the resources to build memorials to their fallen dead immediately after the war (which they didn’t due to the brutal scorched earth campaign engaged in by the union), they would not have been ALLOWED to place monuments up until after 1874 and the occupying force had been removed. Combine this with the fact that the Jim Crow era lasted until the late 1870’s all the way up until the 1940’s and you can see why this position is inherently dishonest. They are essentially making the argument that if the south did not erect their statues within a 5 year period from 1875-1880, then the southern people could not have erected them for ANY purpose other than the intimidation of blacks and to represent white power. That is patently absurd and an incredibly dishonest position to take. Every culture has the right to honor their fallen dead. Men who left home as fathers, brothers, sons, grandfathers and grandsons to defend their people and who just never came home or received a proper burial. Wives, children, parents who had no grave to visit, no body to mourn and no closure for their pain, have a right to memorialize their loved ones. To turn that sacred act into a political battering ram is the apex of immorality.

Next I would like to tackle the idea that the south were traitors. The Northern states and their proxy the federal government were violating the constitution at will and with immunity. They were taken to the SCOTUS twice over their unconstitutional actions and lost both times. The union states ignored those decisions from the Supreme Court and continued to engage in unconstitutional behavior because they knew their proxy, the federal government, would never enforce those decisions. So let me pose a question or two to you:

If you and I enter into an agreement and we both willfully sign a contract that defines our rights and responsibilities under said agreement.

Years later I come back and say, “You know I never liked this part of our agreement because I consider it to be immoral. As such I’m no longer going to uphold that portion of our contract whether you like it or not.” You respond and say, “That’s fine. If you want to unilaterally alter our agreement without my consent then I want out of our partnership.”

Who is the traitor? You or I?

If I then come back and say, “No you’re not leaving our partnership and if I have to murder your men, women and children to stop you then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Who is in right and who is in the wrong? Furthermore if placed in that position would you not fight back?

The southerners were not traitors. The south wanted either the constitution to be followed or for peaceful secession. The north would not allow either and so the war came. Make no mistake however, the traitorous behavior was not secession but the willful, intentional and unrelenting violation of the constitution by the northern states and the federal government. Jefferson Davis said it best when he said, “I would rather leave the Union with the Constitution than to remain in the Union without it.”

Now I would like to address the main, pivotal and driving position that the statue removers believe in regards to slavery and how the south went to war in order to preserve slavery. As I said previously, this position is demonstrably false and easily refuted. This requires addressing several points as well as a couple refutations.

First, we will address this point from the viewpoint of the southern soldier or average citizen. The statue removers would have you believe that slavery was prolific and a large swath of southerners engaged in it. To make this argument they use what is termed the “household argument”. They point to the 1860 census and say, “Look 30% of the households in the south were slaveowners”, but what they neglect to tell you is that in that same 1860 census it also tells you how many ACTUAL slaveowners there were. In the 1860 census, at the HEIGHT of slavery, less than 6% of white southerners owned slaves.

How is this discrepancy possible? It’s possible because the household argument is inherently deceitful. They essentially state, if you have a household with 8 people in it (2 gparents, 2 parents and 4 children) and one of the children turns 18 and purchases a slave, they impugn the ENTIRE household as slaveowners including the 89 year old blind grandmother and the 6 month old infant daughter. This is incredibly dishonest and not how ANY other behavior is statistically determined. If you have a household with 8 members and one of them becomes a thief, do you impugn the entire household as being thieves? Of course not. Not only is it factually incorrect but it’s incredibly dishonest. If one wants to discuss those who BENEFITTED from slavery, one can do that but they’ll need to include far more people than simply southern households.

Now, what we know for a FACT is that less than 6% of white southerners owned slaves. That means that 94% of southerners did not own slaves and were forced to break their backs daily in the fields and mills to compete against that free slave labor. To assert that those 94% went to war and sent their children to fight and die so that the 6% who did own slaves could keep them is intellectually defunct.

On to the real crux of their position. If we are talking about the southern elite and leadership (most of whom were slaveowners) and how they manipulated the average southerners into fighting a war to preserve slavery on their behalf then I ask you this question:

Why did the South not simply sign the Corwin amendment?

The south had no NEED to go to war to preserve slavery. The North had already capitulated and offered the Corwin amendment. An amendment which would have ended secession and guaranteed slavery as an inalienable constitutional right. An amendment which had already passed Congress, had full support from Lincoln and had already been ratified by multiple union states. All the south had to do to keep slavery and preserve it as an inalienable constitutional right was ratify.

So why didn’t they? Why would ANYONE choose to risk EVERYTHING they have , including their wealth, lands, possessions, position, power, the lives of their friends and family and even their own lives in a war which they KNEW they had little to no chance of winning in order to accomplish the EXACT same goal of the preservation of slavery that they could have accomplished with zero risk and a 100% guarantee of success simply by signing a piece of paper?

The answer to that simple question is, they wouldn’t. Nobody would.

So then that begs another question. If they didn’t need to go to war to save slavery, why did they go to war? They went to war not in defense of slavery, but in defense of our constitution and the rights we all hold so dear.

Look we can all agree that slavery was egregious and the fugitive slave clause should have been removed from the constitution.

However the precedent CANNOT be allowed to stand unchallenged that the federal government can simply declare a portion of the constitution to be immoral, they can refuse to uphold that portion of the constitution, they can ignore TWO direct orders of unconstitutionality from the SCOTUS, they can attempt to change the constitution without going through the constitutional process and without the consent of the governed and then violently oppress anyone who opposes them.

That is UNACCEPTABLE and must be met with the utmost and fiercest opposition up to and including warfare. That’s what our ancestors did. They stood up in defense of the constitution, in the face of certain death, against a tyrannical government who was violating that constitution at will and with immunity. They did so against ALL odds; outgunned, outsupplied, with little to no infrastructure and outnumbered nearly three to one. They stood up against overwhelming odds with much honor, sacrifice and blood spilled.

Those confederate men and women are the only reason we still have a constitution today as they made violating the constitution far too costly. They should be honored for that sacrifice. Not vilified.

Refute me if you can.

 

Why are the media and civil rights activists bringing up this Confederacy crap now? More divisive content means more eyeballs and mouse clicks I imagine. Guess what the civil war and slavery in the US ended over 150 years ago. And white people have apologized enough already.

 

As I posted... the USA did allow the defeated Southern states to keep the symbols of their heritage for the next hundred years.

But cultural marxists are a totally different kind of animal.

All one needs to do is look at what happened to Tsarist Christian Russia. Evil antichrist marxist bolsheiviks and their cultural marxist revolution intentionally destroyed Christian Russia's ethnicity, heritage, history, religion, morality and culture. Cultural marxists did this to prevent Tsarist Christian Russia from ever rising again.

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You know, those confederate terrorists managed to inflict a lot of damage on the heritage of African Americans, it's almost like those evil southerners decided to engage in an evil antichristian revolution against the hundreds of thousands who died in the civil war. Southerners did this to prevent African Americans from ever asking for civil rights ever again.

 

As another poster said, Southerners didn’t fight so that rich aristocrats and landowners could keep their property (slaves) nor did Northerners fight so that they couldn’t keep it. Both sides were vehemently racist and neither side was willing to die for subhumans, let alone fight brother vs brother, father vs son, friend vs friend, comrade vs comrade (many generals knew each other personally).

At the end of the day, both sides fought honorably in the greatest tragedy of this country’s history, and given that both sides are Americans and both sides have a lot to be proud of in their military accomplishments, perseverance and sacrifice, I think we can honor the dead by displaying the respective flags they fought and died under without endorsing the political reasons upon which the war began.

 

the displaying of a flag at a memorial is not a celebration nor an endorsement of anything

 

Wow. That is throwing down an impressive number of characters. I do envy your typing skills as well as your grammar and coherent sentence construction skills. Very impressive. Well beyond my abilities with respect to speed.

However, I find your analysis to be flawed and full of s.

Here's a post from quite a while back where if you read backward through the thread you will find that you have repeated verbatim a portion of a post from another member here.

http://www.politicalforum.com/index...ency-relies-on.572727/page-17#post-1072092102

This forum attempts to maintain a level of decorum which I struggle from time to time to uphold and this subject seems to always offer a member that exacerbates the challenge for me.

In 1860 it was a man's world. In the 11 Confederate States the slaves accounted for 38.68% of the population according to US census sources that I can supply courtesy of the member who offered them in support of his bs arguments. In these Confederate States there were reported 392214 slaveholders among a population of 1064193 white men of military age which works out to 36.86% of these men owned slaves. If we expand the denominator to include white men aged 20-89 we find that 392214:1276442 yields 30.73% of men owned a slave in the rebel South.

By all means though - spew forth more character counts in a vain attempt to validate your position.

 

I'm not sure how much of this was aimed at me and how much was addressed to someone else, since you didn't use tags or quotes, and this is going to take several posts to cover, but I'll address it.


As far as our own conversation goes, I said the South seceded over slavery (again, because they said so themselves), and you said this was false. Nothing you have actually said below refutes my claim, and I'll be going through it point-by-point, but you were the one who was supposed to refute what I said, not the other way around.

I'm going to assume this was all meant for someone else, since none of it even makes an attempt to address what I said about the reasons for Southern secession.

Other than those involving slavery, what were the Constitutional disagreements? Care to name those two Supreme Court cases and address that question?

Yeah, I'll get more into why this whole "they just cared about the Constitution" argument is nothing but hot garbage, but first, you need a history lesson. The South started the aggression. They fired the first shots. Hell, even before then, then had started stealing Federal property. And if you want to make the argument that it was okay for them to steal Federal property within their borders after secession, fine . . . how do you address the fact that some states BEGAN STEALING FEDERAL PROPERTY BEFORE THEY EVEN SECEDED?

What it "requires" is to completely ignore what the South itself had to say about the matter at the time.

And already you are making an intellectually dishonest argument. My claim was about the reasons for secession. That decision was made by wealthy politicians, not "the southern soldier or average citizen."

There are a few tricks that the Confederate apologists use here: 1) They include the border states that didn't secede, and where slavery was much more rare, in order to water down the numbers 2) They try to focus on individuals instead of households, which is flatly dishonest. They are using women, children, young folk, and other non-property owners to again water down the numbers 3) They expect you to be dumb enough to believe that the only people who cared about slavery were those who owned slaves, which is historically, objectively false.


In the first two states to secede, nearly half of all households were slaveholding households.

 

Which isn't deceitful . . . because the number of households is what is being counted in the first place. Unless each of those people, including the 89 year old blind grandmother and 6 month old infant daughter, are being counted as their own, also slaveholding household, then no, it isn't deceitful. In fact, you have it completely backward, for reasons detailed above.


Also, shouldn't have to explain this, but that blind 89 year old woman and that 6 month old infant daughter had nothing to do with the decision to secede, so appealing to them is dishonest.

YOU ARE STARTING TO UNDERSTAND! Okay, so you've figured out that people who don't own slaves, but benefit from slavery, might support slavery . . . think on that some more.

You're numbers aren't even close to correct here, and you've already contradicted yourself by admitting that people who didn't own slaves still benefited from slavery.


And there's another piece of intellectual dishonesty to all of this. YOUR CHOICES WERE TO SERVE OR HANG. It was a thought crime punishable by death to so much as sympathize with the United States in the Confederacy, and those who refused to serve were hanged. If you look at the people who actually volunteered, particularly those who became officers, they were disproportionately likely to be slave owners or stand to inherit slaves.

Finally you get to what could almost be considered a decent point. At least now we are finally getting to the people who made the decision to secede . . . which was our original discussion. Took us long enough.


If you want to appeal to the Corwin Amendment, though, you need to actually familiarize yourself with the history, particularly the election of 1860, the Peace Conference of 1861, and the Crittenden Compromise the preceded the Corwin Amendment.


For most of American history before this, there was a concentrated effort to keep a balance of slave and free state power by admitting new states in slave/free pairs. The Kansas-Nebraska Act blew all of that to hell, and such an equal "representation" was no longer guaranteed. Slavery took even more of a center stage in politics than before. The Whigs split, and anti-slavery Whigs formed the new Republican party. Now, only a small fraction of these Republicans were outright, immediate abolitionists, advocating for government force to immediately end slavery. Most were "moderates," including Lincoln. Well, they were moderates in their own eyes, but still extremist abolitionists in the eyes of the South (I have quotes if you want to read them). The "moderates" wanted to let current slave states remain slave states, but wanted to stop the spread of slavery to new territories. They also wanted to make sure that free states did not have to respect the slave "rights" of slave states in any way when it came to travel and to escaped slaves, and they wanted to be able to ban slavery from commonly held federal territory.


But the goal of all of this was still to end slavery, just by choking it out instead of with immediate action. If slavery could be stopped from spreading to new states and territories, then the slave states would lose political power with every new state and territory, eventually setting it on a course for its ultimate destruction. Lincoln admitted as much in the Lincoln Douglas debates, and the Southern states heard him loud and clear. How do I know? Because the first State to secede specifically quoted him saying so when providing their reasons for secession.


The South wanted more than just a guarantee that their current slave states could remain slave states. They knew this would mean the eventual end of slavery without further guarantees. Want to know more about those guarantees? Read the Constitution of the CSA and read up on the Crittenden Compromise. The later involved an attempt by Virginia and Kansas to create a peace summit to prevent further secession. This went a whole lot further than the Corwin Amendment did, and was popular with the slave states. It, however, went too far for Republicans.


The Crittenden Compromise went too far to protect slavery for the North.

The Corwin Amendment didn't go far enough for the South.


And speaking of parties splitting, the Democrat party split as well . . . also over slavery. The Northern Democrats wanted popular sovereignty, where each state could choose whether to be free or slave. The Southern Democrats, emboldened by Dredd Scott, wanted to go further, and saw slavery as a "right" to be protected in all states and territories.

 

They felt the need to secede in order to preserve slavery. And they said so. Then they started stealing Federal property. Then they opened fire to steal Federal property. That's what led to war.

First of all, see the above. Second of all, lol, noooooooo, no it wouldn't have.

Aside from the fact that several states had already seceded (over slavery) at this point, we have writings from Southern states at the time that emphatically disagree with you on this subject. You should start by reading the Declarations of Causes of Secession, at least for South Carolina and Mississippi.

As naive as it is historically ignorant. Yes, many people would have and did and explicitly said so. And many, many more were never given the choice. And, no, the Corwin Agreement was not a strong enough "guarantee."

They did secede over slavery. They said so. Repeatedly.


As for the Constitution, sure, they appealed to it whenever they thought it was supporting slavery, but if all they wanted to do was defend the Constitution, then they would have kept the Constitution. They kept large parts of it, sure, but they felt the need to add extra protections to their own Constitution for slavery, and even publicly complained that the original Constitution not only didn't do enough to preserve slavery, but had set the country on the course for abolition before they left (see the Cornerstone Speech)

We can. The Confederates couldn't.


However the precedent CANNOT be allowed to stand unchallenged that the federal government can simply declare a portion of the constitution to be immoral, they can refuse to uphold that portion of the constitution, they can ignore TWO direct orders of unconstitutionality from the SCOTUS, they can attempt to change the constitution without going through the constitutional process and without the consent of the governed and then violently oppress anyone who opposes them.

No, the only reason that we have the Constitution today is not because a group of white supremacists seceded from our country and rebelled against it in order to secure their continued ownership of black people. And against all odds? What the hell are you talking about? The CSA was ahead for much of the war.

 

WTF are you on aboot? I am not the media nor am I much of a civil rights activist. I'm bringing it up because I don't think the feckless rebel states deserve a flagpole alongside one that flies the US flag. Much less one that flies a rebel flag at full staff while the US flag flies at half staff.

It really is pitiful the lack of depth you bring to your opinions here. I suppose I do like the South Park reference though. It does seem to show an apt self awareness in the twisted weird way that corresponds with that show. What do you do when Mr. Hanky blocks your travels? Dude....

I'm a white guy and I have no need to apologize for anything I've not personally done. Somehow I don't get my bitch panties wadded up by acknowledging the genocide perpetrated on the indigenous population of the US or of the injustices that persist to this day by allowing the despicable institution of slavery to ever have taken hold here.

 

So you're a white guy who likes to spread racial divisiveness. You should've mentioned that at the start.

 

Nothing divisive about it from my point of view. Mr. Hanky seems to be blocking your travels.

 

It's a complicated topic. There were more issues than simply ending slavery during the lead up to the Civil War. The North was not completely altruistic towards black people. However, ending slavery was good.
I love the south, because of its culture, climate, foods, etc., which a mature adult can separate from the issue of slavery.

The sad fact is that once the tractor and other mechanical methods for harvesting were invented, a mere 20-30 years later, slavery could have been peacefully phased out without creating so much animosity.

 

Mr. Hanky is the least of my worries. Towelie has taken up residence in my basement apartment and won't leave. Anyone here familiar with California eviction law?