What Does the Confederate Flag Mean to You?

I agree, making Lincoln...the hero of the South? Again, my point was that they seceded because he was opposed to slavery, and they feared he meant t make that a policy position.

I never said it was "just" about slavery, but writing slavery off as a secondary cause that really wasn't very important as some do is a misreading of history. It was perhaps the most important cause, or first among equals at least.

An interesting summary, but it has a bit of spin in it. Just as many people would say that the four Union slave states were excluded, for example, because Licoln did not want them to seceded too (and Maryland had a number of people who wanted to do just that), rather than because of Lincoln's deep respect for the reach of the war powers. Let alone the implication that he respected Taney and his decisions. Licoln issues an arrest warrant for Chief Justice Taney after the decision in Ex Patre Merryman came down. The ruling? The President (who deeply respects the Constitution) cannot suspend habeas corpus and hold Americans without charge or trial and outside the power of the courts, because the Constitution reserves that right for Congress. Even assuming the President thought he could exercise that ower of Congress on an emergency basis, and that Taney was wrong, lincolns reaction was they he should be thrown in jail for reading the plain words of the Constituition.

Lincoln was a complex figure and not easy to pin down, but I think there are several issues with the passage cited.

 

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And you are spinning Lincoln and the Time period to comply with your 21 century prejudice, and PC view point.

The funny thing is that I am absolutely opposed to Slavery, and yet I can see the point of view of the 19 century mind, both North and South, and realize that there were many other reasons that contributed to the War, as I said slavery was only the fuse to a much larger problem.

Industrialization was coming to the South, and that would have ended slavery by 1900 at the latest, with out having 650,000 people killed in a War that did not need to be.

The Cotton Gin, and the Gang Plow,, those were the death knell of Slavery, is would have been slower, but just as sure, and 650,000 Americans wouldn't needed to have died.

 

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The Confederate flag used to make me angry when I was younger (about 11) and I actually thought it was against the law to fly one (just like how you get in trouble for drawing swastikas in school). That's because I believed it to represent slavery and the oppression of black people in the South. But as I got older and learned more about the South and the history of the US I learned that my anger was misplaced. The Confederate flag now means nothing really to me, personally. However when I see it I do have a terrible prejudice towards people who fly it. I automatically assume uneducated, rifle and bible-toting, minority hating, rednecks. I'm trying to stop doing that though (don't know how). I know it's very narrow minded and prejudiced of me to think that.

 

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You are entitled to your views. I formed my impressions reading many books and original documents on the subject, and think my view is relatively unbiased. On the other hand, I think you have been taken in by two strains of scholarship, the aims of which were to bamboozle you. First, the strain that has tried to bolster the image of the South (and some would argue the self-image of Southerners of themselves and their culture) by downplaying the imnportance that slavery and racism played both in the antebellum culture and as factors in the war itself. Second, and this is more rare, but I've seen it (mostly in blogs), the line of thought that tries to paint Lincoln as a modern day conservative, especially in his views on the Constitution and society.

His views on his powers, though, were radical (even by the standards of the Bush administration which people thinnk of as supposedly having an expansive view). His administration arrested members of the Maryland legislature, the mayor of Baltimore and even its Congressman, Henry May, and held them without trial for a time because he suspected they sympathized with the South and didn't want Maryland to secede (leaving DC surrounded). Probably the correct move strategically, but a bit questionable as a matter of constitutional law, and not very consonant with the notion that the President's war powers did not extend into Maryland.

That is not to say he ignored the Constitution, but that he interpreted it iun a very broad way to give himself the power to the save the Union, and he was not above violating the literal terms of it for the sake of that more compelling principle.

 

Don't give me the old:

I live this at least one weekend through the Summer, if not more, I am a Reenacter, I have 5 book cases full of references on the Civil War, not counting what is piled around the room, I have been on many of the original battle fields of the Civil War, in pursuit of my Hobby as a Reenacter.

I have seen an dread many of the original documents, not only the official documents but the personnel letters from, and to home, of the men on the battle lines.

There was a time when I thought just as you, that slavery was the paramount issue, but that has been discarded decades ago, and replace by knowledge gained, since those early truncated views of the War.

The Slavery Issue may have been the fuse, but it was States Rights that was the powder.

As to your view, I see much 20th, and 21st century PC view to it, the school line, not a lot of independent research, like when I found documentation to the Fact that between 65,000 and 95,000 Blacks served in the Confederate Armed Forces, Army, Navy and Cavalry.

Free Men and Slaves, as soldiers, with weapons, shoulder to shoulder with their White Countrymen, on the line of Battle from the First Battle of Bull Run all the way until Appomattox Court House.

There is a lot of the Civil War that isn't in the Text Books, because it doesn't comport with the Winners View of the Great Crusade to Emancipate the Black from the Dastardly Slave Owners of the South.

 

oh shut the fuck up I'm not in the mood to play with you.

 

So my own reading is irrelevant, but your STANDING ON THE BATTLEFIELDS, that gives genuine insight. Oh, and your reading, which is somehow superior to my reading. Oh, and your "independent research" where you discovered (as has been known for a long time, so unless you uncovered it many decades ago 'independence' must mean "I read someone else's work on the matter") that more blacks fought for the South than did for the North. (Which you take to mean slavery was an intial cause that later became wholly unimportant, if may caricature your position in the same exaggerated way you do mine. No doubt, of course, that your silly caricatures are of a higher quality than mine.)

It's not my fault that you slipped from knowledge into ignorance over the course of many many years. I can lead you to water, but you're still stupid as a horse.

When you reenact, do you tend to the Union side or the traitors' side?

 

No, but your attitude was that my research wasn't valid, or of any standing with your statement.

My reading just might be superior to yours, I have read and studied on this subject for 50 years.

Again I really wonder just how in depth your research is, and as to horses, you and the one you rode in on.

 

I did not say "invalid," I said that you had been taken in by particular schools of thought on two fronts, schools that I tend to see as ahistorical and revisionist myself and for which I don't find much support in the actual events or statements of the time. States Rights was an important issue, but it did not cause Bleeding Kansas or the attitudes of the people involved (that I know, like you, from reading the personal letters of those involved, puzzling over the crappy handwriting just as I assume you did), and it is not very likely that the attitudes that led to that simply vanished a few years later.

It very well might be. As I said you are entitled to your opinion, I just happen to disagree. That said, one should never mistake a quantity of years studied for a quality of understanding. There is no reason to believe that those 50 years have not simply more deeply ingrained misconceptions you prefer to believe rather than led to true elucidation. Rarely to older academics make startling breakthroughs. Most breakthroughs come from the relatively young. Age does not generally improve intelligence, but tends to decrease it and harden the mind to thinking outside one's preferred perspective. You may be one of the exceptions to that, or you may not.

As I wonder about yours. As I wonder about of great many things. It's easy to say you've studied a subject, harder to prove. It's easy to say you were a soldier who fought in 'Nam, but you could be a 12 year old girl for all I know.

 

The State Right involved, the one at risk, was the State Right to establish human slavery.

That doesn't make up for saying things like this:

None of that stuff has the slightest bearing on the question of why the slave States of the South (and no others) seceded from the Union, and fielded an army to defend that decision, touching off the Civil War.

They seceded to protect their established institution of slavery, and the Confederate battle flag flew over an army put into the field to defend that decision.

Now the fact that they were probably within their rights to secede, and the battle flag was honorable on that score, does not cover for the fact of the motive behind the secession, a motive and worldview symbolized by that flag to this day.

 

The Confederate Flag is a nasty piece of work. Wasn't it flown a nation which napalmed North Vietnam and Cambodia, charring the flesh from the bones of little children? Wasn't it flown by people who propped up sadistic dictators in third world countries? Wasn't it used to justify racial segregation, and the forced placement of those of Japanese descent in internment camps? And that's just off the top of my head.

The Confederate Flag was borne and looked up to by a nation which committed the above despicable deeds, so it's a symbol of imperialism, oppression and racism. Why are people even allowed to possess the flag, let alone show it in public? People who do so should be abducted in the middle of the night, placed in a burlap sack, and beaten to death with rubber truncheons!

 

The Stars and Bars had nothing to do with those things. Your beef about those things is with Old Glory herself. Oddly enough, many say if the South had won the things you are pointing out might never have happened.

 

Ok, you can just do away with 'playing the innocent child' card.
Villages would send a child holding a grenade into groups of Soldiers and Marines; even less moral than today's suicide bombers. You also had children no older than 10 or so raising AKs and firing them. I guarantee you that if I were in combat, and a kid raised an AK and pointed it at me, he (or even she) would catch as many rounds being fired out of my rifle as they could before they hit the ground dead.
I'm sure quite a few of those children that were napalmed were part of NVA or VC families or villages that would have killed any Americans if they had the chance anyway. I see that as 'nipping it in the bud'.

You do realize that before Lincoln took office, the whole fuckin nation advocated slavery, don't you? Every president before him owned slaves. Please get off your high horse thinking that the North was ohhhh so much better than the South. The only reason the North won, was because the South did not have enough money to finance the war. Physcially speaking, the South was doing a bang up job of kicking the North's ass all up and down the place.
I personally believe that the South is the best place in the United States. I was born and raised here.
That said, while I don't detest the Confederate Flag, because it does represent the South, I will never display it anywhere because it also denotes and could be misinterpreted by others that the flag displayer advocates slavery and racism (and I am not a racist).

 

Why is there still so much pain and anger among the Southern states toward the Northern ones? And disrespect from the Northern states toward the Southern ones? The Civil War was well over a century ago, why is there still such a divide? Just wondering.

 

When Lincoln took office slavery had been made illegal,by majority vote of the citizenry, in half the states of the Union. It faced strong opposition several of the rest.

The only reason it was only half, is that the Federal Government had adopted a policy of admitting new states in pairs, one "slave" and one "free", to preserve the balance desired by the Slave States.

The Slave States formed a Confederacy, and seceded, because they foresaw slavery being abolished by popular will in the whole of the Union as soon as that balance was broken, and they foresaw Lincoln breaking it.

America should not send people who think like that into other people's countries with loaded weapons, unless the goal is to destroy the country and kill its people.

Barack Obama was eight years old before his mother and father could have legally married in all of the former Slave States. Had he attempted to attend one of the better public schools in some of those states, as he did where he lived, he would have had to walk through a crowd of screaming, spitting adults, kept at bay by police dogs actually trained to attack him, and might have met at the door a local authority, with the backing of the community, wielding an axe handle to beat his mother or father.

That's one reason.

 

Yes, that may be so but what was the vote?

51% 49%? ---52% 48%?

Also remember that women couldn't vote, and in many states you had to own property to vote.

You need to do a lot more reading on this before you speak.

Actually the Confederacy was formed after they succeeded, and no slavery would not have been abolished in the whole Union if the Civil War had not taken place, the 10 Amendment prevented that, except as voted by the Individual State.

Look at the:

Dred Scott v. Sandford case in 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress did not have authority to prohibit slavery in territories, and that those provisions of the Missouri Compromise were unconstitutional.

And this has what to do with the civil war?

The really funny thing is that there were many Black Schools with Higher Academic Achievement across the South than many White Only Schools.

 

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We have a real winner here!

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All by those who looked up to the Confederate flag, right?

 

It's a symbol of a people wanting to break away & form their own nation & government but being prevented from that by sanctimonious deluded hypocrites.
1111

 

Moderator Note: Several off-topic posts that were flaming and trolling were deleted and warnings sent. Further offense(s) will result in temporary suspension of the offender's account.

 

Just to add to what iceaura already said:

What, seriously? Other than the obvious history, I'd point out that these divisions have been continually stoked for political gain, by one party or the other, continuously since the Civil War (and, for that matter, long before that). To offer a short recap, the Civil War alienated the South from the Republican party (for obvious reasons), and so the Democrats spent the next 100 years nurturing and exploiting this divide to leverage the South as an electoral base. When they finally flipped on the South in the 1960's, the Republicans promptly jumped in where the Dems left off. This brings us right up to the present day.

Let's also notice that the economies of many states in the South have essentially never recovered from the Civil War. People just don't seem to have much in the way of profitable ideas for those states that don't involve slave labor. There are exceptions to this, of course (Coca-Cola, CNN, etc.), but overall... yeah...

It's not just "the Northern states." The rest of us are also pretty sick of the divisive, corrosive effects of Southern bitory, pride and dysfunction on our national polity. We don't speak up about it a whole lot, since we're generally content to let the South focus their anger on the Northeast, but the attitudes are pretty much the same.

Or had you really not noticed that catering to Southern chauvinism and recalcitrance is, to this day, the fundamental differentiator of the two major American political parties? When our nation is no longer held hostage by a gang of backwards idiots that resent being told that their bigotry has no place in national politics, then we can talk about respecting the South. So long as it remains a regressive, introverted polity, it will remain a drag on everyone else and be resented for it.

One of the biggest upsides to the latest election is that the post-Civil-Rights-Era Republican national political strategy (i.e., the "Southern Strategy") finally seems to have run aground. It turns out that you can't win a Presidential election with only the deep South, Texas, Arizona and a bunch of empty square states. If proven to be true, this is an historical (and very positive) development. If neither party can lock up a slew of states endorsing the bigotry of fools, then both parties will have to differentiate themselves through their ideas and discipline, and we can start having a national conversation about real problems instead of culture-war wedge issues. And I certainly don't see how the South is ever going to get past these old wounds so long as exploiting them is seen by either party as a requirement for the White House. It may, at last, be time for everyone to move on...