“The past is never dead, it’s not even past”
Pretty sure I’m not the only one remembering that Faulkner quote.
When I grew up, there were many people around me in their 30s, 40s, and 50s who were Holocaust survivors, anything from Partisans, people who survived Ghettosand camps, etc. These were teachers, nurses, bank employees, neighbors, and parents of friends. The mother of one good friend survived one of the smaller Ghettos, and the mother of another was one of the children on whom Mengele performed human experiments.
Yet, by the time that my daughter is my age, the Holocaust will have been over 100 years in the past.
The last Civil War Veteran died only 8 years before I was born.
The are grandchildren and great grandchildren of Slaves still alive today.
The Civil War Really wasn’t that long ago.
I grew up In Israel, where, to qualify as “Ancient History” it needs to be a few thousand years old at least. Three generations is contemporary…
I live in Alabama right next to the Mississippi state line so many of the people I know live in Mississippi. While I see a few people on my facebook that are vocal about having it changed and some that approve but don’t really seem to care that much about the issue, there are even more that are not happy about it. Most people that I know don’t associate it with racism but rather Southern heritage. I have to admit it is a pet peeve to hear people who simplify the Civil War as being just about slavery, that was only one of the issues and most of the poor Southerners were fighting because they believed the federal government was overstepping it’s bounds. There is no denying that slavery was one of the main issues and some of the more prominent leaders were protecting their financial interests by trying to hold on to slavery. It is also the case that many of the Union leaders weren’t really concerned with abolishing slavery and protecting human rights, the initial decree just freed slaves in states that had joined the Confederacy. They were also protecting their financial interests by trying to keep the Southern states from seceding. The way many people portray Southerners and the Confederacy as racists and Northerners as somehow superior does not sit well with most Southerners. I have no problem with the flag being changed and I put away my Confederate flag a few years ago because I wouldn’t want to cause any of my black friends or family members to feel unwelcome and I want to represent Christianity well by showing love for others, but I don’t appreciate the generalizations that some people make.
Historians are nearly unanimous in their analysis that the Civil War was all about slavery. It may be that the people that you know do not believe that to be true. Americans need to read more history. Magical thinking is not reasoned opinion.
I actually took several history and political science courses in college(considered both as a major at one point), and that definitely was not the consensus. There are some that will argue that it wasn’t about slavery at all, and those people need to read more history, so do those who oversimplify and try to claim that it was only about slavery. Politics are now and have always been much more complex than some people want to admit, things are rarely as simple as they might seem to some.
You don’t need a historian to interpret what the State of Mississippi wrote in 1861. Here are the first two sentences:
http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/175/index.php?s=extra&id=177
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states#Mississippi
Slavery was a huge scourge the indirectly divides us today.
However, the message Dixie May be conveying is that the issue is much more complicated. Slavery was terrible and should have been abolished. The direct and indirect effects of slavery and racism affect the entire country even today. The north is not immune to abject and deep racism simply by virtue of locale or winning the civil war. Boston and NYC are 2 very racially divisive cities and history has shown as much. There are many other “northern” cities which continue to experience deep rooted racial problems such as Baltimore, LA, Minneapolis, etc.
The notion that slavery and the byproduct of slavery and racism was solely a “southern” problem is a naive and most certainly inaccurate.
Has someone been arguing this here? I missed that. I thought that we were discussing the causes of the Civil War on this page. Obviously, the byproducts of slavery and racism are not just a “southern” problem in this country, but that was not what we were discussing. It is a strawman argument.
Every single Article of Secession points to preserving slavery as the reason that they are seceding. Every. Single. One.
While it is true that the North did not fight to free the slaves, the South seceded for the single purpose of maintaining slavery within their territory. That was the only thing which was endangered by staying within the USA, and that is the ONLY reason given in the articles of secession of every one of the Confederate states.
Slavery was more than just the finances of the wealthy, it was an entire economy, and, more importantly, a way of life. Even for the poorest White man in a slave state, their status was defined by the existence of slaves. No matter how low status a white man was, they were not slaves. They didn’t see the removal of slavery as the elevation of Black people to the level of free White people, but as forcing White people down to the level of Black slaves. That was something for which they were willing to fight, especially if the Union Soldiers were invading for that specific purpose.
The importance of slavery was such that the mere election of Lincoln caused the states to secede, long before a single law abolishing slavery was even proposed, much less passed and signed. South Carolina seceded before Lincoln’s inauguration.
Also, the first to start the war were the Confederates, by trying to steal US military equipment, and attacking a US Army base.
I am sorry, but trying to explain away the articles of secession is not history, it is revisionism. Like the tens of thousands of books and movies and plays which painted slavery as a benign institution in which the slaves were treated well, and loved their masters.
I am sorry, but I am tired of all of the ways in which the ex-slave states have tried to avoid accepting the fact that they were engaged decades and centuries of crimes against humanity, and I am tired of all of the ways in which people have tried to justify and romanticize the willingness of people in the slave states to kill and be killed to preserve their ability to continue to commit these horrific crimes.
Millions of human beings were kept as property, raped, tortured, degraded, had their humanity stripped away in the slave states. The Confederate soldiers, from the lowest private to the generals, knew that they were fighting to make sure that these atrocities continued. It doesn’t matter what other reasons they had. It really doesn’t.
The articles of secession are also pretty straightforward. They all say the same thing: “You have elected an abolitionist, you want to force us to free our slaves, and we are unwilling to do so, and will fight to the death for the right to continue to own slaves”. It really isn’t all that complex.
Cama and MW, I totally agree.
I was not arguing that southern versus northern cities were somehow better than the other.
My point is that the byproduct of slavery and racism affects everyone with little matter where you live.
The Confederacy was not Nazi Germany and this analogy fails on so many levels. First, only two percent of Northerners favored abolition at the time of the war; abolition simply wasn’t on the table. Lincoln urged the Southern states to ratify the Corwin Amendment, which would have expressly legalized slavery “forever.” Third, slavery was widespread in much of the North and the Federal District. Also, the failure of the Southern states to take Lincoln up on his offer to preserve slavery “forever” proves that war was more about economics and a protest against unfair taxation as it was about slavery.
Our high school history courses don’t teach about the British Emancipation Proclamation of 1775 which pushed Southern colonists loyal to the Crown into support for the Revolution. Unlike the case with the Confederacy, these people were actively fighting to re-enslave blacks. In 1860 no one thought that a Union victory would have resulted in abolition. In 1860 Grant’s wife owned four slaves and she frequently traveled with him during the war with their entourage of slaves. Prior to this Grant managed a portion of the Todd family’s plantation and oversaw a great number of slaves.
The United States of 1860 is not the country we live in today. In 1860 the U.S. was far more like the European Union than a nation with a centralized government. The attack on the South was no different than if Germany and France had attacked Great Britain to force them to remain in the EU. Secession may be wrong today, but it wasn’t in 1860. Slavery was wrong but secession wasn’t. Those who answered the call of their states to fight for independence are just as worthy of honor as the Union slaver-generals.
But then do you consider secession for the purpose of defending slavery against what the State of Mississippi government in 1861 saw as a threat of abolition or restriction to be wrong?
Reminder of what the State of Mississippi government wrote in 1861 as its reasons for seceding:
http://www.mshistorynow.mdah.ms.gov/articles/175/index.php?s=extra&id=177
Grant managed the Dent’s family land in Missouri (not Todd). Grant’s own family were strong abolitionists.
There were also men who fought for the Union who owned slaves. There were blacks and Indians who owned slaves. History is muddy rather than simplistic.
History is blindingly clear that every single state that seceded from the United States of America did so to be able to continue to enslave black people. All the rest of the statements comparing the US in the nineteenth century, and quibbling about how many northerners supported abolition at the time are deflection and smoke and mirrors.
Slavery had been abolished in all of Europe and their colonies before the civil war. Only in the southern US was it still legal. People knew slavery was wrong, no matter how many southern clergymen twisted Christian principles to defend it. I grew up attending public schools in the south and I know how seriously they all misrepresented the civil war in order to keep propping up the “lost cause” mythology.
“Mississippi Wants Magnolia to Be Centerpiece of New State Flag”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/02/us/mississippi-magnolia-state-flag.html?ocid=uxbndlbing
That is about as 180-degree switch as could have been made. Great choice!
I agree. However I wish they hadn’t put in the In God We Trust. Performative religion is a pet peeve of mine.
Looks like they will not be using a proposed mosquito flag.
That’s hilarious!
We could keep going over points like “but-but-but THEY practiced slavery too!” and secession-vs.-slavery-as-reasons and many other nuances. No matter how those analyses evolve, the Confederate battle flag is a racist symbol, and it needs to go.
Also to those invoking Confederate ancestors who didn’t fight for slavery – if they were indeed against the institution, wouldn’t consigning the Stars and Bars to museums and history books honor their legacy more?