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Clark Salmo
MemberPosts: 46 Member
Honest question
Clark Salmo
MemberPosts: 46 Member
Why the uproar over Confederate monuments? I don't see where racism is involved, the Civil War was not about slavery, it was about State's rights.
Help me understand.
Clark
Help me understand.
Clark
Replies
In my opinion it's equal to tearing down the Colosseum in Rome.
The short answer is because the Civil War was about states' rights to have a system of laws that allowed slavery. Stated differently, it was not about the right of a state to have, say, different gauge railroad tracks. Instead, the issue was fundamentally about slavery.
The slightly longer answer is that in the years leading up to the Civil War abolitionists clamored about the immorality of slavery. Many in the South didn't like that, as reflected by the fact that US Rep. Preston Brooks of So. Carolina entered the US Senate Chamber and vicously beat US Senator Charles of Massachusetts with a metal tipped cane due to a speech Sumner made that disparaged slavery.
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/The_Caning_of_Senator_Charles_Sumner.htm
Relatedly, there had been a long running dispute about whether slavery would be allowed in newly admitted western states. Beginning with the Missouri Compromise in 1820 the issue had been patched over with a series of deals, but the issue came to a head with the admission of Kansas as a free state, which prompted a vicious civil war in that state.
Abe Lincoln gets elected in 1860. That freaked out the slave states, even though Lincoln was not a rabid abolitionist. In fact, he did all he could to keep the Union together. But, the southerners felt threatened, and fired upon Fort Sumter. The war started. Originally the North did not expressly and officially fight to abolish slavery, but instead to preserve the Union. However, slavery was the fundamental issue underlying the whole matter, and with the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 the North put the fundamental issue on the table and officially stated it was fighting to not only save the Union but also to abolish slavery.
Edited to add: Both my great great Grandfather and his brother served in the Union Army during the Civil War. The brother died in combat in the Battle of Averasborough in March 1865, shortly before the end of the war.
No slavery, no argument about a state's right to secede.
Thanks for the info.
Clark
I should add that magnanimity has it's limits. No rebel dead are allowed to be buried in Gettysburg National Cemetery, or any other one as far as I know.
GMB's summary is excellent, btw.
"I agree with you both 100%. However, tearing down monuments to fight racial injustice is like ripping a scab off a wound to prevent an infection."
Nah. A lot of these monuments were built long after the Civil War, many in the 1960s or later. This isn't the Liberty Bell we're talking about here.
If we went to a small German town and saw a memorial to a Waffen SS commander from the area, wouldn't we all be appalled? The guy might have been brave as hell, a great commander and warrior, but what he fought for was so bad, we'd all be in shock.
There's little difference from honoring Confederate dead in my opinion.
Texas apparently thought slavery was part of God's will. "...based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law."
https://www.civilwar.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states
Crooow:This music would work better with women in bikinis shaking all over the place. I guess that's true of any music really.
In fact, IIRC, one of the more controversial decisions St. Ronnie made during his eight (8) year tenure was to visit an SS cemetery. He was roundly criticized for it. I don't remember how that was resolved.
The South had constructed an entire intellectual edifice around the continuing vitality of slavery. Its really jarring to read now.
Well, that's not exactly right. It was a German military cemetery with some SS buried in it.
It wasn't really resolved. At the end of the day, in retrospect, Reagan said he didn't realize how many old wounds it would open and regretted going.
It is like how the Chinese and Koreans get extremely upset if the Japanese do anything to cast a positive light on the Japanese soldiers and sailors who fought and died in WW2.
Except it was all about slavery.
This ^^^^^
Then the seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and a loud voice came from the throne in the temple, saying, “Steven and Comic have reached an agreement!”
Just sayin'
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Irony: People waving Confederate flags, complaining about the North's treatment of the South and the South losing the Civil War yet at the same time telling black folks they need to "get over" slavery....
Who is living in the past?
Simple explanation - We are not a fully rational species.
My favorite example is a likeable and very intelligent young man with whom I worked once back in the 1980s. He was rabidly pro-IRA/Brits-out of northern Ireland, even though the Ulster Plantation of English and Scottish settlers into Ireland had occurred almost 400 years previously. He also was furious that an American Indian tribe was attempting to reclaim it's ancestral land that had been stolen by white settlers less than 300 years previously, land along Connecticut's "Irish Riviera" where his family had a beach house. He was unable - or at a deep level, unwilling - to see any similarity between the two situations.
That's the reason we periodically have to deal with these tribal outbursts. ****, defeated on the battlefield but not in the hearts of men, lies dormant for a while, but its always waiting in the wings, biding its time for its glorious return. And for political leadership that enables and legitimizes it.
You know why the statues in Charlottesville have to come down? Because **** don't want them to come down. And every minute they exist they serve as a rallying cry for fascist thugs.
I think that the rise of hate groups and Naziism shows also the futility in "fighting" an ideology. Ideologies are not defeated on the physical battlefield.
Those who demand that confederate era monuments be taken down.
No one cared for many years but now they all of sudden do? Just another case of PC gone wild again and people living in the past.
Do we keep burying history just because someone might be offended in this day and age?
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A plausible case could be made that these monuments were built not as civil war monuments per se, but to prop up the edifice of Jim Crow.
More than plausible. This is what I and others wrote about above. Thanks for finding and posting the graph, and for explaining in a sentence why the statues should come down without referencing the Civil war or slavery.
I sent the coordinates to Kim Jong Un.
You're welcome.
Oh, that's the best laugh I've had in a while. thanks George.