re: Confederate Statue Removal

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You know you didn’t learn the BS you’re spouting from an actual history teacher/professor, high school or otherwise.

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You are not well educated.

Take off your hat, and find your humility.

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You are not well educated.

Take off your hat, and find your humility.

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Primary sources >>> bullshite on the Internet

It’s amazing that you’ll take a White Russian’s diary as gospel but dismiss Georgians Declaration of Secession

Acting like you won’t find hundreds of historians that will just tell you it was mostly about slavery.

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I don't understand honoring people who fought a war against our country and lost.

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The country we have now is an absolute perversion of what our Founding Fathers intended, specifically because the Union side was victorious. Do you think Washington, Jefferson and Madison would have taken up arms against the Confederacy and their fellow Southerners? How about Patrick Henry or Thomas Paine? The traitors were the Yankees who abandoned the principles of the American Revolution 80 years earlier and created a large centralized state from the ashes of a war that killed over 600k people.

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Primary sources

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That’s the problem. You don’t understand the period or how they thought. You have a superficial education and you can’t see the world through their eyes, or understand how the issues reveal deeper seated problems. You’re literal to the point of ignorance.

Southern newspapers in the 1850s and 1860s wrote repeatedly about their fear of slavery. Southerners were preoccupied with the idea. But they weren’t talking about chattel slavery. They were worried about being politically dominated and crushed by the north.

Little about the period was simple though.

The average free-soiler, for example, believed that paid labor was morally superior to slave labor. And they simultaneously believed, that Blacks were morally inferior to Whites. And they were strongly opposed to freeing slaves.

Slavery was the crash point of the late antebellum period, but as much as was the point of conflict, it wasn’t the source. Each block, north and south, has a different culture and even class structure, the north was mercantile and middle class, and New England was still very theocratic, the south was agrarian and if it modeled itself after anything, it was medieval England, with its own landed aristocracy.

The most popular book in Richmond in the years before the war, was Ivanhoe.

That’s how southerners saw themselves.

These cultures were mutually incomprehensible, and incompatible. And they had very different economic interests, and while slavery was a critical issue, it was a symptom of the larger gulf between the two blocks.

There was no way to compromise on economic issues in Washington for example.

The south depended on imports, the north wanted tariffs to protect their own domestic industries. Northerners strongly supported the use of federal funds to make infrastructure improvements. Southerners screamed that this was theft, and an unjust use of power.

Either the north won, and the south lost, or the south lost, and the north won.

And that was the story again and again, from the debates over a national bank, to domestic improvements, to tariffs, to slavery. It was harder and harder, if not impossible to compromise. Someone was going to win, and someone was going to lose.

The shared culture values, the focus on honor, the belief in agrarian lifestyle, also had a profound effect on the southern states. Southerners came to understand that there was something called the south, and while the states could be very different, they shared a basic outlook on life, that made them different from the centralized and often totalitarian worldview of the Puritan North East. What began as southern pride became full throated southern nationalism. And it’s why, ultimately, more than 92% of eligible men fought for the Confederacy.

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I’m white guy from the south.

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You don’t say southerner

I’m picking on you, but there’s a difference between the two statements

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Your problem is you start with your conclusion and work backwards to justify it.

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I went to high school in Massachusetts, which is a liberal place, but my school was out there, even for Massachusetts. Our history textbook was A People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn.

UVA changed my mind about a lot of things.

Gary Gallagher was especially influential. He wrote extensively about the southern nationalism in his book the Confederate War. Michael Holt was also very good. He spent his career researching the the antebellum period and why the war happened. His major focus was teaching us to see the conflict as people of the period saw it. He would famously ask on his exams for students to explain the political views of … an Irish dock worker, or a river boat gambler. To pick two examples.

I recommend the book "The South Was Right" by James Ronald Kennedy and Walter Donald Kennedy. It explains how the South was an independent country invaded, captured and still occupied by a vicious aggressor

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The civil war was not fought over slavery.

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Then there were several Confederate leaders very confused about what was going on. Because they said/wrote that it was.

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Lincoln was a tyrant.

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He may have been. And probably a hypocrite, too. And if not for the slavery motive, the Confederacy may have maintained the moral high ground. Alas.

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You'll find out soon enough when the communists make you a slave.

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Well, perhaps you and I can start a movement in which we go kidnap a bunch of people and institute forced labor upon them. When the government comes to arrest us, we'll cry, "Tyrant!" and start a war against the United States.

Then we'll be heroes too.

Find a home in a red state.

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Where do you go when home no longer exists?

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I feel your pain. It is how I feel about New Orleans. There, but gone.