Why should the plantation owners have been forced to give up anything (other than their slaves) when owning slaves was legal to do? It wasn’t just legal during the Confederacy, but it was legal for them to do so when they were a part of the Union and would still have been legal for any state rejoining the union prior to Lincoln’s 1863 deadline.
It’s not a defense of the Confederacy at all. I’m just pointing out that slavery and racism is part of the heritage of all Americans, the whole country. Most white Northerners weren’t abolitionists, and many of those that were, were vile racists about it.
You may disagree, but I think most folks would recognize that the Founding Fathers sought to establish a country that had democratic representation, republican values… and slaves. Whereas the founders of the CSA sought to establish a country that had slaves… and that other stuff too.
And it’s a matter of historical records that many of the Founding Fathers did not, in fact, want slavery, or assumed it would go away somehow. Slavery was a contentious issue pretty much from the get go. Slavery was something the new nation-state was saddled with, something some people wanted and some did not, and they adopted a series of half-assed compromises until it finally blew up.
The CSA WANTED slavery. There was no compromise to be had. Every state in the CSA wanted it so that white people could own black people the way you own a cow.
Somehow, this has evolved into an argument about CSA history, and how what memorials and monuments of that era should be regarded. Take Stone Mountain, GA-it is a massive sculpture on the side of a mountain. Some would argue that the sculpture commemorates traitors; others see it as representing history. Is it right to start destroying such monuments?
I think this is the start of a slippery slope.
Stone Mountain is a gorgeous sculpture in honor of a bunch of terrible people. I don’t think we should destroy art like that, whatever evil it honors. We should acknowledge it as a product of its time–white supremacists in the twentieth century honoring the white supremacists of the nineteenth century. I don’t know of any analogous work in the world–is there one?
I don’t think Stone Mountain should be destroyed. I’d think it advisable for the State of Georgia to release all interest in the park, however. My understanding is that Georgia has essentially chartered a non-profit to take care of the park, so my suggestion would be to simply eliminate the charter and allow the association (or whatever it is) to simply maintain the area as private property.
The government could have justified it as wartime reparations. By leading their states into secession and a declaration of war, the plantation owners had caused the United States to spend millions of dollars defending itself. The plantation owners could have legally been forced to surrender their assets to recover this cost just as other countries have been forced to pay for wars they lost.
The United States government could have then turned around and used the assets it received to fund a program of land grants for freed slaves.
The Civil War was a successful attempt to protect Black people from white people. The American Revolution was an unsuccessful attempt to protect red people from white people.
If King George* had said “Those Indians? Who we couldn’t have defeated the French without? Who expect us to keep our promises? Fuck 'em!” we’d be eating beans on toast for breakfast today.
*George being German, you can imagine this in approximate Yiddish
What about these jackasses?
This woman decided to remove the confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol herself.
Bullshit. The South was spent. The North did as it pleased, and it pleased them to try their best to not let the South descend into further chaos. This they accomplished poorly.
What you describe would have been the equivalent of scorched earth - uproot the old and replace with the new. Maybe that sounds practical to your ears, but there is no way that was an option back then. The North was almost as spent as the South.
They freed the damn slaves and killed everybody doing it- after 150 years how much criticism do you want to heap on them now for not finishing it the way you would have done?
According to Snopes, the petition to remove the Stone Mountain carving isn’t current. It was started in 2013 and was withdrawn because it lacked enough signatures.
Help me see how England not forming alliances with the various Indian tribes would have caused England to win the Revolutionary War.
He’s overstating it, but I think the point he’s trying to make is that a lot of American resentment against Britain was due to the Proclamation of 1763, which said basically that all land west of the Appalachians was, for the time being, Indian territory, and banned white settlement. It was unpopular in the American colonies, partly because a lot of the colonies already claimed territory west of the Appalachians.
I think he might be overstating it, and he’s certainly overstating the “Those Indians? Who we couldn’t have defeated the French without?”, part, as most of the tribes allied with the French (The only tribes to fight on the British side were a branch of the Mohawk, the Catawba, and the Cherokee, until relationships fell apart, and the Cherokee attacked the British). But there you go.
Can we at least add a white flag of surrender to the carving?
Don’t just make two stacks: fought with the French and fought with the British. The ones who the British persuaded to stay out of the whole thing was where the difference was made.
To be fair, their most well-known monument is toa doughnut. I shit you not (that’s selling the cultural significance short, but it’s true)
The State Flag of Georgia: The 1956 Change in it’s Historical Context (PDF).
The above points to Brown vs. The Board of Education, the famous “Separate is NOT equal” ruling from the courts. I believe that to use the color of a student’s skin to decide which public school they attend is racist. Therefore, in the mid-twentieth century, Georgia (and South Carolina) used the Confederate Battle Flag as a racist symbol arguing in favor of Jim Crow laws and segregation.
That was then, this is now.
Of course there’s still the racist connotation, but I think the Battle Flag has gained more of a “rebellious” symbolism, specifically conservative beliefs in a tsunami of liberalism. I’ve looked around my community and pretty much everyone flying that flag are total gun-nuts, believe marriage is “one man, one woman”, hate Obamacare and want to kill every last wolf on the planet. “Southern Pride” doesn’t enter the equation here in The West very much.