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Confederate Flag[W:1518,2230, 2241]

Should the Confederate Flag be abolished?

  • Yes

    Votes: 55 30.2%

  • No

    Votes: 127 69.8%
  • Total voters
    182
Re: Confederate Flag

Cryptic said:
I guess it just depends on how you interpret the phrase "get their asses handed to them".
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Homeland laid to rubble pretty much covers it.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Cryptic said:
I guess it just depends on how you interpret the phrase "get their asses handed to them".
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Ask General Sherman. I've been to Atlanta. It probably looked better after he got done with it.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

SouthernDemocrat said:
Yes, that is one difference. While the Nazi symbol does have an older meaning in Buddhist and Hindu cultures and thus does not only represent an evil cause, the Confederate Flag only represents an evil cause. An attempt to preserve the evil institution of slavery is all the Confederate Flag represents.
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Absolutely wrong. And the North and so-called free states had their own forms of slavery. At heart in the Civil War was who held the power to determine the will of the people, the individual states and the people or the federal government.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Kobie said:
"NORTH SUPPRESSION"! :lamo
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If you want to have an honest discussion, this was a real thing that was in peoples minds at the time. The North had the majority of power and industrialization and it was felt in the pockets of the southern commoner. In reality the rich southern people also played their fair hand, but the condition is much of the same as power imbalances of today... the north had a much larger middle class, more immigrants, more industrialization, that made the majority non-farm related power to be in the north... and just like the large business of today, the poorer people suffered. A small poor southern farmer knew nothing of the business practices of the north. Many thought separating the two economies would give the north less influence on southern businesses. Numerous Republicans, including Lincoln, were worried about the loss of tariff revenue from the Deep South states. The Republicans favored a high federal tariff and protectionism, as did many influential Northern businessmen.

These fears were then realized after war to a large extent.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Kobie said:
Ask General Sherman. I've been to Atlanta. It probably looked better after he got done with it.
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Or you could ask the 110,000 union fatalities.
 
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Re: Confederate Flag

clownboy said:
Actually, the federal government did the opposite. Had they been living up to the promise of the Constitution the individual states would have been free to decide the issue for themselves or there would have been a constitutional amendment.
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I suppose one can hold to such an argument if they choose to ignore the beliefs held by Jefferson, the intentions that when Article 1 Section 9 expired and the Acts to ban the importation of slaves. Early on the intent was to end slavery, a holdover from colonial times. It was the Southern conservatives that kept blocking moves to abolish because they did not change their farming economics or moral values as the North did.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

SouthernDemocrat said:
Yes, that is one difference. While the Nazi symbol does have an older meaning in Buddhist and Hindu cultures and thus does not only represent an evil cause, the Confederate Flag only represents an evil cause. An attempt to preserve the evil institution of slavery is all the Confederate Flag represents.
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Only?

I guess that's where we disagree... I can show you so many different things on what the common confederate soldier was concerned about, why the war happened, etc... it's become a cultural symbol, slavery used to be a cultural issue, now it's not in southern culture... that has changed, and that was never the only cultural issue and it wasn't debatably the most important cultural issue to the common southern soldier in the civil war.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

clownboy said:
Absolutely wrong. And the North and so-called free states had their own forms of slavery. At heart in the Civil War was who held the power to determine the will of the people, the individual states and the people or the federal government.
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That is revisionist nonsense. The South seceded for the states right to preserve the institution of slavery. Had it not been for slavery, the South would not have seceded.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Gimmesometruth said:
I suppose one can hold to such an argument if they choose to ignore the beliefs held by Jefferson, the intentions that when Article 1 Section 9 expired and the Acts to ban the importation of slaves. Early on the intent was to end slavery, a holdover from colonial times. It was the Southern conservatives that kept blocking moves to abolish because they did not change their farming economics or moral values as the North did.
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And along came that damn Cotton Gin, messin' everything up.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Kreton said:
It is a symbol of racism and segregation. I would not oppose an individual having one or flying it. I do not support our federal or state governments flying that flag.
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To you maybe. To the many rednecks who have carried it into battle with them since the civil war, it may mean something different. To a person who opposes Washington dictating to the people, maybe there is a third thing. The list goes on. I would only support banning the confederate battle flag if it was part of the same law that made it a felony with a mandatory minimum prison sentence to burn, destroy, or otherwise mutilate the current US flag. If we go in, we need to go all the way in.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

clownboy said:
Absolutely wrong. And the North and so-called free states had their own forms of slavery. At heart in the Civil War was who held the power to determine the will of the people, the individual states and the people or the federal government.
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Sure, the will of ....White people.

That makes a big difference in the framing of the argument.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

logansrun said:
To you maybe. To the many rednecks who have carried it into battle with them since the civil war, it may mean something different. To a person who opposes Washington dictating to the people, maybe there is a third thing. The list goes on. I would only support banning the confederate battle flag if it was part of the same law that made it a felony with a mandatory minimum prison sentence to burn, destroy, or otherwise mutilate the current US flag. If we go in, we need to go all the way in.
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Who said "ban it"?
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Paperview said:
And along came that damn Cotton Gin, messin' everything up.
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Not really, it reduced labor costs, the South could have changed their model further, but greed outweighed morality.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Gimmesometruth said:
Not really, it reduced labor costs, the South could have changed their model further, but greed outweighed morality.
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What are you talking about?

The Cotton Gin directly lead to the deep entrenchment and demand for slavery and arguably directly led to the Civil War.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Gimmesometruth said:
I suppose one can hold to such an argument if they choose to ignore the beliefs held by Jefferson, the intentions that when Article 1 Section 9 expired and the Acts to ban the importation of slaves. Early on the intent was to end slavery, a holdover from colonial times. It was the Southern conservatives that kept blocking moves to abolish because they did not change their farming economics or moral values as the North did.
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I'd have believed that too if I wasn't aware that NONE of the founders taking that position divested themselves of their own slaves. The compromise was made to form this nation, and slavery was allowed in order to make that happen. The solution should have come from the people and the states, NOT the federal government. NOT some states using the federal to gain power over other states.

And slavery did not end with the Civil War. Just ask the Chinese working on the railroads.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Gimmesometruth said:
Sure, the will of ....White people.

That makes a big difference in the framing of the argument.
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No, it doesn't. Context. The will of the people when this nation was formed was the will of the white male people.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

celticwar17 said:
If you want to have an honest discussion, this was a real thing that was in peoples minds at the time. The North had the majority of power and industrialization and it was felt in the pockets of the southern commoner.
...
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Let's hear from some of the folks at the time, and what they had to say:

"In 1858, the eventual president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis threatened secession should a Republican be elected to the presidency:

I say to you here as I have said to the Democracy of New York, if it should ever come to pass that the Constitution shall be perverted to the destruction of our rights so that we shall have the mere right as a feeble minority unprotected by the barrier of the Constitution to give an ineffectual negative vote in the Halls of Congress, we shall then bear to the federal government the relation our colonial fathers did to the British crown, and if we are worthy of our lineage we will in that event redeem our rights even if it be through the process of revolution.



​
It is difficult for modern Americans to understand such militant commitment to the bondage of others. But at $3.5 billion, the four million enslaved African Americans in the South represented the country’s greatest financial asset. And the dollar amount does not hint at the force of enslavement as a social institution. By the onset of the Civil War, Southern slaveholders believed that African slavery was one of the great organizing institutions in world history, superior to the “free society” of the North.


From an 1856 issue of Alabama’s Muscogee Herald:

Free Society! we sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the Northern men and especially the New England States are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meet with is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman's body servant. This is your free society which Northern hordes are trying to extend into Kansas.

​
The last sentence refers to the conflict over slavery between free-soilers and slave-holders. The conflict was not merely about the right to hold another human in bondage, but how that right created the foundation for white equality.



Jefferson Davis again:

You too know, that among us, white men have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race. The mechanic who comes among us, employing the less intellectual labor of the African, takes the position which only a master-workman occupies where all the mechanics are white, and therefore it is that our mechanics hold their position of absolute equality among us.
​

Black slavery as the basis of white equality was a frequent theme for slaveholders. In his famous “Cotton Is King” speech, James Henry Hammond compared the alleged wage slavery of the North with black slavery—and white equality—in the South:"

^ From great Article that is well worth the read, if you care: The Confederate Cause in the Words of Its Leaders - The Atlantic
 
Re: Confederate Flag

HowardBThiname said:
And some people fan the flames of racism by accusing non-racists of being racist.

Those people are the part of the problem - not the solution.
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Ignoring racism won't make it go away. We need to shine a bright light on it every time that it rears its ugly head.




"At the heart of racism is the religious assertion that God made a creative mistake when He brought some people into being." ~ Friedrich Otto Hertz
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Gimmesometruth said:
Most everyone understands that the Southern Democrats were EXTREMELY conservative, hence why the Southern Strategy worked so well from the 1960's forward.
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They were fiscal liberals/Federalists... and they liked the use of government control to fit their culture norms. The democrat party hasn't changed in it's foundation... Just when they couldn't have that social control anymore they retreated to try to protect their own views/liberties... that's why some started voting republican.

Gimmesometruth said:
You can try to paint it anyway you like, the fact still is it represents a defending of a slave system, something Dixiecrats and the KKK understood.

???????
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Democrats* ...They can't change the meaning of the flag, you can't change the name
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Paperview said:
What are you talking about?

The Cotton Gin directly lead to the deep entrenchment and demand for slavery and arguably directly led to the Civil War.
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What I am talking about is the shortsightedness of the Antebellum South. Slavery was inefficient, it stifled growth...even with the Gin. But the South insisted on an archaic system because of ideology that that Blacks are inferior, that White slave holding is the natural order of things.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

SouthernDemocrat said:
That is revisionist nonsense. The South seceded for the states right to preserve the institution of slavery. Had it not been for slavery, the South would not have seceded.
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To keep the union whole Lincoln offered to let the south keep their slaves. He would not allow the new territories who would later become states the right to slavery however. While the south had an issue with that, there were other issues. Pro slavery Democrats were upset with Republican abolitionists in the north. To gain control of the federal legislature, the south wanted slaves counted in the census for the purpose of counting legislators. The abolitionists only allowed slaves to be counted as 3/5th of a person for the census thus taking votes away in the house of representatives for the south and decreasing their impact in Federal government.

The south succeeded. Two years after succession Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation hoping to create a slave rebellion in the south and further taxing confederate troops. He allowed some northern states to keep their slaves and the institution of slavery lasted until after the war was over and congress ratified the thirteenth amendment.

To say that the civil war was about slavery isn't quite true. It was a large issue but Lincoln was willing to let the south keep their slaves and there were many more issues that contributed to the south's unhappiness with the union. In the end it's more accurate to say that the war was fought over states rights and federal power.

Some of this I knew. Some I garnered from my participation in these discussions and independent reading I did as a result. Thank you.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

gimmesometruth said:
what i am talking about is the shortsightedness of the antebellum south. Slavery was inefficient, it stifled growth...even with the gin. But the south insisted on an archaic system because of ideology that that blacks are inferior, that white slave holding is the natural order of things.
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k.

...
 
Re: Confederate Flag

Paperview said:
Let's hear from some of the folks at the time, and what they had to say:

"In 1858, the eventual president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis threatened secession should a Republican be elected to the presidency:

I say to you here as I have said to the Democracy of New York, if it should ever come to pass that the Constitution shall be perverted to the destruction of our rights so that we shall have the mere right as a feeble minority unprotected by the barrier of the Constitution to give an ineffectual negative vote in the Halls of Congress, we shall then bear to the federal government the relation our colonial fathers did to the British crown, and if we are worthy of our lineage we will in that event redeem our rights even if it be through the process of revolution.



​
It is difficult for modern Americans to understand such militant commitment to the bondage of others. But at $3.5 billion, the four million enslaved African Americans in the South represented the country’s greatest financial asset. And the dollar amount does not hint at the force of enslavement as a social institution. By the onset of the Civil War, Southern slaveholders believed that African slavery was one of the great organizing institutions in world history, superior to the “free society” of the North.


From an 1856 issue of Alabama’s Muscogee Herald:

Free Society! we sicken at the name. What is it but a conglomeration of greasy mechanics, filthy operatives, small-fisted farmers, and moon-struck theorists? All the Northern men and especially the New England States are devoid of society fitted for well-bred gentlemen. The prevailing class one meet with is that of mechanics struggling to be genteel, and small farmers who do their own drudgery, and yet are hardly fit for association with a Southern gentleman's body servant. This is your free society which Northern hordes are trying to extend into Kansas.

​
The last sentence refers to the conflict over slavery between free-soilers and slave-holders. The conflict was not merely about the right to hold another human in bondage, but how that right created the foundation for white equality.



Jefferson Davis again:

You too know, that among us, white men have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race. The mechanic who comes among us, employing the less intellectual labor of the African, takes the position which only a master-workman occupies where all the mechanics are white, and therefore it is that our mechanics hold their position of absolute equality among us.
​

Black slavery as the basis of white equality was a frequent theme for slaveholders. In his famous “Cotton Is King” speech, James Henry Hammond compared the alleged wage slavery of the North with black slavery—and white equality—in the South:"

^ From great Article that is well worth the read, if you care: The Confederate Cause in the Words of Its Leaders - The Atlantic
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lol, I am sure I can find quotes that match what I am saying too... I never said slavery/racism wasn't there and wasn't a part of the confederacy, I am saying the conflict was much broader than that. Even to the republicans at the time it had nothing to do with slavery but seceding from the union. Lincoln actually supported a mandate that states have a constitutional right to either banish or maintain slavery.
 
Re: Confederate Flag

sawdust said:
To keep the union whole Lincoln offered to let the south keep their slaves. He would not allow the new territories who would later become states the right to slavery however. While the south had an issue with that, there were other issues. Pro slavery Democrats were upset with Republican abolitionists in the north. To gain control of the federal legislature, the south wanted slaves counted in the census for the purpose of counting legislators. The abolitionists only allowed slaves to be counted as 3/5th of a person for the census thus taking votes away in the house of representatives for the south and decreasing their impact in Federal government.
...
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That's quite a mixed up rendering of the 3/5th compromise.
 
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