I've been having some conversations with some conservative folk lately about the Confederacy, where these conservatives made it clear that they did not view the Confederates as traitors to the US (they were) and that they did not believe that the war was fought to defend slavery (it was).
I was looking into how wide spread this thinking was. I found a range of surveys with different numbers, but it appears that a large portion of the US does not view the Confederacy as traitors (!) (the "traitors" designation is mine, but the point being, that the Confederacy was wrong) who waged war to defend slavery.
The numbers, depending on how the questions were asked, make it appear as if only about half the nation recognizes that defending slavery was the (or at least one of the) primary reason for the Confederacy waging war against the US and that only 67% view the Confederacy in a negative light (!). That is mind-blowing to me.
Historians almost unanimously disagree. Here's one historian making some good points.
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"The decision of slaveholding states to secede, to separate from the United States, was the culmination of a 30-year effort to protect the right to hold property in persons—the institution of slavery. It came in response to Abraham Lincoln’s election, the first of an openly antislavery candidate and party...
Nascent Confederates were candid about their motives; indeed, they trumpeted them to the world. Most states wrote justifications of their decision to rebel, as Jefferson had in the Declaration of Independence. Mississippi’s, called the “Declaration of Immediate Causes,” said bluntly that the state’s “position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” The North, it said, was advocating “negro equality, socially and politically,” leaving Mississippi no choice but to “submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money or … secede from the Union...”
"...In late February 1861, in Montgomery, Alabama, the seven breakaway states formed the C.S.A.; swore in a president, Jefferson Davis; and wrote a constitution...
It bound the Congress and territorial governments to recognize and protect “the institution of negro slavery.” But the centerpiece of the Confederate constitution—the words that upend any attempt to cast it simply as a copy of the original—was a wholly new clause that prohibited the government from ever changing the law of slavery:
“No … law denying or impairing the right of property
in negro slaves shall be passed.”
It also moved to limit democracy by explicitly confining the right to vote to white men.
Confederates wrote themselves a pro-slavery constitution for a pro-slavery state..."
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The entire article can be found in the Atlantic...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/confederacy-wasnt-what-you-think/613309/?utm_source=pocket-newtab
11 comments:
It's not about history, Dan. People like Marshal and Craig, northern people, will, just like so many southern white Americans, mimic the Lost Cause arguments - which arose only in opposition to Reconstruction and Civil Rights, so, well after the Civil War itself - because they are lost in an identity politics to defend whiteness.
History does not matter. Christian faith does not matter. Black and brown people do not matter as people who are crying out.
Marshal and Craig are literally cognitively lost because fear and its product, rage, is what they are subconsciously choosing to guide their ethics, morals, and identity.
What they have to fear is nothing about living their life in this country. It is solely about losing a manufactured identity built on Indian genocide, slave economy, and massive other, sequential brutalities through out our history. From the eugenics of early California youth prisons of a hundred years ago to the police culture today.
They are sick with a new, epochal surge of hate because they cannot face the pain of the truth of their fear.
You Want a Confederate Monument? My Body Is a Confederate Monument By Caroline Randall William
The black people I come from were owned and raped by the white people I come from. Who dares to tell me to celebrate them? I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument. Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow. According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.
What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals? You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter. Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.
Craig refuses, in the face of mountainous evidence, to hear what is being said to him. He has it wrong when he says, "It’s obviously nuts to think that if you tell people that they are X [white] often enough, that they just might believe what they’re told."
We are hime that, no, we are not white. That whiteness is only a subconscious apparatus of a power play identity for the purpose of defending against the guilt of our inherited empire that continues to demand unjust, even murderous sacrifice.
It’s not a normal, healthy culture. Whiteness is not even a culture. It is an ideology. It does not feed the spirit. We are not X - white - because we cannot be X - white. We need to give up this defense of nothingness in order to save ourselves.
The frightening aspect of giving up that unfair advantage, of losing the thrill for the brutal opportunity to scapegoat, is what half of us cannot do as of yet. But our children see our bloody hypocrisy.
Whiteness will die because it’s not a thing. Craig's personal talisman Mr Perkins dimly knows this. NatGeo only, maybe, a little more so.
We need to find our identify in real life, real cultures, as something adaptive, resilient, creative. Whiteness isn’t a human culture. It isn’t real. Only those of us with real faith and with real courage are trying to move one, trying to be better, trueing to reflect the image of a God who is not white, who did not create whiteness, who cries over the brutality of the last 400 years from which whiteness draws its reality-like breath of violent force.
Craig thinks there are gay people because he keeps calling people gay.
I wish he’d stop calling people sinners then the world would be perfect.
Apparently, Dan, Craig came reading and hated to find himself revealed as a shallow and conflicted thinker.
So, he claims it's false by offering.... zero evidence or argument.
I'm pretty sure, Craig, that mature adult exchange requires you to make a forceful argument of your own as to why exaclty what you read is false.
No one is holding their breath.
Not to mention the adolescent avoidance of Craig whining at his blog about what is on your blog and asking - in a tortured non-denial denial way that he is asking - you to police your own blog differently.
Marshal finds fighting racism to be a child’s fantasy play. Marshal thinks tracing the 400 year old phenomenon of brutalizing violence perpetrated by an ever expandingly defined group of white people and its appointed guardians upon black skinned people to be more like counting the fireflies of yesteryear.
Marshal is the example of what happens when so many weak adults quit adulthood, dumb down into a descent into nihilism and flirt with choosing chaos and a failed civilization, in the name of a leather bound god.
Marshal, Craig, Stan and other traditionalists, maybe if you won't listen to black people or liberals like me, maybe you'll listen to the very traditional, very conservative creator of the Christian "Veggie Tales" cartoon series.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGUwcs9qJXY&feature=youtu.be&fbclid=IwAR1MZgNhlG7rstfYbE6wP9UDKdmdnDworN8dq7Ir89lPllrHYTWYpe_xZq4
Again, Dan, what makes you think Vischer is a conservative Christian? I can't seem to find any info saying one way or the other. Do you have any comments from him affirming your belief?
And also, again, you seem to think that we don't listen to the black people you find compelling. We do and have and don't find them to be so. This is not to say that they don't express their perceptions in a compelling manner. Some certainly do. But what they say does not mean an accurate accounting of anything...it's only their perception of events and their too often presumption of the intentions of those they believe have done them wrong. And you'll never find any of us saying that there's never been a case in recent years (the only period that matters...by which I mean the last 50) wherein some black person was the victim of actual racism. But that cuts both ways, especially within this last 50 years.
Worse, liberals like you, and your sidekick, are far and away the least worthy source of such things. You see yourselves as more compassionate because you buy into every story you heard as if there's no possible way of error in the telling. We simply prefer to have allegations supported by verifiable facts. And the black voices to which we listen provide that. They do not speak out of emotion, but are courageous enough to take a hard objective look around them and by doing so see reality.
Think of it this way: You and the troll like to accuse me of racism, but beg as I might, neither of you bring forth any evidence of it. But suppose you could, or suppose either of you ever did. Your attitude toward me would be justified. For me to ignore the evidence and act and speak only out of my perception would be, intentionally or not, a lie. Yet if I took a hard look at myself and weighed the evidence and facts you provide, I would have to acknowledge those facts and you would chastise me if I didn't. You guys, and those to whom you lend an ear, do not provide those facts. All you have is emotional and biased responses to actual events.
"Marshal finds fighting racism to be a child’s fantasy play."
You don't fight racism, feo. You perpetuate it. You keep the fires burning. You like to pretend you're a black man and wish you could be one. But like a guy who thinks he's really a woman, you'll never really know what being a black man is. Thus, you're an insult to them.
"Marshal thinks tracing the 400 year old phenomenon of brutalizing violence perpetrated by an ever expandingly defined group of white people and its appointed guardians upon black skinned people to be more like counting the fireflies of yesteryear."
It's hilarious...in a truly pathetic kind of way...that you think this claptrap is profundity.
"Marshal is the example of what happens when so many weak adults quit adulthood, dumb down into a descent into nihilism and flirt with choosing chaos and a failed civilization, in the name of a leather bound god."
And the above is an example of projection, as well as another failed attempt to sound insightful and intellectual. It's what we've come to expect when you're once again proven to be intellectually inferior. Geez. Just think if I went to school!
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2020/07/22/historical-ignorance-and-confederate-generals-n2572772
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