gamerprinter
Mapper/Publisher
I don't think the Irish consider the British Empire escaping censure, not at all.
The Confederate Flag
- Status
I don't think the Irish consider the British Empire escaping censure, not at all.
IIRC, Tobacco was a large part of the exports from the South, and slaves were their main force of labor for the tobacco plantations.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
Most of the US may be complicit with early slavery (there's a song in the musical 1776 - brilliantly performed by John Cullum - ripping northern shipping and merchants for their participation in slavery), but it's disingenuous to not acknowledge that slavery's expansion was driven by the South and that the periodic crises that came up (to be temporarily assuaged with grand compromises brokered by Henry Clay) were driven by southern states looking to expand slavery into new territories to further the cotton industry as well as admit new slave-friendly states capable of counterbalancing northern, slavery-unfriendly states. And that's before adding all of the butcher's bill from the American Civil War.
The south utterly deserves its baggage from slavery and its Jim Crow legacy whether or not the north needs to shoulder some of its own burdens in America's history of disastrous race relations. It's worth noting, for example, that the areas covered by the Voting Rights Act's scrutiny, that the SCOTUS in a stunningly bad move threw out, included areas that were not part of the Confederacy but had a history of voting shenanigans (like parts of New Hampshire, Arizona, California, and New York).
Last edited:
yup. And honestly, this is me showing some empathy (hard to imagine I'm sure), that was a tough bind to be in. How do you handle the changing tide of "that's evil" when it affects your entire state economy?
That would have been terrifying to adopt that change. Imagine if the UN decided, "hey, North American belongs to the natives. We're going to need all of you to leave the continent if you're not of Native Descent"
It's a different scale, but it points to "we got here by some evil means" and to make that right requires serious setback for our group. That outnumbers the other guys. Why do we have to change?
Luckily for the southern states, they had an out. War was fought and might made right (being facetious there).
All they had to do was stop talking about how awesome the Confederacy was and flying that dang flag and sugar coating what was said and what was done.
Bro code would have kicked in and we'd all be playing ball together again without anybody ribbing South Carolina about that one time they screwed up.
there's ugly business all around. Every nation did something crappy to somebody.
Maybe we can't make it right. But we can say "yeah, that was pretty crappy what our ancestors did. Let's promise to try not to do anything crappy like that again."
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him)
My empathy is somewhat limited. The expansion of slavery went with the deliberate expansion of cotton into the Deep South with the full knowledge that slavery was a large part of what made cotton profitable.
But as the song and saying goes, Cotton was King.
For many, there is another quote from 1776 that is relevant.
"John Dickinson: Don't forget that most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor."
Last edited:
No. First off, what you say isn't quite correct - while slavery was legal in the sense that the Federal government hadn't outlawed it, the northern states started doing so as early as 1780. All the northern states had abolished it by 1804 (some of them had "gradual" transitions, so there were some slaves in northern states after that time, but the law in pace to end the practice existed). This didn't end racism by any means, and we still have issues everywhere, but some of that is, in fact, due to what happened next...
The South catches crap for this because they fought very, very had to *not* abolish slavery. To the tune of hundreds of thousands of deaths.
The fact that they fought so hard, and so many died, led to a cascade of events and mistakes (by both North and South) that can be seriously argued to have *enhanced* racism, rather than allowed it to decline.
Last edited:
With respect - not flying the flag on state grounds has *NOTHING* to do with destroying history. This is not a start of a slippery slope.
- Status
Similar Threads
