The Confederate Flag

[gamerprinter]

England, for the sins of the British Empire. The Scots were often right there beside them, yet somehow we escape censure (well, mostly).

I don't think the Irish consider the British Empire escaping censure, not at all.

 

[Raunalyn]

That's a good question, one I kind of addressed. I think the North at some point, took great strides to divorce itself from slavery. So when they decided slavery was bad, they went whole hog. There were economics involved of course, the North wasn't dependent on slave labor.

The South seems to have been trapped. Their economy was based largely on manual labor, by slaves. And all the great speeches of the time were about keeping slaves when the Confederacy started.

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]

Question: Slavery was a legal American institution for almost 100 years, since the original 13 colonies, right on during the ACW. Does the South serve as a scapegoat for America on the issue of slavery, (and racism in general)? Essentially putting all the baggage on the South to lessen the weight of all of America's guilt?

Are there other examples, in America or any other country, where one region/peoples of the country is held more to account for an atrocity actually committed by the entire nation?

Bullgrit

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).

 

[Janx]

IIRC, Tobacco was a large part of the exports from the South, and slaves were their main force of labor.

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.

 

[Janx]

I don't think the Irish consider the British Empire escaping censure, not at all.

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]

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?

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.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

IIRC, Tobacco was a large part of the exports from the South, and slaves were their main force of labor for the tobacco plantations.

But as the song and saying goes, Cotton was King.

 

[Umbran]

I actually understand them, and likewise ethnic minorities and poor people who vote GOP. They usually share a LOT of the GOP's espoused fiscally conservative ideals. They just happen to differ on particular social issues.

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."

 

[Umbran]

Question: Slavery was a legal American institution for almost 100 years, since the original 13 colonies, right on during the ACW. Does the South serve as a scapegoat for America on the issue of slavery, (and racism in general)?

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.

 

[Umbran]

. While I understand and agree with what most of you have said regarding the removal of the flag, I have an intense and almost blinding aversion to destroying history, even if it's for the right reasons.

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.