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Question: The Confederate Flag!.!.!.!?
I was watching the news last night!. It showed a group of Confederate Historians raising a large flag to celebrate their southern history!. I was happy to see several black members in the group!. They also interviewed the leader of the nearby NAACP group!. The flag cast a shadow of their building!. He said it was an insult, but he realized that it was a part of history!.
Why is it that there are still so many people who think that the civil war was about slavery!?
The War Between the States began because the South demanded States' rights & were not getting them!. The Congress at that time heavily favored the industrialized northern states & demanded that the South sell its cotton & other raw materials only to the north, rather than to other countries!. The Congress also taxed the finished materials that the north produced heavily, making products that the South wanted, unaffordable!. It sounds much like the reason we broke from Great Britain to begin with!Www@QuestionHome@Com
Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:
People think that Abraham freed the slaves out of the goodness of his heart and that the Civil War was about the slaves because it is what we are taught in school!.
It sounds much nicer to hear the story with a spin!. It helps in creating patriotism in a young age to hear good stories about our past presidents and founding fathers!.
Children who learn only positive things about our country will grow up thinking that we live in such a beautiful country, full of good-willed citizens!. Since most high schoolers don't want to be bothered about boring history in school they never give themselves the chance to hear the truth and will go through life completely misinformed!.
The ignorance drags into the required history classes in college where the student only shows up for class and does just enough work to pass the class - nothing gets retained because the student can't be bothered!.
All of this is why as a teacher I won't lie to my students about history!.
They deserve to know the truth and to know all of the truth!. That's how each student can come to realize that through it all, America is, indeed, a wonderful country!.Www@QuestionHome@Com
I agree with you one hundred percent!. Blacks of today are constantly fighting to have the Confederate flag removed or eliminated from history!. Remember, many slaves who were freed before Lincoln's time actually bought and owned slaves themselves! It's not just a black and white thing, people!. It's history!. The easiest way to repeat history and/or mistakes is to forget they happened!.Www@QuestionHome@Com
Many people now have been taught untruths toward the War of Northern Aggression!. Many think that slavery was the real reason for the war!. It was not the real issue!. A smoldering issur of unjust taxation that enriched Northern Manufacturing states and exploited the agricultural South was fanned to a furious blaze in 1860!. It was the Morrill Tariff that stirred the embers of regional mistrust and ignited the fires of Secession in the South!. This precipitated a Northern reaction and call to arms that would engulf the nation in the flames of war for four years!. A tariff is a tax on selected inports, most commonly finished or manufactured products!.Www@QuestionHome@Com
I have lived in various parts of the southern U!.S!. all my life, I am a Caucasian, and I see nothing wrong with any of the flags of the C!.S!.A!., because like them or not they are a part of our past!. I have never owned one or flew one, but if someone so chooses that is their right to do so!. I feel that if we start banning one thing from our history because a few groups or so does not like it, then where will that lead!? Voice your ideas and opinions and be ready to accept the other guys point of view as well!. If you can not listen, do not expect other people to listen to you!. In other words, this country has far more to worry about right now than the flying old 150 year old flag!. It is an old argument that may never be settled, move on to a real problem!.Www@QuestionHome@Com
I have read all the comment's written here about the Confederate Flag!. I believe that everyone who spoke here is coorect in there own way!. Its a Proud Symbol to some, and a Curse to others who lived under Oppression under the Flag (Slave's)!. Black people see as a symbol of tyranny and some Southern White's as the time when they were there own country!. Allot of people want to say please leave it in the past where it belongs, but what about the million's of blacks that were killed an families that were tore apart because of Slavery!. If you have "NOT WALKED" in a people's step's please look at there side of the issue!. Let's just be gald that WE live in a country where we can say and write what we want!Www@QuestionHome@Com
If you really want to know why the Confederate Flag is being put up in Tampa, check out this web-site:
www!.tampaflag!.info
in short, the SCV in Florida has been slapped in the face one time too many by local politicians!. It begain in 1990 when the NAACP decided that it would make it part of their agenda to remove all monuments related to the Confederacy in the South (they have a resolution on this) and to re-write the history to equate the Confederacy to Nazi Germany!. They don't care about the truth!. Its an agenda, one that is base on Marxism and is the root of what American is now learing about called Black Liberation Theology (we've known all about this for 20 years)!.
We want people to know that Florida is a Southern State, and gave greatly to the Confederate Cause!. I'm a 5th Generation Florida Cracker and I've come to see my home state ruined by Northerners who killed what industry we had here and replaced it with service industry, tourism, and cheap illegal immigration that the politicians pander to!.
Confederate General Patrick Cleburne once said (paraphrasing) that Northern victory would mean the history would be written by the North and future Southerners would learn from Northern history books!. Today, we are seeing an ignorant society that screems racism anytime something about the South comes up!.
I remember as a teenager (I'm 34) watching TV beginning in 1990, although at the time I didn't know why, the Confederate Flag is being portrayed on popular TV shows as some always being carried by some bigot, racist, or some Black person being "offended" by it!. Examples of popular TV shows at the time were "In The Heat of the Night", "The Golden Girls", "Designing Women" to name a few!. Look up past episodes and you will see what I mean!.Www@QuestionHome@Com
I think it's important to understand a few things about history and the "Confederate flag" that people refer to, put on pickup trucks or have added to state flags!. The Confederacy had 3 National flags and none of them (Stars and Bars, the Stainless Banner or the one adopted just before the surrender) were the dixie flag with the St!. Andrew's cross!. But hey, don't let that stop people from arguing that something completely different represents the Confederate government!.
1!. The "Battle Flag" wasn't even the official flag of the Confederacy at the start of the war and was one of only 180 separate battle flags used by the Confederacy (ie: each regiment would fly their regimental colors and then the battle flag)!. The one that you typically see is a derivative (that does not match) of the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (other Confederate armies had their own battle flags) and the ANV's flag was square!. So it's hypocracy for others to claim they're honoring heritage or history!.
2!. Some of the gyrations around the flag and the evolution of State flags is just fascinating to observe!. Some of the Southern States which have incorporated elements of the ANV Battle Flag into their State flags did so at the time of Civil Rights (which is about an obvious example of possible of saying an "FU" on race as you can)!.
3!. The argument about Congress favoring the North and unfair taxes is a bit disingenuous!. The South liked to export products (especially cotton) directly to England in exchange for goods!. The North (which had developed factories to produce similar products) was successful in arguing for tariffs on imports!. Many Southern politicians took the position that individual states had the power to overturn or ignore any Federal laws!. Your argument about taxes vastly overstates the issue--there was practically no federal taxation of any kind at that time!. And your claim of heavy taxation of Northern products is actually the reverse of the truth--the Federal government placed tariffs on imported goods so they were MORE expensive than domestically produced goods!.
Additionally, it is technically true that slavery was not the "cause of the civil war!." But the South wanted new states to be slave states!. When Congress did not support that position, they then wanted states to individually determine if they were be slave holding states or not!. That then lead to the bloodshed in Kansas that earned the sobriquet "Bleeding Kansas!." Very, very hard to argue that slavery was a non-issue or not a major political dividing force in the 1850's in our country!. I can assure that the bloodshed in Kansas and Nebraska and Missouri was NOT over tariffs, taxes, importation of goods from England or Northern factories!. It was almost entirely about slavery!.
Furthermore, one need only look at what the Southern papers published as headlines and comments upon seccession!. For many of them, slavery was listed as a factor!. Now, that wasn't enough to get Lincoln to go to war!. But to argue that the war wasn't about slavery or that Lincoln used it only later is disingenous!. Without slavery, much of the initial states rights conflict would have been insufficient for a war!.Www@QuestionHome@Com
What is the question here!?
Assuming it's 'Why is it that there are still so many people who think that the civil war (sic) was about slavery!?', the answer to that is simple: For many, many people, slavery _was_ a factor!. It was not the _only_ factor, but it was the predominant one for a lot of individuals!. Many black families are still impacted by the issue of slavery, even to the point that the names they have today are those of their ancestors' slaveowners--why do you think Cassius Clay or Malcolm Little wanted to change their names, and justifiably so!?
It isn't just a single-race issue, either: I come from a tobacco plantation-Southern family on one side of my family tree, and considering my parents are older than the average 27-year-old's, I am only three-four generations removed from slaveowners!. That side of my family had money like you wouldn't believe before the war, because they had people working for them for virtually free!. Then the war came, and all the money was lost, and the slaves were free--and rightly so, on both counts, as what my ancestors were doing was purely unethical, no matter how they treated the workers they kept in bondage!.
That side of my family had to shift from being plantation owners to simple tobacco _merchants_, obviously a huge economic downturn!. In purely economic terms, had we owned hotels or oil, we could have been the Hiltons or Bushes of modern day!. It is good, fair, and just that we aren't; it is good, fair, and just that my mom had to work for a living, and the descendants of her great-grandparents' slaves are free!.
That sort of thing is the most visceral, obvious result of the Civil War, and that is why people are more immediately impacted by slavery being an issue than by factory-workers in Marietta being an issue!. (The factory-workers who lost their jobs weren't all that well-off to begin with!.)
Politically, your analysis is correct!. Realistically, for _people_, it isn't at all--and the human side of the issue is the one that generally counts in the morality of using the flag!.Www@QuestionHome@Com