"The War Between the States triggered generations of disputes and controversies between regions, races and cultures," said state Sen. Glenn McConnell, president pro tempore of the South Carolina Senate and a Civil War re-enactor."Why was the war fought? Was it about slavery or states' rights? What does the Confederate battle flag stand for? Is it a symbol of bigotry or a memorial to the valor of fallen soldiers," he asked about 700 people gathered at a ceremony commemorating the first shots of the war. "Many of the emotional issues still rage."
The Confederate Flag, in our view, is hardly a memorial to the "valor of fallen soldiers". Instead, given the treatment by slaveholders in the old South, it represents a vile regime in some respects as bad as the Nazis'. Watching some folks in the Old South states drive around in Confederate Flag-festooned pickup trucks is similar to imagined images of Germans driving around in Volkswagens with Nazi flags taped to their rear windows.
However, a different view of the Confederate South is emerging. It wasn't all pro-slavery, and it wasn't all pro-secession. Instead, the move to secession was driven by a moneyed few who dragged the rest of the populations along with them. This important article at DailyKos explains many of the details:
At no time during the winter of 1860-1861 was secession desired by a majority of the people of the slave states. . . . Furthermore, secession was not basically desired even by a majority in the lower South, and the secessionists succeeded less because of the intrinsic popularity of their program than because of the extreme skill with which they utilized an emergency psychology, the promptness by which they invoked unilateral action by individual states, and the firmness with which they refused to submit the question of secession to popular referenda.
. . .
In Georgia, voters actually preferred to stay in the Union by a margin of about 1,000 statewide. Yet, somehow, a secession convention was called, with slave holders comprising 87 percent of the delegates – even though they comprised only a third of qualified voters. As Williams writes, “Similar statistics at all the conventions virtually guaranteed secession regardless of the popular will.”
. . .
The key for the secessionists was, as Freehling explains, South Carolina, where anti-Union oligarchs with extensive commercial ties to England has been promoting secession since the 1830s Nullification Crisis. Votes on secession had been held in South Caroline in 1832-33 and again in 1850-51 but had never come close to a required two thirds majority. After John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859, secessionists had quietly begun forming armed militias. A year later, whenever hostility to secession surfaced, these militias soon arrived to squash opposition, forcefully branding dissent as disloyalty to the South and her proud institutions. When South Carolina’s U.S. Senator James Hammond wrote a long public letter against secession, a coterie of editors helped Alfred P. Aldrich, South Carolina legislator from Barnwell and leading secessionist, to suppress it. Aldrich openly averred that they could not wait “for the common people when a great move was to be made—We must make the move and force them to follow.”
Go read the rest of the article; there is much more in there. The Civil War was actually fomented by rich slaveholders, a small minority of the population, who stood to lose the most should abolition succeed.
Perhaps the best way to remember the Confederate South, therefore, is not the valor of fallen soldiers or famous battles. Instead, it should be remembered as a war generated by the moneyed, powerful few who, lying and suppressing dissent, sacrificed hundreds of thousands of their countrymen in a stupid and destructive war the successful outcome of which would have benefitted only of themselves.
In short, never let the super-rich and powerful run the country. Sadly, we seem to have forgotten that lesson completely.
No comments:
Post a Comment