Confederate Flag Debate
- Thread starter Axolotl
- Start date
HellRell804
Banned
Slavery was never the cause of the war. It was the battle of states rights vs the formation of an all powerful central government. Slavery is the emotional manipulation to get people to forget that the federal government declared war on it's own people and bombed them into submission.
And that's a trick the federal government would continue to use for years after, whether its Waco, operation MOVE in Philadelphia and anyone else who dares oppose them
I saw a bunch of white kids in that classroom about 97%
so I just
so I just
This is the other side of the coin for DOS. If we're the descendants of slavery, they're the descendants of slave owners (DOSO??? 
) they feel just as entitled to embrace it as their heritage and what makes them unique to any other group to come to America.
) they feel just as entitled to embrace it as their heritage and what makes them unique to any other group to come to America.You backed down from him
Should have pressed the issue about that fakkit ass flag
Marc Spector
the 4'11 Cuban
Bullshyt fam. It was over states rights all right, the right to have slavery. Those rich cacs who profited off of the slave trade instigated the war by scaring the poor Johnny rebs that the govt of the North was coming for them next.
AuntAnniesPretzels
Banned
Is there a problem here?
Freedman
Choppers For Karate Nggas
Larry Lambo
Superstar
Slavery was a major factor in the South seceding from the Union. It wasn't the only factor but it was a major driver. Lincoln before being elected already had announced that he intended any new state to be a "free" state. That was going to tip the balance to the non-slave holding states. The election of 1960 favored Republicans, which the South perceived as threats to their establishment.
Slavery was a way of life and the economic engine for the South (for the country in general, but specifically for the South). They weren't comfortable in what they were seeing from the U.S. Government and felt the momentum was going against them. There were some other issues as well, not saying it was all slavery, but they fought to preserve their way of life and slavery was a big part of it.
Now, if we are talking about the North, they didn't give a rats ass about slaves. They just wanted to preserve the union (i.e. resources/manpower/tax base).
HellRell804
Banned
The right for states to do what they want means some states are going to have shyt laws and practices.
Let's also not forget that the invention of the cotton gin made owning, feeding, and clothing slaves a financial liability. So it was all a moot point. Slavery was ending whether they liked it or not.
Lord_nikon
Veteran
It was states rights to keep slavery going as long as possible. So....slavery. Any attempt to make this about anything other than slavery is people trying too hard. Go back and read what the confederate leaders said. They were basically saying "we fighting to keep slavery going as long as possible, we want black Africans to be slaves forever, we can't imagine a world without slavery, fukk these nikkas."
The only nuance is that the north wasn't fighting to make blacks equal to white, they just wanted to end that version of white supremacy and they thought the south was going to get too much wealth and power due to slavery.
Selected Quotations
Selected Quotations from 1830-1865
Most of these quotes are things I have found in my reading, or that I was sent by a friend. Many of the quotes were sent to me by Prof. Dwight Pitcaithley of New Mexico State University in 2008; another large collection was posted to Facebook by Mr. Bryan Cheeseboro, who got them from Al Mackey. The organization here is very chaotic and eclectic.
- Representative Benjamin Stanton, Republican of Ohio, January 15, 1861: "Mr. Chairman, I desire to state, in a few words, what I regard as the real question in controversy between the political parties of the country. The Republican party holds that African slavery is a local institution, created and sustained by State laws and usages that cannot exist beyond the limits of the State, by virtue of whose laws it is established and sustained. The Democratic party holds that African slavery is a national institution, recognized and sustained by the Constitution of the United States throughout the entire territorial limits, where not prohibited by State constitutions and State laws...All other questions about which we differ grow out of this, and are dependent upon it..." [Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., (Appendix), p 58]
- Senator Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia: "There is not a respectable system of civilization known to history whose foundations were not laid in the institution of domestic slavery." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 56.]
- Richmond Enquirer, 1856: "Democratic liberty exists solely because we have slaves . . . freedom is not possible without slavery."
- Atlanta Confederacy, 1860: "We regard every man in our midst an enemy to the institutions of the South, who does not boldly declare that he believes African slavery to be a social, moral, and political blessing."
- Lawrence Keitt, Congressman from South Carolina, in a speech to the House on January 25, 1860: "African slavery is the corner-stone of the industrial, social, and political fabric of the South; and whatever wars against it, wars against her very existence. Strike down the institution of African slavery and you reduce the South to depopulation and barbarism." Later in the same speech he said, "The anti-slavery party contend that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States." Taken from a photocopy of the Congressional Globe supplied by Steve Miller.
- Keitt again, this time as delegate to the South Carolina secession convention, during the debates on the state's declaration of causes: "Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it." Taken from the Charleston, South Carolina, Courier, dated Dec. 22, 1860. See the Furman documents site for more transcription from these debates. Keitt became a colonel in the Confederate army and was killed at Cold Harbor on June 1, 1864.
- Senator Louis Trezevant Wigfall; December 11, 1860, on the floor of the Senate; "I said that one of the causes, and the one that has created more excitement and dissatisfaction than any other, is, that the Government will not hereafter, and when it is necessary, interpose to protect slaves as property in the Territories; and I asked the Senator if he would abandon his squatter-sovereignty notions and agree to protect slaves as all other property?" [Quote taken from The Congressional Globe, 36th Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 58.]
- Isham Harris, Governor of Tennessee, January 7, 1861, (Messages of the Governors of Tennessee, p. 255); "The systematic, wanton, and long continued agitation of the slavery question, with the actual and threatened aggressions of the Northern States and a portion of their people, upon the well-defined constitutional rights of the Southern citizens; the rapid growth and increase, in all the elements of power, of a purely sectional party,..."
- Senator John J. Crittenden, Kentucky (Democrat), March 2, 1861, (Congressional Globe, page 1376); "Mr. President, the cause of this great discontent in the country, the cause of the evils which we now suffer and which we now fear, originates chiefly from questions growing out of the respective rights of the different States and the unfortunate subject of slavery..."
- Henry M. Rector, Governor of Arkansas, March 2, 1861, Arkansas Secession Convention, p. 44 "The area of slavery must be extended correlative with its antagonism, or it will be put speedily in the 'course of ultimate extinction.'....The extension of slavery is the vital point of the whole controversy between the North and the South...Amendments to the federal constitution are urged by some as a panacea for all the ills that beset us. That instrument is amply sufficient as it now stands, for the protection of Southern rights, if it was only enforced. The South wants practical evidence of good faith from the North, not mere paper agreements and compromises. They believe slavery a sin, we do not, and there lies the trouble."
- Thomas F. Goode, Mecklenburg County, Virginia, March 28, 1861, Virginia Secession Convention, vol. II, p. 518, "Sir, the great question which is now uprooting this Government to its foundation---the great question which underlies all our deliberations here, is the question of African slavery..."
- William Grimball to Elizabeth Grimball, Nov. 20, 1860: "A stand must be made for African slavery or it is forever lost." [James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, p. 20]
- William Nugent to Eleanor Nugent, Sept 7, 1863: "This country without slave labor would be completely worthless. We can only live & exist by that species of labor; and hence I am willing to fight for the last." [James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, p. 107]
- William M. Thomson to Warner A. Thomson, Feb. 2, 1861: "Better, far better! endure all the horrors of civil war than to see the dusky sons of Ham leading the fair daughters of the South to the altar." [James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, p. 19]
- George Hamill, March, 1862: "I never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white person. There is too many free ******s. . . now to suit me, let alone having four millions." [Diary quoted in James McPherson, For Cause and Comrades, p. 109]
- Methodist Rev. John T. Wightman, preaching at Yorkville, South Carolina: "The triumphs of Christianity rest this very hour upon slavery; and slavery depends on the triumphs of the South . . . This war is the servant of slavery." [The Glory of God, the Defence of the South (1861), cited in Eugene Genovese's Consuming Fire (1998).]
- Jefferson Buford, Barbour County, Alabama, speaking to the Alabama Secession Convention, on March 4, 1861: "Now, Mr. President, I submit that while our commission is of much higher import and dignity, it is, in one respect, by no means so broad. We are sent to protect, not so much property, as white supremacy, and the great political right of internal self-control---but only against one specified and single danger alone, i.e. the danger of Abolition rule."
- Pvt. Thomas Taylor, 6th Ala., to his parents, March 4, 1862: "we are ruined if we do not put forth all our energies & drive back the invaders of our slavery South." (Chandra Manning, What This Cruel War Was Over, p. 66).
- From the Georgia Constitution of 1861:"The General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves." (This is the entire text of Article 2, Sec. VII, Paragraph 3.)
- From the Alabama Constitution of 1861: "No slave in this State shall be emancipated by any act done to take effect in this State, or any other country." (This is the entire text of Article IV, Section 1 (on slavery).)
- Alexander Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, referring to the Confederate government: "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition." [Augusta, Georgia, Daily Constitutionalist, March 30, 1861.]
- On the formation of black regiments in the Confederate army, by promising the troops their freedom:
- Howell Cobb, former general in Lee's army, and prominent pre-war Georgia politician: "If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong." [Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
- A North Carolina newspaper editorial: "it is abolition doctrine . . . the very doctrine which the war was commenced to put down." [North Carolina Standard, Jan. 17, 1865; cited in Battle Cry of Freedom, p. 835.]
- Robert M.T. Hunter, Senator from Virginia, "What did we go to war for, if not to protect our property?"
- Senator William Bigler, Pennsylvania, January 21, 1861: "The fundamental cause of the imperiled condition of the country is the institution of African servitude, or rather, the unnecessary hostility to that institution on the part of those who have no connection with it, no duties to perform about it, and no responsibilities to bear as to the right or wrong of it. Each event, touching the extension, contraction, or control of this institution, as it has presented itself, has added to the mutual exasperation and strife between the North and the South, until men have become convinced that to have peace, as to all things else, the North and the South must be completely separated as to this institution of slavery." [36th Cong., 2nd Sess., Congressional Globe, p. 489]
- John B. Baldwin, Augusta County delegate to the Virginia Secession Convention, March 21, 1861: "I say, then, that viewed from that standpoint, there is but one single subject of complaint which Virginia has to make against the government under which we live; a complaint made by the whole South, and that is on the subject of African slavery...." [Journal of the Virginia Secession Convention, Vol. II, p. 139]
richaveli83
Veteran
I honestly don't get that upset seeing the confederate flag because the CSA only existed for four years whereas the United States has been around for nearly 250 years and black people have caught more hell under the American flag. Nonetheless the confederates were traitors and should not be celebrated and the generals and politicians that served in the confederacy should have been executed or/and received life sentences for their betrayal.