Heritage, Not Hate ...

Alright, here it is. I have avoided this topic because it is so controversial. I had too much important stuff to say to let a silly little moot issue be used to discredit me. Few Republicans know about this, and even fewer Democrats do. But I have come to the conclusion, more and more, as time goes on, that battles are not won by making concessions. The bigger picture can not be clear if any details are sacrificed. The full truth must be at least spoken, even if it is not agreed upon. When people start using untruths to try to discredit people who are trying to do good work, there is a problem. That is why I am now going to defend that most hated of all symbols in American history, the Confederate flag.

We have been led to believe that this symbol stands for oppression, racism, and slavery. People from an entire region of the country have been led to be ashamed of their ancestry, many going so far as trying to distance themselves from it. It does not.

Firstly: The Civil War was not about racism, it was about states rights, and before you tell me that the right that the states wanted was the right to own slaves, I will tell you that the banning of slavery was already being introduced into the Virginia state legislature. I will also tell you that Robert E. Lee (a true American hero and patriot, by the way, and a great man) did not own slaves. He freed his slaves, but at least one of them stayed with him, voluntarily, because his life was better working for Robert E. Lee than it would be anywhere else. In addition, I will tell you that only about a third of the people in the south at the time of the civil war had slaves, and it was only a minute fragment of the population who had more than two or three. In addition, William Tecumseh Sherman (who was absolutely and unequivically not an American hero or patriot) stated that he did not care about the plight of the slaves. When he marched to the sea (more on that later), he took slaves against their will to be used as manual labor in the army (more on that later.). Slavery was, as Thomas Jefferson put it, like holding a wolf by the ears, you don't really want to keep him, but it is pretty hard to let him go. There were a lot of practical issues which had to be addressed in getting rid of slavery. Firstly, where are all the slaves going to go? This is a whole group of people who owns nothing, and will be out of work, food, and shelter the minute this passes. What are you going to do with them? Let them starve? This is something that needed to be addressed. Secondly, what will happen to slave owners who have relied on slavery as a source of labor (it wasn't right, but that's what they did, and how much worse was it than what they did in the north? More on that later.). The north's answer to those questions was, respectively, "I don't care," and "Suck it up." It probably did not make the north more hesitant to proceed in this manner to think that that course of action would crust the economy of the most prosperous region of the nation, right as the industrial revolution was starting to take hold, hey can we have some of them Blacks when you aren't using them? Oh, by the way, you are telling me that every other country in the civilized world managed to get rid of slavery peacefully, and the US couldn't?

Secondly: Do you really think there was some magic dividing line of morality which ran between two areas of the country? Everyone below the line was racist hillbillies who just wanted to own slaves, and everyone above it was a bunch of benevolent, accepting, and tolerant people? It was all economics. In the south, slavery was economically viable. You had a plot of land, and you used some of it to grow sustenance crops, and some of it to grow cash crops. If you had enough land, you could grow enough sustenance crops to feed yourself and a couple or more slaves. At this point, slaves become almost cost neutral and provide a source of labor. I would like to take the opportunity to dispell the common myth that most Southern landowners who had slaves had the slaves do all of the work, and just sat around and ordered them to do things all day. That is simply not true. The vast majority of Southern landowners, even among those who owned slaves, only owned a couple and had to work with them in the fields in order to survive. That said, this was not the case in the north. In the north, there were two types of economy, farming, and industry. In industry, slavery was not economically viable because the slaves had to be supported. They had to be fed, clothed, and housed, all of which cost money. At that point, it is cheaper and easier to bring a poor immigrant off a boat and have him work for wages low enough that he and his whole family, including children, have to work, usually in dangerous, dangerous jobs (usually for you), in order to survive (often paying rent to you to live in buildings that you own, in towns you built, whose commerce you control). Again, that leads to effectively cost neutral labor, and with no money, these immigrants have no real future. How is that different from slavery? Actually, today, we acknowledge it as slavery, economic slavery, but apparently the term is not retroactive. Thirdly, there are the agriculturalists of the north. The growing season is not long enough to have a plot of land used for sustenance farming. Many northern agriculturalists specialized in growing things such as apples, maple syrup, timber, or dairy, and while it is possible to grow a balanced diet in the north, it takes much more in terms of resources, so it is much harder to turn a profit, especially while feeding more people. Getting rid of slavery got rid of the labor source for one segment of the population, while keeping equally unfair and even more dangerous labor practices intact for another segment of the population.

Thirdly: The north did some pretty terrible things during that war. Sherman's March to the Sea was a deliberate "total war" strategy, aimed at destroying, not only the economic prosperity of the South, but also its very ability to survive. Sherman marched through hundreds of acres, burning everything, slaughtering the animals, and taking the slaves (after the emancipation proclamation, might I add) against their will to do manual labor. They raped and murdered an unknown number of black women. They murdered black men who tried to protect their wives or even the white women left behind on the plantations. They took children away from the only home they had ever known at gunpoint. So yeah, slavery was bad, but you know what, I guess if the war was about slavery for the South, it was about genocide for the North. By the way, a lot of Native Americans will tell you that the true attempt at genocide came under Sherman. Yes, there had been strained relationships before that. Yes, there had been injustices before that. Sherman started the genocide. The attempt to eradicate the Native Americans by any means necessary, whether it was killing their food and starving them, or arranging for mass murders of men, women, and children, it was Sherman.

Fourthly: No culture is perfect, and I will not defend slavery nor the South's participation in it. It is also true, however, that no culture is purely evil (with the possible exception of the state imposed culture of Nazi Germany, under which you would find many good citizens willing to risk their lives to protect others or fight the state.). All that anyone thinks of when they think of the South are racism and slavery. They think of the KKK. That is not what the South stood for any more than genocide and industrialist exploitation are what the North stood for. Very few cultures are remembered solely for their flaws, and the South should not be. It should be remembered equally, or even more, for its positive qualities. It should be remembered for its culture, its elegance, its sophistication. It should be remembered for the great people who lived there, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, William Faulkner, Mark Twain. It should be remembered for the bravery of the people who first settled it, in Jamestown, in 1607. It should be remembered for the positive values it stood for, individuality, independence, freedom, and bravery. It should be remembered for its contributions to the United States throughout its history. All of these things are a part of the heritage of the South, more than racism.

This is what it means to say, of the Confederate Flag, Heritage, not Hate.