I posit these statements as facts:
• The Civil War began when the southern states established the Confederate States of America. While the areas of disagreement between the regions may have been manifold, the most compelling factor was that the entire economy of the South was based on an agriculture system that depended on slave labor for its profitability. When the first Republican president was elected on a platform to prohibit slavery’s expansion into new states, slave state leaders were alarmed that they would soon lose their stalemate in the Senate and the United States would soon be on the slippery slope to prohibition. Secession was a preemptive move to maintain the pro-slavery status quo.
• Many scholars believe that Lincoln personally supported abolition but as a practical politician could not do it universally by edict. Yes, there are a couple of asterisks that need to be applied but the Emancipation Proclamation was a momentous document that had to be supplemented with the 13th and 14th Amendments. Even so, it took another century for Black Americans to be given equal rights of citizenship. Of course, things like the GOP’s voter suppression efforts continue to work counter to this ideal.
• Abolitionists existed in the South. Most Whites in the North had views that would be considered quite racist today. Many were indifferent to the slavery issue. Any analysis of the people of the two “nations” would not find that either population to be morally superior to the other.
• There can be no similar equivalence offered for the two regimes that were at war. The CSA waged a brutal war against the United States. Its officers betrayed their oaths of loyalty to the USA. While the U.S. Constitution was silent on the issue of slavery (silence infers consent?), the C.S. Constitution was quite explicit in guaranteeing support for the peculiar institution.
• If the goals of Reconstruction had been adhered to, if the promise of 40 acres and a mule had been honored, America would have reached racial reconciliation a hundred years sooner. (not that we’re there yet, BTW).
• At some point late in the 19th Century Americans made a grand bargain. We would honor the heroes from both sides of the conflict. Southerners would cling to the wistful melancholy of their beloved lost cause and we all* could get back to being one American people again.
• The price for this bargain was paid by African Americans. When federal troops withdrew, former slaves lost their franchise along with the rest of their civil rights. They were subjected to brutally enforced codes and random acts of domestic terrorism. This created, in functional terms, the reinstitution of slavery. [recommended reading: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II http://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Another-Name-Re-Enslavement-Americans/dp/0385722702 ]
It is right to celebrate southern people and their culture. Those who died in their war against the United States are to be afforded our respect and honor. However, I will not pretend that the Confederate States was somehow benign. It was an evil regime created to perpetuate the peculiar institution of slavery. Its symbols became tools which were used to enforce the subjugation of African people well into the 20th Century. It may cause discomfort among good people in the 21st Century, but this is something that can never be sugarcoated.
*all the White people, that is.
