Irony said:
To me the Confederate Battle Flag mainly represents the area in the U.S. commonly referred to as the "South". That area has a very distinct culture within the U.S. Being a bit history buff I will also associate it with the C.S.A.
Obviously alot of racist groups use it as "their" flag, but it's much the way that Mussolini's Fascist Italy liked to conjure up images of the Roman Empire or Nazi Germany evoking "Germanic" traditions. They are descendants of these things true, but their connection is not as close as they claim.
creager91 said:
Racism, thats all the flag represents to me. Not trying to offend anyone here but the South seceded because of racism. I'm not saying you should be ashamed to be from those states or live in them, but to sport the flag? To me thats racism. You're flying the flag of the soldiers who fought and died so they could keep "ownership" of another human being. I know many Southerners try to say the Civil war was not really about racism and I don't know what your education has taught you, but slavery was the driving force behind the South Confederacy.
The Civil War wasn't driven by racism. It was driven by the argument on how powerful the individual state governments had in relation to the Federal government. There's a reason why it was the
Confederate States of America as opposed to the
Federal states of America. The Southern states wanted more independence from the Federal government and had for some time. There had been several resolutions saying that an individual state had the right to overturn a federal decision within it's borders. These were ultamitly used by the Southern states to "give" themselves the right to secede from the Union.
Lincoln dissputed these claims and thus the Civil War took place. In fact it was Lincoln's strenghting of the Federal government that helped to create the U.S.A. we know today. Before then the title U.S.A. made sense because it was more of union of seperate states (not to be confused with their common American usage today) is the sense of "The State of Britin" or "The State of Russia". Originally the U.S. was supposed to be a confederacy (Hence the Articles of Confederation). The slow centralization of the government wasn't universally supported and eventually came to the front when the Southern States felt they'd had enough.
While slavery was part of the reason why the Civil War happened it was not the whole part. If you were to ask the average Southern during that time why the Southern states had seceded they probably would have answered in a similar manner: "Because the Northern States were trying to oppress them". The average Southern didn't have slaves, only the most wealthy could even afford to own them (the slave trade had ended much earlier and keeping a person alive and work-worthy out of your own pocket is expensive). Why would a poor farmer want to support something that had no impact on his life? Hell, there were even several Northern states that still had slavery at the time (Maryland and Missouri are two). The only reason why the war is so closely linked to the issue of slavery is due to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which only banned slavery
in southern states. The Emancipation Proclamation wasn't some moral law being brought about, it was a clever piece of political maneuvering that helped to dissuade the C.S.A.'s potential allies (Britain and France) from joining due to the fact that by that time both had banned slavery within their motherland. I don't know what your education taught
you, but the reason why slavery is so closely linked to Confederacy is the same reason why the Holocaust is linked with Nazi Germany; at the time the war wasn't being fought to oppose it. It's only later that these practices were used to make the victors seem all the more righteous.
Sorry, I quoted the whole thing cause I didnt want to have someone think I took it out of context (which I think might still happen alot in here if this continues to get popular), but that bolded part is rather... well, wrong.
The need for a strong central government that all the citizens wanted began well before the Civil War. Now true, the Articles of Confederation were drafted before the Constitution as we know it now, but that was because the States had just fought to be free from a central government. So in the mid-late 1780s when Daniel Shay raised his head for the rights of the soldiers who were getting the brush off from the US government (which was really the States, cause the US gov didnt have any real power to do anything about it), Shay's Rebellion started and showed the weakness of the AoC. Fear of another such uprising created the need of a strong central government, so the states gathered to revise the Articles. When they saw that that was utterly pointless, they made the constitution.
The Civil War was about the idea of territories and an inability from the "Free" North and Slave South to split each terroitory equally. Thats actually why we have a lot of the states we have now, just so that the seats in Congress could be kept even. If not, really Maine wouldnt have a purpose to exist as itself and would still be part of Massachusetts. Territories were able to draft their own "state" constitutions and some of them wanted to have more confederation, and then when the Abolition movement swept through, things just sorta fell apart under the leadership of a weak president (Buchanan). He really didnt do anything that didnt either come back to bite him (and infact was sympathetic to the South more then the North) or just turn into a big waste of time.
If you actually look at a confederation (especially THE Confederation [C.S.A.]) it was doomed anyway, cause a Confederation is extremely hard to run, maintain, and control off the global stage. Once its one it, it just completely collapses and fails. Plus the Leaders running it were doing an exceedingly poor job. Without foreign intervention, the states would have went into rebellion and it would have collapsed again.
... Sorry, I think went off and rambled abit. Point is, the idea of wanting a more powerful central government existed well before the Civil War, especially since of the first nine to sign* three were what would later be pro slavery states that had alot to lose and where major cash crop states.
*The list being (in order):
1 Delaware
2 Pennsylvania
3 New Jersey
4 Georgia
5 Connecticut
6 Massachusetts
7 Maryland
8 South Carolina
9 New Hampshire
