Ghazkuul wrote:
hell I have seen black people wearing Confederate flags on their clothing,
I do hate that it took the murder of 9 people including a former US senator for people to think "hey lets take down that hate symbol flying on our state capital."

 generalgrog wrote:

 motyak wrote:
All this "I can't believe you want to change every place that is named after a civil war person" or "no one ever will be allowed to sell it ever"....where is that coming from? I mean the OP was about not flying it at state/federal government locations. That's it. Which side of the argument made it about renaming military bases and never ever selling it?

It's called the slippery slope fallacy. A lot of that happening in this thread.

Dogma is better at explaining it Than I, but the basic strategy is to claim that if you take one minor step, it ABSOLUTELY HAS TOO lead to massive unexpected consequences, even though there really isn't proof that these MASSIVE consequences might happen.

GG

 motyak wrote:
All this "I can't believe you want to change every place that is named after a civil war person" or "no one ever will be allowed to sell it ever"....where is that coming from? I mean the OP was about not flying it at state/federal government locations. That's it. Which side of the argument made it about renaming military bases and never ever selling it?

 CptJake wrote:

As for the flag issue, at what point will folks be happy? Do we need to outlaw it so that even having accurate confederate flags for miniature war game units is illegal (much like you cant have accurate WW2 German markings on model aircraft/ships and so on sold in Germany?)

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Let's get back talking about the amazing act of Christians by the victim's family:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/06/19/i-forgive-you-relatives-of-charleston-church-victims-address-dylann-roof/

That is something worth talking about, and worth championing. I can't think of a more power act of what it's means to be a Christian there...

Christian what ? How did this thread become about Christianity?

As Charleston marched in unity at sunset on Sunday night, two things were conspicuously missing. One was the progressive paid-agitation mob, normally so prevalent whenever an eager media trains its cameras on torched buildings and tear gas. The other was Barack Obama, who was golfing on the other side of the country and nowhere to be found. Just days earlier, an unthinkable act of racial terror had ripped the city apart and frayed the fabric of the nation: nine African-American members of the historic Emanuel A.M.E. Church were gunned down in a Bible study group by a white supremacist with yet another creepy bowl haircut. The dead included three pastors, one of which was noted State Senator Clementa Pinckney. Due to the time of night when the crime occurred, very few details initially emerged concerning the crime or its particulars.

But, to a narrative-happy media approaching another critical election year, it didn’t matter.

Before the sun was given a chance to rise, the usual media suspects had chosen their narrative. Before the shooter was even apprehended every professional grievance-hunter, from Talking Points Memo, Salon, and The Huffington Post to the Obama Administration, was placing blame for a terror attack at the feet of a Republican Governor and a flag. Before the weekend was out, every Republican candidate for President was being bombarded by Buzzfeeders and JuiceVoxers. The GOP campaigns, still apparently naïvely unaware as to what the goals of these outlets are, decided to play along and they were promptly rewarded with more blame and more questions. Leftist media finally had the Conservative Tea Party Monster they’d always intended James Holmes or Adam Lanza or Jared Loughner to be.

Republican Presidential candidates were being made to answer for a Democrat battle flag, representing a Democrat war in a chapter of American history remembered as a Democrat revolt against the Republican proposition that human beings shouldn’t be held as chattel property. And all this even before the victims of Emanuel A.M.E. Church were given a chance to be memorialized.

Before the crime scene had been cleared and the killer had been caught, our media was once again bludgeoning us over the head and telling us to submit before we had even begun to grasp what it was that had actually happened. As reports came in via social media and local news outlets in the heat of the late South Carolina night, we were all struggling to find out what was happening. We weren’t even able to catch our breath. POLITICO, the Washington Post, and the New York Times all began examining what they called an “uncomfortable relationship the GOP has with the Confederate Flag.” It doesn’t matter that their crack researchers ignored a quote from a prominent KKK Member on the front page of Democrat candidate for President, Lincoln Chafee‘s website. Or that Bill Clinton signed legislation in 1987 amending the Arkansas state flag to honor the Confederate States. This is not about a flag but that doesn’t matter.

We get flooded with opinions of Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee (polling somewhere around 2% nationally), but not once, in spite of her own husband’s legislative ties to the Confederate States, did media pressure Democrat frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

They were too busy partying at the wedding of one of her aides.

That’s how it has been for a long seven years (and if they have their way, another four). A tragedy is immediately politicized by the agitationist progressive left. Their targets are now dragged, unwillingly and unjustly, into a fight they neither wanted nor started. It’s like fighting off a rabid dog. Before we have a chance to catch our breath, progressive media has its jaws locked onto our throat and is foaming at the mouth. Over a flag.

The Confederate battle flag is a stupidly retrograde symbol of a deservedly losing cause that flies over a Civil War memorial adjacent to the Columbia SC capitol building and which, in any event, was not responsible for the actions of a deranged individual in Charleston. If you think it was, then ask why have such modern mass-slaughters managed to spare Mississippi, a state that incorporates the Confederate battle standard into its official state flag? The Holy Cross is also disagreeable symbol to progressive media (for infinitely less justifiable reasons), and this past weekend there were more people in Charleston waving that than the Confederate flag. Before the victims can be memorialized and grieved for, the political ideology that the national media on the Left is at war with (the party that itself buried the Confederacy, mind you) must atone for sins that don’t belong to them.

And thus a powder keg is lit.

The pattern is all too familiar. Shooter commits crime. President blames guns. Media blames Republicans. Media glorifies leftist protest. Protest turns to riot. Rinse. Repeat. Hope and Change, or else. For the past six or so years, the country feels like we’re on the verge of just getting our teeth kicked in. Like one spark lights a fuse. There was a feeling, propagated on social media and online, that perhaps this was that spark. That’s the goal of Alinsky social policies. At all costs, keep people angry. Keep people divided. Keep people distracted. We feared as a country there was no coming back from this.

But then something happened. This time was different. This time things didn’t go according to the their plan. This time, spurred on by the courage of families left behind, forgiving an unforgivable monster, with arms linked on bridges and church pews, Charleston joined together and made it known to racial extremists, both black and white, that their community would not be defined by them.

Hate would not win.

The country isn’t divided. The country isn’t racist. The country is exhausted.

As we witnessed Charlestonians of every race, color, and confessional creed congregating and joining hands as services at Emanuel A.M.E. Church resumed on Sunday, our President and his special advisor Valerie Jarrett were finger-wagging everyone on Twitter from the confines of an exclusive private country club in Palm Springs, CA–literally the furthest point he could get from Charleston in the country without physically leaving it.

Obama entered the White House briefing room the morning after the attack, gave a short two minute statement, lectured the country about gun control and then got on his airplane and flew away to Hollywood. Beyond a couple sparse tweets, that was all we heard from him. It takes a truly special brand of narcissism to decide to sit out the healing and grieving process a country takes upon itself in its President’s absence, yet at the same time scold it from an iPhone at Tyler Perry’s house or a golf course in Palm Springs.

Ronald Reagan sat in the Oval Office and embedded the memory of Christa McAuliffe and her crew into the permanent consciousness of the country. Bill Clinton’s down-home personal touch helped a country cope with, and understand a devastating act of domestic terror in Oklahoma City. George W. Bush, on the night of September 11th, 2001, exited Marine One and marched across the south lawn of the White House alone, head unbowed, and addressed a confused and angry nation against the wishes of his Secret Service.

With this President, checking out seems to be his only coping mechanism of choice, an inadequate response for a man tasked as the leader of the free world. Barack Obama, indignant that he can’t use the Charleston shooting to pass his political agenda, seems to have found no use in acting as a consoler-in-chief, but instead offered up a half-hearted lecture on gun control premised on faulty statistics. Then he boarded Air Force One and flew to Hollywood for four fundraisers, a podcast with a comedian and two days of golf. Just as he did after the terror attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. Just as he did in the Hamptons and at the White House Correspondents Dinner as images of Ferguson and Baltimore being burnt to the ground blazed across cable channels.

A defining characteristic of this President is his constant (really, unique) ability to completely disappear when the country needs leadership the most, and instead let his bidding be done by junior staff on Twitter. A terrorist attack fundamentally changed the course of George W. Bush’s presidency. A terrorist attack doesn’t even change Barack Obama’s podcast schedule.

The last time he addressed the country from the Oval Office was in August of 2010. Every time the country has endured a tragedy since then, and has turned to its President looking for words of comfort or understanding, that office has remained empty.

This country doesn’t have a race problem. It has a leadership problem.

In spite of unimaginable horror, however (and in spite of the vacuum of leadership), Charleston has given us hope. For the first time in seven years, the country turned its back on divisive rhetoric and policies. It drowned out the voices of a leftist mob hoping to leave a scorched wasteland wherever it goes (but particularly wherever the cameras follow). Charleston has begun to put itself back together and has done so without Al Sharpton’s paid mob of leftist shock troops or Barack Obama’s idle threats and apathy. They didn’t turn their pain into rage and then take it out on businesses in the community. They harnessed it into a message of hope and forgiveness, thus neutering the shooter of his stated goals. It was illuminating. It was inspiring and the remaining remnants of an organized horde of occupiers and incendiaries were helpless to stop it.

Their self appointed leader, Deray McKesson, the seemingly fresh-spawned whelp of the Sharpton/Soros social media faux-activist mob, arrived in Charleston ready to stamp his feet and scream, only to be greeted by the nigh-incomprehensible (to him) sight of people singing with, and not screaming at, one another. Before the weekend was out, Deray was taking his frustrations with this so-called “forgiveness” narrative out on the families of the victims, and was being told to go home by a city and a state with its heart already full of grief and with no time for his shovel-ready anger-and-agitation tactics.

Deray was instead exiled to the blasted ratings heath of CNN to spread his message of widespread rampant racism in South Carolina, despite the solemn claims of the racist mass murderer in his manifesto. Despite the claims of Obama on Marc Maron’s podcast, or Deray’s daily racial Uberfact Tweets, racism was so scarce on the ground in South Carolina that the shooter couldn’t find anyone to go along with his ideology or his plan. He lamented about how alone he was in his demented ideals. Deray’s only outlet in Charleston became his Twitter feed, where he did his best impression of Vigo the Carpathian, desperately clinging onto a baby as he hears all the singing coming from outside the museum. In the end, the sight of thousands of peaceful people marching across the Revenal Bridge, waving flags and locked in arms was too much for him to stomach.

He sat it out.

Charleston turned their back on hate, and did so without occupying a park, torching a business, smashing up a single cop car, or burning a single American flag. It’s a country we aren’t used to seeing anymore, which is why the images from worshippers joining hands and embracing each other in faith felt so viscerally moving to so many. It’s something we haven’t seen in awhile and it’s not something the far left wants us to see. Progressive and network media were happy to wrap themselves in a biased political narrative about an outdated flag. The rest of the country wrapped itself in the of the arms of the victims, their families, and the congregants of Emanuel A.M.E. Church, and let it be known loud and clear that they were not alone. Charleston, like New York or Boston, is not alone.

That is the country we are.

sirlynchmob wrote:

Yes Whembly the democrats USED to be the racist party, but that was then and today the republicans proudly wear that title.

 BrotherGecko wrote:
I have been trying to figure out why Americans in the south portion of the country identify as Southerners as opposite to Northerners. Yet those in the North rarely seem to identify as Northerners. Some even identify by state, geographical region then country (looking at you Texas...).

Had a FB argument with a friend. He was under the impression that the CSA was more America then the Union and if they had won, the would of abolished slavery and racism wouldn't have come into existence. He also seemed to see it as a bastion of freedom. I tried to explain it to him that the CSA was doomed to fail as it had no central gov and amounted to just a handshake for mutual support. Likely the members of the CSA if it was left alone would resemble poor undeveloped countries...similar to now but without the federal gov proping them up lol.

 motyak wrote:
Whembly, that is one of the worst, most inane things that I have ever read. I award you no points and may god have mercy on your soul. If you truly think that is representative of reality that is. You could have posted it as a joke (I can hope right?).

 motyak wrote:
All this "I can't believe you want to change every place that is named after a civil war person" or "no one ever will be allowed to sell it ever"....where is that coming from? I mean the OP was about not flying it at state/federal government locations. That's it. Which side of the argument made it about renaming military bases and never ever selling it?

n an era where there is little bipartisan accord, it is significant that many on the right are joining the chorus of voices on the left demanding that the Confederate battle flag be removed from the grounds of South Carolina’s statehouse. Republican Governor Nikki Haley herself made the case yesterday during a press conference for relocating the flag to a more neutral location.

For some this is just a beginning. According to Stars and Stripes, there has been talk for years about whether military bases named for Confederate generals, of which there are nine, should be renamed.

Read more at http://libertyunyielding.com/2015/06/23/time-to-rename-u-s-military-bases-named-after-confederate-generals/

 Asherian Command wrote:
The Civil War happened because it was bound to happen whether it was by slavery or not.

 whembly wrote:
Go ahead... fisk it.

 Frazzled wrote:

 BrotherGecko wrote:
I have been trying to figure out why Americans in the south portion of the country identify as Southerners as opposite to Northerners. Yet those in the North rarely seem to identify as Northerners. Some even identify by state, geographical region then country (looking at you Texas...).

Had a FB argument with a friend. He was under the impression that the CSA was more America then the Union and if they had won, the would of abolished slavery and racism wouldn't have come into existence. He also seemed to see it as a bastion of freedom. I tried to explain it to him that the CSA was doomed to fail as it had no central gov and amounted to just a handshake for mutual support. Likely the members of the CSA if it was left alone would resemble poor undeveloped countries...similar to now but without the federal gov proping them up lol.

You can't figure out why a Texan identifies as being Texan and northerners don't identify with their state? Maybe because you have to be proud of something to identify with it?

I've known New Yorkers. They were proud of their state too, as they should be (despite it being NY).

Now Oklahoma, yea I could understand....


being proud of your state means you can be proud of both your immediate location and the greater America Hurr! Its a twofer!

 Peregrine wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Go ahead... fisk it.

It's not worth it, but I'll point out a key difference in the two situations:

In the first situation someone is murdered and the murderer is arrested, universally condemned, and the only question is whether he will get the death penalty or "merely" spend the rest of his life in prison. Meanwhile the victims are assumed to be innocent and nobody questions whether they might have done something to deserve death.

In the second situation someone is murdered and the murderer is protected by the state, defended by a large percentage of society, and is likely to face a temporary suspension and a "don't do it again" note at most. Meanwhile the victim is assumed to be guilty, discussion of the murder is full of speculation about all the horrible things they did in the past and how they probably deserved to die, and in less heavily moderated places than this site crosses the line into speculation about how all members of the victim's race/culture are inherently violent criminals.

Can you really not see why one of these situations is likely to produce peaceful memorials while the other is likely to produce anger and protests?

 jasper76 wrote:
deleted it, because you did.

 Manchu wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:
The Civil War happened because it was bound to happen whether it was by slavery or not.

This statement makes no sense.

This year initiates the commemoration of the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War. This is an occasion for serious reflection on a war that killed some 600,000 of our citizens and left many hundreds of thousands emotionally and physically scarred. Translated into today’s terms – our country is ten times more populous than it was then -- the dead would number some 6 million, with tens of millions more wounded, maimed, and psychologically damaged. The price was indeed catastrophic.

As a Southerner with ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, I have been intrigued with the question of why my ancestors felt compelled to leave the United States and set up their own country. What brought the American experiment to that extreme juncture?

The short answer, of course, is Abraham Lincoln’s election as president of the United States. What concerned Southerners most about Lincoln’s election was his opposition to the expansion of slavery into the territories; Southern politicians were clear about that. If new states could not be slave states, went the argument, then it was only a matter of time before the south’s clout in Congress would fade, abolitionists would be ascendant, and the South’s “peculiar institution” – the right to own human beings as property – would be in peril.

It is easy to understand why slave owners would be concerned about the threat, real or imagined, that Lincoln posed to slavery. But what about those Southerners who did not own slaves? Why would they risk their livelihoods by leaving the United States and pledging allegiance to a new nation grounded in the proposition that all men are not created equal, a nation established to preserve a type of property that they did not own?

In order to find an answer to this question, please travel back with me to the South of 1860. Let’s put ourselves into the skin of Southerners who lived there then. That’s what being an historian is about: putting yourself into the minds of people who lived in another time to understand things from their perspective, from their point of view. Let’s set aside what people said and wrote later, after the dust had settled. Let’s wipe the historic slate clean and visit the South of 150 years ago through the documents that survive from that time. What were Southerners saying to other Southerners about why they had to secede?

There is, of course, a historical backdrop that formed the foundation of experience for Southerners in 1860. More than 4 million enslaved human beings lived in the south, and they touched every aspect of the region’s social, political, and economic life. Slaves did not just work on plantations. In cities such as Charleston, they cleaned the streets, toiled as bricklayers, carpenters, blacksmiths, bakers, and laborers. They worked as dockhands and stevedores, grew and sold produce, purchased goods and carted them back to their masters’ homes where they cooked the meals, cleaned, raised the children, and tended to the daily chores. “Charleston looks more like a Negro country than a country settled by white people,” a visitor remarked.

Fear of a slave rebellion was palpable. The establishment of a black republic in Haiti and the insurrections, threatened and real, of Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner stoked the fires. John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry sent shock waves through the south. Throughout the decades leading up to 1860, slavery was a burning national issue, and political battles raged over the admission of new states as slave or free. Compromises were struck – the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850 – but the controversy could not be laid to rest.

The South felt increasingly beleaguered as the North increased its criticism of slavery. Abolitionist societies sprang up, Northern publications demanded the immediate end of slavery, politicians waxed shrill about the immorality of human bondage, and overseas, the British parliament terminated slavery in the British West Indies. A prominent historian accurately noted that “by the late 1850’s most white Southerners viewed themselves as prisoners in their own country, condemned by what they saw as a hysterical abolition movement.”

As Southerners became increasingly isolated, they reacted by becoming more strident in defending slavery. The institution was not just a necessary evil: it was a positive good, a practical and moral necessity. Controlling the slave population was a matter of concern for all Whites, whether they owned slaves or not. Curfews governed the movement of slaves at night, and vigilante committees patrolled the roads, dispensing summary justice to wayward slaves and whites suspected of harboring abolitionist views. Laws were passed against the dissemination of abolitionist literature, and the South increasingly resembled a police state. A prominent Charleston lawyer described the city’s citizens as living under a “reign of terror.”

WHAT THE CHURCHES WERE SAYING

With that backdrop, let’s take our trip back in time to hear what Southerners were hearing. What were they being told by their pastors, by their politicians, and their community leaders about slavery, Lincoln, and secession?

Churches were the center of social and intellectual life in the south. That was where people congregated, where they learned about the world and their place in it, and where they received moral guidance. The clergy comprised the community’s cultural leaders and educators and carried tremendous influence with slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike. What were Southern pastors, preachers, and religious leaders telling their flock?

Southern clergy defended the morality of slavery through an elaborate scriptural defense built on the infallibility of the Bible, which they held up as the universal and objective standard for moral issues. Religious messages from pulpit and from a growing religious press accounted in large part for the extreme, uncompromising, ideological atmosphere of the time.

As Northern opposition to slavery grew, the three major protestant churches split into northern and southern factions. The Presbyterians divided in1837, the Methodists in 1844, and the Baptists in 1845. The segregation of the clergy into Northern and Southern camps was profound. It spelt an end to meaningful dialogue, leaving Southern preachers to talk to Southern audiences without contradiction.

What were their arguments? The Presbyterian theologian Robert Lewis Dabney reminded his fellow Southern clergymen that the Bible was the best way to explain slavery to the masses. “We must go before the nation with the Bible as the text, and ‘thus sayeth the lord’ as the answer,” he wrote. “We know that on the Bible argument the abolition party will be driven to unveil their true infidel tendencies. The Bible being bound to stand on our side, they have to come out and array themselves against the Bible.”

Reverend Furman of South Carolina insisted that the right to hold slaves was clearly sanctioned by the Holy Scriptures. He emphasized a practical side as well, warning that if Lincoln were elected, “every Negro in South Carolina and every other Southern state will be his own master; nay, more than that, will be the equal of every one of you. If you are tame enough to submit, abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.”

A fellow reverend from Virginia agreed that on no other subject “are [the Bible’s] instructions more explicit, or their salutary tendency and influence more thoroughly tested and corroborated by experience than on the subject of slavery.” The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, asserted that slavery “has received the sanction of Jehova.” As a South Carolina Presbyterian concluded: “If the scriptures do not justify slavery, I know not what they do justify.”

The Biblical argument started with Noah’s curse on Ham, the father of Canaan, which was used to demonstrate that God had ordained slavery and had expressly applied it to Blacks. Commonly cited were passages in Leviticus that authorized the buying, selling, holding and bequeathing of slaves as property. Methodist Samuel Dunwody from South Carolina documented that Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, and Job owned slaves, arguing that “some of the most eminent of the Old Testament saints were slave holders.” The Methodist Quarterly Review noted further that “the teachings of the new testament in regard to bodily servitude accord with the old.” While slavery was not expressly sanctioned in the New Testament, Southern clergymen argued that the absence of condemnation signified approval. They cited Paul’s return of a runaway slave to his master as Biblical authority for the Fugitive Slave Act, which required the return of runaway slaves.

As Pastor Dunwody of South Carolina summed up the case: “Thus, God, as he is infinitely wise, just and holy, never could authorize the practice of a moral evil. But god has authorized the practice of slavery, not only by the bare permission of his Providence, but the express provision of his word. Therefore, slavery is not a moral evil.” Since the Bible was the source for moral authority, the case was closed. “Man may err,” said the southern theologian James Thornwell, “but God can never lie.”

It was a corollary that to attack slavery was to attack the Bible and the word of God. If the Bible expressly ordained slave holding, to oppose the practice was a sin and an insult to God’s word. As the Baptist minister and author Thornton Stringfellow noted in his influential Biblical Defense of Slavery, “men from the north” demonstrated “palpable ignorance of the divine will.”

The Southern Presbyterian of S.C observed that there was a “religious character to the present struggle. Anti-slavery is essentially infidel. It wars upon the Bible, on the Church of Christ, on the truth of God, on the souls of men.” A Georgia preacher denounced abolitionists as “diametrically opposed to the letter and spirit of the Bible, and as subversive of all sound morality, as the worst ravings of infidelity.” The prominent South Carolina Presbyterian theologian James Henley Thornwell did not mince his words. “The parties in the conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders. They are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground – Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity at stake.”

During the 1850’s, pro-slavery arguments from the pulpit became especially strident. A preacher in Richmond exalted slavery as “the most blessed and beautiful form of social government known; the only one that solves the problem, how rich and poor may dwell together; a beneficent patriarchate.” The Central Presbyterian affirmed that slavery was “a relation essential to the existence of civilized society.” By 1860, Southern preachers felt comfortable advising their parishioners that “both Christianity and Slavery are from heaven; both are blessings to humanity; both are to be perpetuated to the end of time.”

By 1860, Southern churches were denouncing the North as decadent and sinful because it had turned from God and rejected the Bible. Since the North was sinful and degenerate, went their reasoning, the South must purify itself by seceding. As a South Carolina preacher noted on the eve of secession, “We cannot coalesce with men whose society will eventually corrupt our own, and bring down upon us the awful doom which awaits them.” The consequence was a pointedly religious bent to rising Southern nationalism. As the Southern Presbyterian wrote, “It would be a glorious sight to see this Southern Confederacy of ours stepping forth amid the nations of the world animated with a Christian spirit, guided by Christian principles, administered by Christian men, and adhering faithfully to Christian precepts,” ie., the slavery of fellow human beings.

Shortly after Lincoln’s election, Presbyterian minister Benjamin Morgan Palmer, originally from Charleston, gave a sermon entitled, “The South Her Peril and Her Duty.” He announced that the election had brought to the forefront one issue – slavery – that required him to speak out. Slavery, he explained, was a question of morals and religion, and was now the central question in the crisis of the Union. The South, he went on, had a “providential trust to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing.” The South was defined by slavery, he observed. “It has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all of our habits of thought and feeling, and molded the very type of our civilization.” Abolition, said Palmer, was “undeniably atheistic.” The South “defended the cause of God and religion,” and nothing “is now left but secession.” Some 90,000 copies of a pamphlet incorporating the sermon were distributed.

Preachers were prominent at ceremonies held as troops marched off to war. In Petersburg, Virginia for example, Methodist minister R. N. Sledd railed against Northerners, an “infidel and fanatical foe” who embodied “the barbarity of an Atilla more than the civilization of the 19th Century” and who showed “contempt for virtue and religion according to their savage purpose.” Northerners, he warned, wanted to “undermine the authority of my Bible. You go to contribute to the salvation of your country from such a curse,” he told the departing soldiers. “You go to aid in the glorious enterprise of rearing in our sunny south a temple to constitutional liberty and Bible Christianity. You go to fight for your people and for the cities of your God.”

WHAT THE POLITICIANS WERE SAYING

What were the South’s politicians saying? In late 1860 and early 1861, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Louisiana appointed commissioners to travel to the other slave states and persuade them to secede. The commissioners addressed state legislatures, conventions, made public addresses, and wrote letters. Their speeches were printed in newspapers and pamphlets. These contemporaneous documents make fascinating reading and have recently been collected in a book by the historian Charles Dew.

William Harris, Mississippi’s commissioner to Georgia, explained that Lincoln’s election had made the North more defiant than ever. “They have demanded, and now demand equality between the white and negro races, under our constitution; equality in representation, equality in right of suffrage, equality in the honors and emoluments of office, equality in the social circle, equality in the rights of matrimony,” he cautioned, adding that the new administration wanted “freedom to the slave, but eternal degradation for you and me.”

As Harris saw things, “Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the negro as an ignorant, inferior, barbarian race, incapable of self-government, and not, therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political, or social equality.” Lincoln and his followers, he stated, aimed to “overturn and strike down this great feature of our union and to substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white races.” For Harris, the choice was clear. Mississippi would “rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pyre than see them subjugated to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race.” The Georgia legislature ordered the printing of a thousand copies of his speech.

Two days before South Carolina seceded, Judge Alexander Hamilton Handy, Mississippi’s commissioner to Maryland, warned that “the first act of the black republican party will be to exclude slavery from all the territories, from the District of Columbia, the arsenals and the forts, by the action of the general government. That would be a recognition that slavery is a sin, and confine the institution to its present limits. The moment that slavery is pronounced a moral evil – a sin – by the general government, that moment the safety of the rights of the south will be entirely gone.”

The next day, two commissioners addressed the North Carolina legislature and warned that Lincoln’s election meant “utter ruin and degradation” for the south. “The white children now born will be compelled to flee from the land of their birth, and from the slaves their parents have toiled to acquire as an inheritance for them, or to submit to the degradation of being reduced to an equality with them, and all its attendant horrors.”

Former South Carolina Congressman John McQueen was crystal clear about where things stood when he wrote to a group of Richmond civic leaders. Lincoln’s program was based upon the “single idea that the African is equal to the Anglo-Saxon, and with the purpose of placing our slaves on a position of equality with ourselves and our friends of every condition. We, of South Carolina, hope soon to greet you in a Southern Confederacy, where white men shall rule our destinies, and from which we may transmit to our posterity the rights, privileges, and honor left us by our ancestors.”

Typical of the commissioner letters is that written by Stephen Hale, an Alabama commissioner, to the Governor of Kentucky, in December 1860. Lincoln’s election, he observed, was “nothing less than an open declaration of war, for the triumph of this new theory of government destroys the property of the south, lays waste her fields, and inaugurates all the horrors of a San Domingo servile insurrection, consigning her citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans. The slave holder and non-slaveholder must ultimately share the same fate; all be degraded to a position of equality with free negroes, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life, or else there will be an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting all the resources of the country.”

What Southerner, Hale asked, “can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distant future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality?” Abolition would surely mean that “the two races would be continually pressing together,” and “amalgamation or the extermination of the one or the other would be inevitable.” Secession, argued Hale, was the only means by which the “heaven ordained superiority of the white over the black race” could be sustained. The abolition of slavery would either plunge the South into a race war or so stain the blood of the white race that it would be contaminated for all time.” Could southern men “submit to such degradation and ruin,” he asked, and responded to his own question, “God forbid that they should.”

Congressman Curry, another of Alabama’s commissioner’s, similarly warned his fellow Alabamans that “the subjugation of the south to an abolition dynasty would result in a saturnalia of blood.” Emancipation meant “the abhorrent degradation of social and political equality, the probability of a war of extermination between the races or the necessity of flying the country to avoid the association.” Typical also was the message from Henry Benning of Georgia – later one of General Lee’s most talented brigade commanders – to the Virginia legislature. “If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished,” he predicted. “By the time the north shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that? It is not a supposable case.”

What did Benning predict would happen? “War will break out everywhere like hidden fire from the earth. We will be overpowered and our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth, and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination. We will be completely exterminated,” he announced, “and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back to a wilderness and become another Africa or Saint Domingo.”

“Join the north and what will become of you” he asked. “They will hate you and your institutions as much as they do now, and treat you accordingly. Suppose they elevate Charles Sumner to the presidency? Suppose they elevate Frederick Douglas, your escaped slave, to the presidency? What would be your position in such an event? I say give me pestilence and famine sooner than that.”

In sum, the commissioners described one apocalyptic vision after another – emancipation, race war, miscegenation. The collapse of white supremacy would be so cataclysmic that no self-respecting Southerner could fail to rally to the secessionist cause, they argued. Secession was necessary to preserve the purity and survival of the white race. This was the unvarnished, near universal message of southern political leaders to their constituencies.

WHAT COMMUNITY LEADERS WERE SAYING

Southerners heard the identical message from their community leaders. In the fall of 1860, John Townsend, owner of a cotton plantation on Edisto Island, authored a pamphlet delineating the consequences of Lincoln’s elevation to presidency. The abolition of slavery would be inevitable, he warned, which would mean “the annihilation and end of all Negro labor (agricultural especially) over the whole South. It means a loss to the planters of the South of, at least, FOUR BILLION dollars, by having this labor taken from them; and a loss, in addition, of FIVE BILLION dollars more, in lands, mills, machinery, and other great interests, which will be rendered valueless by the want of slave labor to cultivate the lands, and the loss of the crops which give to those interests life and prosperity.”

More to the point, he noted, abolition meant “the turning loose upon society, without the salutary restraints to which they are now accustomed, more than four millions of a very poor and ignorant population, to ramble in idleness over the country until their wants should drive most of them, first to petty thefts, and afterwards to the bolder crimes of robbery and murder.” The planter and his family would “not only to be reduced to poverty and want, by the robbery of his property, but to complete the refinement of the indignity, they are to be degraded to the level of an inferior race, be jostled by them in their paths, and intruded upon, and insulted over by rude and vulgar upstarts. Who can describe the loathsomeness of such an intercourse;—the constrained intercourse between refinement reduced to poverty, and swaggering vulgarity suddenly elevated to a position which it is not prepared for?”

Non-slaveholders, he predicted, were also in danger. “It will be to the non-slaveholder, equally with the largest slaveholder, the obliteration of caste and the deprivation of important privileges,” he cautioned. “The color of the white man is now, in the South, a title of nobility in his relations as to the negro,” he reminded his readers. “In the Southern slaveholding States, where menial and degrading offices are turned over to be per formed exclusively by the Negro slave, the status and color of the black race becomes the badge of inferiority, and the poorest non-slaveholder may rejoice with the richest of his brethren of the white race, in the distinction of his color. He may be poor, it is true; but there is no point upon which he is so justly proud and sensitive as his privilege of caste; and there is nothing which he would resent with more fierce indignation than the attempt of the Abolitionist to emancipate the slaves and elevate the Negroes to an equality with himself and his family.”

CONCLUSION

There you have it. The reasons that Southerners gave their fellow Southerners for Secession – from the pulpit, from their political and community leaders, in their reading material. There was much more – I haven’t discussed newspapers yet -- but the message was the same. Secession was required to preserve slavery. Why should non-slaveholders care? Because slavery was the will of God, and those who opposed the institution – the abolitionists – were by definition anti-God. More to the point, secession was necessary to preserve white supremacy, to avoid a race war, and to prevent racial amalgamation. For Southerners to remain in the Union, be they slave-owners or non-slave-owners, meant losing their property, their social standing, and the “sacred purity of our daughters.” Tariffs appear nowhere in these sermons and speeches, and “states’ rights” are mentioned only in the context of the rights of states to decide whether some of their inhabitants can own other humans. The central message was to play on the fear of African barbarians at the gate.

The preachers and politicians delivered on their promise. The Confederate States were established explicitly to preserve and expand the institution of slavery. Alexander Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president, said so himself in 1861, in unambiguous terms. “The Confederacy’s foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,” he announced: “that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.”

The new nation’s constitution sealed the deal. In most respects it was identical to the United States Constitution. The big change regarded slavery. Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 4, provided that "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." And Article IV, Section 3, Paragraph 3, stated that "The Confederate States may acquire new territory . . . In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and the territorial government."

Thus, while the rest of the western world followed an historic trajectory dedicated to abolishing slavery and bringing an expanded meaning to the concepts of human rights and participatory democracy, the South marched off in an opposite direction. The Confederacy was a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are not created equal, and that the Government’s job is to preserve and ensure that inequality.

Later, after the war, when Southern preachers and politicians felt moved to explain their actions to the world and to their progeny, they told a very different story. In 1881, former President Jefferson Davis claimed that slavery was an abstract matter only incidental to the conflict. The South, he proclaimed, had fought only for the noblest of principles, such as constitutional government, the supremacy of law, and the “natural rights of man.” And what about Alexander Stevens, he of the cornerstone speech, what did he have to say when he began to write about the past in 1868? The war, he assured his readers, had not been about slavery; it had been a grand struggle of principle between “the friends of constitutional liberty” on the one hand, and the “demon of centralism, absolutism, and despotism” on the other.

So where does this leave us. Unlike present-day South Africa, the South had no truth-and-reconciliation commission. Our ancestors did not have to come to grips with their own history at a time when honesty might have carried the day. Instead, we are left with the post-war fantastical tall-tales of men like Stephens and Davis that race and slavery had nothing to do with the South’s drive for independence, tall tales that have become grist for the mill of neo-confederates and their present day partisans. Those tall-tales and after-the-fact justifications, however, can survive only if we ignore what the South’s leaders actually said as they urged their countrymen to action. Those words are preserved in repositories such as the Charleston Library Society. They are here for the world to read. So long as libraries across the country preserve these original speeches, pamphlets, and sermons, the message remains loud and clear: You can run from the truth, but you cannot hide from it.

It is no accident that Confederate symbols have been the mainstay of white supremacist organizations, from the Ku Klux Klan to the skinheads. They did not appropriate the Confederate battle flag simply because it was pretty. They picked it because it was the flag of a nation dedicated to their ideals, i.e., “that the negro is not equal to the white man.” The Confederate flag, we are told, represents heritage, not hate. But why should we celebrate a heritage grounded in hate, a heritage whose self-avowed reason for existence was the exploitation and debasement of a sizeable segment of its population?

As a Southerner, a historian, and a descendant of former slave-owners, I sincerely hope that we use the opportunity of the Sesquicentennial to open a frank and civil dialogue about what happened 150 years ago. Our ancestors were unapologetic about why they wanted to secede; it is up to us to take them at their word and to dispassionately form our own judgments about their actions. It is time for Southerners to squarely face this era in our history so that we can finally understand it for what it was and move on.

 Manchu wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:
The Civil War happened because it was bound to happen whether it was by slavery or not.

This statement makes no sense.

 Frazzled wrote:

 Manchu wrote:

 Asherian Command wrote:
The Civil War happened because it was bound to happen whether it was by slavery or not.

This statement makes no sense.

There is an argument by some historians that eventually the (then) wealthier agrarian south would eventually conflict with the industrializing north no matter what. It doesn't explain why other ag states didn't join (Kentucky, Kansas, Missouri, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, etc).

 Asherian Command wrote:
It is a common thing among historians to say that.

 whembly wrote:
But, don't tell me that the same crowd from Ferguson/Baltimore/NY didn't want to stir things up in Charleston either.

 Peregrine wrote:

 whembly wrote:
But, don't tell me that the same crowd from Ferguson/Baltimore/NY didn't want to stir things up in Charleston either.

They might have wanted to, but they failed. And the reason wasn't Christian forgiveness or national unity or whatever, it was very simple: the only target for protests/rioting/whatever is currently sitting in a jail cell, and is only going to leave that cell for the formality of his trial and conviction. If the police had said "it was probably self defense" and started digging up any possible criminal records or character flaws of the victims to justify it then it's a pretty safe bet things wouldn't be peaceful anymore.

 whembly wrote:
Roof fething wanted to start a Race War... and epically failed.

 Manchu wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Roof fething wanted to start a Race War... and epically failed.

Probably because Roof, like you, does not understand why people in Ferguson and Baltimore were upset.

 whembly wrote:

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:
Christian what ? How did this thread become about Christianity?

Because the Charleston didn't turn into another Ferguson or Baltimore or NY.

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:

 whembly wrote:

 Hybrid Son Of Oxayotl wrote:
Christian what ? How did this thread become about Christianity?

Because the Charleston didn't turn into another Ferguson or Baltimore or NY.

How did you get from “Should or should we not fly the confederate flag on government buildings” to “Did the Charleston turn into another Ferguson or Baltimore or NY” (whatever that means), and then how in turn did we go from this to “See how Christianity is awesome”? Do you really want to turn this thread into debating whether or not Christianity is awesome.

 whembly wrote:
Its the fact that the victims families, at the court hearing, forgave him & expressed mercy on his soul.

 Peregrine wrote:

 whembly wrote:
Its the fact that the victims families, at the court hearing, forgave him & expressed mercy on his soul.

Again, it was a lot easier to forgive him knowing that he will spend the rest of his life in prison and nobody is defending him.

Do you honestly think he would have received the same forgiveness if the police had said "must have been self defense", let him go, and closed the case? Do you honestly think that all those messages of peace and unity would have had the same effect?