Thats the problem, some like yourself think the South’s rememberance of its own history is ‘bigotry’.
Its not. Its family history as much as anything else. The common myth found in the North is everybody involved in the war on the Southern side was pro slavery, which simply isn’t true. They think they were all racists, which is only arguable if you apply today’s standards to a society that literally ‘disappeared’ over 150 years ago.
Most Southerners I’ve had the pleasure to meet and call friends remember the ‘fight’, the good fight. Its not called ‘The Last Gentlemen’s War’ for nothing.
You don’t find anyone calling for reinstatement of slavery, for goodness sake, yet some in the North pretend thats what the CSA battle flag, and the “South will Rise Again” means.
Its simply not the case at all. Its a matter of regional pride in their forefathers that had the guts to ‘stare across the deadly space’. Its about a war in which the entire adult population of countless towns throughout the South were literally decimated...and yet they still fought on. Its about valor, and courage, and honor, and honoring those that fell - on both sides btw, in my experience.
Northerners, when this topic comes up, as you inadvertently demonstrate, prefer to look to the worst aspects whenever a CW thread comes up.
We all know what those ‘aspects’ were.
By the third year of the war, those troops, especially those in the Army of Northern Virginia, were not fighting for slavery, far from it. By that point, nobody was thinking much about ‘The Cause’ at all, they were fighting for their brothers - literally, and their neighbors - again literally, because of the unusual nature of the war itself.
Next time you feel the urge to slam those that find the CSA ‘battleflag’ a source of pride, perhaps consider they were fighting, and dying, along with their family and friends.
I don’t respect ‘The Cause’.
I have a very deep and abiding respect for all who ‘stared across the deadly space’. I admire the raw courage it took to walk across that deadly field in Gettysburg on July 3rd, 1863....just as I admire those that held the copse of trees that was the focal point of a charge of 12 - 15 thousand members of an army that had routinely kicked the Army of the Potomac’s ass for the past year. I’m amazed at that courage it took to cross, and recross the cornfield at Sharpsburg/Antietam. Let alone trying to defend, or attack the infamous ‘sunken road’ now referred to as ‘Bloody Lane’.
To insinuate looking at those unbelievable men, on both sides, with awe, and admiration is to admit to not understanding family, in short.
They aren’t ‘celebrating slavery’ with this, nor are they even hinting at it. That only comes from Northerners with a false axe to grind in my opinion.
Think about this next time you want to besmirch the South, friend.
"Even after slavery was outlawed in the North, ships out of New England continued to carry thousands of Africans to the American South. Some 156,000 slaves were brought to the United States in the period 1801-08, almost all of them on ships that sailed from New England ports that had recently outlawed slavery. Rhode Island slavers alone imported an average of 6,400 Africans annually into the U.S. in the years 1805 and 1806. The financial base of New England's antebellum manufacturing boom was money it had made in shipping. And that shipping money was largely acquired directly or indirectly from slavery, whether by importing Africans to the Americas, transporting slave-grown cotton to England, or hauling Pennsylvania wheat and Rhode Island rum to the slave-labor colonies of the Caribbean.
Northerners profited from slavery in many ways, right up to the eve of the Civil War. The decline of slavery in the upper South is well documented, as is the sale of slaves from Virginia and Maryland to the cotton plantations of the Deep South. But someone had to get them there, and the U.S. coastal trade was firmly in Northern hands. William Lloyd Garrison made his first mark as an anti-slavery man by printing attacks on New England merchants who shipped slaves from Baltimore to New Orleans. "
1. Hugh Thomas, “The Slave Trade,” N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1997, p.519.
2. Lorenzo Johnston Greene, “The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776,” N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1942, p.68-69.
3. ibid., p.26.
4. “Brown University committee examines historical ties to slavery,” Associated Press, The Boston Globe, March 5, 2004
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