On Reconsidering the Southern Cause (Flag Thing)

Catholic World Report ^ | July 11, 2015 | James V. Schall, S.J.

[publius911]

"What I see appears to be a vengeful elimination of any memory or dignity in the South, a dignity the peace after the Civil War thought it wise to allow"

[publius911]

Don't be misled by the source, this is a comprehensive treatment of a baffling development in out National Identity, and the role of the ignorant NO information voter. The response comments are as useful as the article. Do expand the longer comments; there is a lot of nonsense there. A lot of useful verifiable history, too.

[Eddie01]

Anacdotal:

I live in Michigan.

Rebel Flag is being flown where I’ve never seen it before.

[x]

But Lord Acton, Chesterton, and many others, early on, saw the American Civil War in other lights. While they did not condone slavery, neither did they think that slavery was the sole or even the most important cause. Recent top-down impositions by the central state make their concerns, in retrospect, look rather prophetic. The principal concern, in the view of many, was the ability to protect a family or city from a statist ideology or culture that would impose its will on every segment of the country.

Of course, they might have thought differently if some part of the UK, their own country, had declared its independence from the monarchy and started shooting.

[miss marmelstein]

Can somebody send this to that a**hole Michael Medved who today, as always, was tripling down on the evils of the south? He’s now claiming that almost everyone in the south owned slaves before and during the Civil War. He brought on some author who was backing him up to the hilt. Between him and Levin, I want to scream!

[miss marmelstein]

I'm going to assume you're being sarcastic in your post although actually Cornwall is currently thinking about declaring independence. Not that I think that's going anywhere.

Of course, England had some sympathy towards the Confederacy considering that a chunk of their economy was directly tied to the south. If it hadn't been for Prince Albert, a vociferous abolitionist, perhaps they would have helped out militarily.

Many British actually like southern history and are great supporters of the battlefields.

[Boogieman]

Yeah, this is Britain we are talking about, that already happened. Long before the 19th century.

[Boogieman]

“The higher law tradition of our civilization has always assumed that state laws themselves are only legitimate when they do not violate natural law. When they do, they are invalid. The question then becomes: “How does one ‘resist’ them when secession is excluded?””

Well, if you can’t change them working within the system, there are only two options left, civil disobedience, or rebellion.

[KGeorge]

This is one of the best articles- sober & clear minded, I’ve ever seen regarding the WBTS. Of course, it was written before the re—education really got underway, or at least in the cusp. Thank you so much!

[publius911]

Rebel Flag is being flown where I’ve never seen it before.

Same here; And in my case it has nothing to do with North Versus South or the wisdom of the totally ignorant. More so on account of little gems like this one:

"Some state legislatures and governors are seeking for a way to resist this imposition. Other approaches include a conscious withdrawal from participation in the state that now controls almost the whole public order and most of its institutions. Churches are now facing the distinct possibility that the price of their public presence is conformity to the state’s laws and what they demand."

[southland]

What killed more black children planed parenthood or the rebel flag??

[colorado tanker]

This article takes the usual path of argument but in my opinion that path is misguided. We don't have to re-fight the Civil War or come up with contortionist theories that it wasn't about slavery. Of course it was. The abolitionist cause was moribund until the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott case. The spectacle of Southern slave catchers invading Northern states to grab slaves with the assistance of Federal authorities riled up the North, set the abolitionist movement on fire and directly led to the establishment of the Republican Party.

In my opinion, this is what we should be talking about:

How did we get from this to where we are now? The men who fought the war and saw their friends and comrades die in droves forgave each other and reconciled as Americans. But today people are bent on vengeance and denying any honor to those who fought for the South.

I think it's because much of America, like most of Europe, is now in a post-Christian era. Concepts of forgiveness, reconciliation and love of fellow man are foreign to many if not most Americans today. That's why the nation was shocked when the relatives of the Charleston victims readily forgave the murderer. In my lifetime we went from the Solid Democrat South to a mostly Republican South. The Democrats are out for their vengeance.

BTW, Lord Acton really didn't understand people who had strong feelings about slavery. A quote:

Democracy inevitably takes the tone of the lower portions of society, and, if there are great diversities, degrades the higher. Slavery is the only protection that has ever been known against this tendency, and it is so far true that slavery is essential to democracy…. This is a good argument too, in the interest of all parties, against the emancipation of the blacks.

[DoodleDawg]

...when the other side of the Southern Cause, its concern about unlimited central power able and willing to impose its ideology on everyone...

What ideology was the unlimited central power trying to impose on the South?

[jeffersondem]

“What ideology was the unlimited central power trying to impose on the South?”

Love and respect for the union . . . by bayonet.

And effective dominance of the nation’s economic and political system by the industrial states for at least 100 years. In other words, money.

[iowamark]

You could post the entire essay. Catholic World Report not on complaint list.

[maddog55]

Prior to the deranged white guy shooting 9 black people there wasn’t a problem with the Confederate Flag for the vast majority of folks and then BAM.. some nut shoots 9 people and he was seen in a picture holding a Confederate Flag so all hell breaks loose and the flag gets banned.

Seems odd don’t you think.. an idiot shoots 9 people and somehow a flag gets shamed and banned and guns are evil.

Seems to me the dick that did the shooting should drawn and quartered in public. I’d set up a beer & BBQ stand and celebrate the occasion and this could all be over in 1 - 2 days not like the 3 years for James Holmes the Colorado shooter. That should have taken 1 - 2 days MAX

To bad Dylann Roof wasn’t holding an LGBT Rainbow Flag.

America.. swinging he pendulum to fast and hard to correct problems that don’t exists.

[DoodleDawg]

Love and respect for the union . . . by bayonet.

Well that's ridiculous because the article this thread is linked to gave that as a reason for secession in the first place. You're talking about the Confederacy losing its war.

[rockrr]

He’s now claiming that almost everyone in the south owned slaves before and during the Civil War.

Well, not quite. He said that his "research" led him to believe that the number was "about 30% of southern families had at least one slave". I wanted to call in and ask him where he came up with that number.

[x]

I suspect by dividing the number of free households by the number of slave owners.

Whether he's right or not depends on how you define "the South."

If you're talking about the Deep South which drove the secession movement, those numbers are basically right -- on the low side in some cases.

If you include the Upper South and/or the Border States, they're too high.

[miss marmelstein]

The fact is, for some weirdo reason, he’s on a jihad against the Confederacy. I thought the Confederacy had been taken care of by 1865. I believe he got the factoid from the author he was interviewing.

[nathanbedford]

It is impossible to understand the American Revolution without taking into account the impact of Tom Paine's Common Sense. Equally, it is impossible to understand the impulses which animated the North in the American Civil War without taking into account, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Rarely does our nation experience national convulsions over an act of Congress or a Supreme Court decision. I think Lincoln expressed it best when he said when greeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, "so you are the little lady that wrote the book that started this great war."

When one asks what were the ideological aims of the North in waging the war or in imposing reconstruction one has to ask, which Yankees, when? At the beginning Lincoln proclaimed the war aims to be the restoration of the union and explicitly wrote to Horace Greeley to the affect that he would preserve the union by abolishing slavery or by not abolishing slavery as expedient. Later when it was politically expedient both domestically and internationally Lincoln converted the war effort into one for the abolition of slavery by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. The race riots in New York and elsewhere made it quite clear that there was a huge part of the northern population unwilling to die to abolish slavery.

Likewise, reconstruction varied depending on the players and depending on the time in question. Certainly, the ideological aims of the radical Republicans of the House and Senate were quite different from the ideological aims of Pres. Johnson whom they impeached largely because he failed to impose their vision on the South. That vision included not just emancipation of African Americans but their enfranchisement-in the South but evidently not so much in the North.

As is recounted in my about page, the efforts to impose ideological aims on the South lapsed over time so that by 1876 radical Republican forces of occupation were withdrawn from the last two rebellious states and reconstruction was over giving way to a century of Jim Crow (to a very degree in the North as well as in the South). The ideological aims of the Republicans in ending reconstruction were apparently to put a Republican in the White House and at the cost of disenfranchising Negroes in southern districts. During occupation many of the ideological aims of the radical Republicans were secondary to ambition or greed.

Raising all these issues in the modern context of the southern battle flag may or may not be relevant. My objection to the national spasm we are currently experiencing has to do with a deliberate, even malicious, departure from historical reality and the elevation of victimhood and relativism with its evil twin subjectivism to legitimacy. Historic reality should not be dependent on ever shifting goalposts ceaselessly repositioned by professional victims. My rights do not depend on your feelings.