True intellectual leadership

[Buck Turgidson]

http://inamerica.blogs.cnn.com/2011/12/05/black-student-defends-his-confederate-flag/?hpt=us_c1

Now I am not a southern man, but everyone understands what the confederate flag has come to symbolise.  I think this is a great example of someone who, through independent thought, challenges the dogma and symbols his community tells him to hate, and neutralises it by breathing new meaning into it.

Here is a man who can think for himself, and can frankly think better for others than the extremist haters who have come to dominate some groups in his community. 

Every group that has an identity is made up of a few leaders, and a mass of intellectually lazy followers who can do nothing more than parrot the words of others - often these followers don't even understand what they are talking about, so they are reduced to a byte or two triggered by symbols or keywords.  Extremist haters use these symbols to feign offence and marshall their unthinking followers the way the Nazis did with gold stars.

And the crazy thing about this is that these parrots often rile people up into knee-jerk censorship.  If you believe in the power of freedom of speech, this is an interesting read indeed.

[Kenneth Kenstar]

I think every southern intellectual goes through a period of looking for reasons to believe that the Confederacy wasn't about slavery.

And fails.

To me, it means more states' rights

to own slaves.

But, whatever. Opinions are like assholes, right?

He seems like a cool guy regardless.

[Buck Turgidson]

Well, the US civil war was certainly not about slavery, and you could easily argue that the south was not simply about slavery.  But I guess the main point here is that the Confederate flag stood for values apart from the right to own other humans.  Southern soldiers fought well and died in droves, and their rallying cry was surely something more lofty than "chain them up, boys!" 

[Mr_Cynic]

No, the Civil War was about slavery.  Abraham Lincoln was elected, was anti-slavery, and so the South seceded.  Didn't have a damn thing to do with states' rights.  At least at the national level.  Why the men who fought did so, that's another story.  Some of the Southerners may have fought to save slavery, some for their state, others for some other reason.

That said, the Confederate flag doesn't mean what most Northerners think it means anymore.  Speaking from the perspective of an urban Northerner who used to assume that anyone with a Confederate flag is a hick, it really is just a symbol of Southern pride to most people.  I learned that after just a week in Tennessee on a spring break training trip for rowing.  There were very nice, very pro-America, non-racist people down there who had Confederate flags out.  When asked why, they said it's their way of showing pride in their Southern culture, and the South definitely has its own culture.

Then again, some people ruin it.  Like the guy I saw whose bumper sticker was a Confederate flag with the words "SEND MORE YANKS THEY'RE TASTY" emblazoned on it.

[Fake from State Jarm]

No, the Civil War was about slavery.

Some of the Southerners may have fought to save slavery, some for their state, others for some other reason.

these two statements directly contradict eachother. the political considerations of the man in charge do not render obsolete the motivations of the people actually dying while following his orders. if a war is about one thing to politicians who start it, and about another thing to the soldiers fighting it, then it is about all those things, not simply about whatever the winner's politicians said it was about.

Lincoln stated explicitly, so as to leave no confusion, that the war was not about slavery in and of itself:

Spoiler for Hiden:

"If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union."

That said, the Confederate flag doesn't mean what most Northerners think it means anymore.  Speaking from the perspective of an urban Northerner who used to assume that anyone with a Confederate flag is a hick, it really is just a symbol of Southern pride to most people.  I learned that after just a week in Tennessee on a spring break training trip for rowing.  There were very nice, very pro-America, non-racist people down there who had Confederate flags out.  When asked why, they said it's their way of showing pride in their Southern culture, and the South definitely has its own culture.

so, you had an erroneous opinion and perhaps a false sense of moral superiority about a large group of people who were geographically distant from you. rewind this 100+ years when they had much less means of travel and sharing information, making it much harder to dispel stereotypes and assumptions in the way that you did yours. You still think it was all about slavery? And that the way southerners feel about southern pride wasn't just as much a factor back then?

the main reason the issue survives is because people prefer to take the easy way out and paint the issue in moral absolutes that favor the winner (well, or the loser if you say slavery was irrelevant). the federal government never has to apologize for forcibly retaining those who do not want to be a part of it, or promise not to do it again, as long as it pushes the public's attention to moral issues which cast the past losers in an unfavorable light. "we weren't fighting to maintain a monopoly on power, we were fighting to free slaves..." (the implication, at least).

there's no dodging the fact that slavery was a central issue, but for it to be the defining issue of the war would require that most southerners who fought, were putting their lives on the line for the right to own slaves; not out of southern pride. If it is true that most of them fought for the latter and not the former reason, then the civil war was like most wars in that it was fought because two groups of people developed profoundly different ethos and culture because their geography and economy led them to develop that way, and they became too divided to tolerate eachother.

anyway, it's not conducive to 'the union' that so many in the north believe what is so easy to believe: that the war was a simple moral issue and the winners were right. that kind of generalization is the strongest evidence that other factors other than simple moral deficiency caused the war. if the north had been full of land suitable to crops like cotton, would they have developed a different economic path and less slave based culture? if they hadn't been feeding off of the success of the southern slave based economy, would they have been powerful enough to fight them? I'm glad slavery was abolished, but let's not pretend that either the north or the south are objective about the moral reasons behind the whole thing. Maybe Lincoln was right to fight to preserve the Union, considering that the divisive issue of slavery and the general cultural division may have made war inevitable even if he had allowed a peaceful secession. But scapegoating the south with oversimplified generalizations about their motives for fighting and dying is only going to lead down the exact same path and undo what he fought for.

tl;dr: the reason for any war is based on why the average participant is fighting it, not just what politicians say, and oversimplifying breeds resentment.

[Mr_Cynic]

Well in my opinion why a war is officially fought and why people fight it are two different things.  Also, I'm not even reading your huge rant because you skipped two words: "USED TO think that..."

[Buck Turgidson]

It's our nature to simplify and personify conflict.  Give me the names of the Nazis who were responsible for WW2 - I bet it's a short list, and it would be wrong either way.

In defence of the North, the South signed the Constitution, which mentions something about being indivisible under God (in an age of intense faith), so they breached a treaty - there's your casus belli.  If the war were about slavery, the declaration of emancipation should have preceded secession - the fact that an anti-slavery president got elected just doesn't prove that the war was about slavery.  The South seceded prematurely.

The declaration of emancipation was timed correctly, during the war, when enough people had been mobilised and killed to foster hate and the will to keep fighting, even though the average Joe in the North didn't care about slavery.  It was timed to do the most damage, once the South was weakened, at the tipping point of the war, and seriously undermined the Southern economy.  They had to keep their sights on the North, as well as the possibility of a slave revolt.

The US civil war was the second war of independence, to ensure that European powers could not divide and rule the Americas, and the secession, in my opinion, happened because the Southern confidence was bolstered by what they perceived as commitment from European powers to support their move.  So the breach of the terms of the constitution had to be enforced, or the Union itself could not continue in any reduced form.

Oh man, I just farted and it is so nasty.

[Fake from State Jarm]

Well in my opinion why a war is officially fought and why people fight it are two different things.  Also, I'm not even reading your huge rant because you skipped two words: "USED TO think that..."

I'll be more succinct. if the elected officials were the ones fighting it, it wouldn't have been a war, it would have been a series of pistol duels. the official reasons for a war are never a good approximation for the real reasons for a war, unless they are well aligned with the motivations of the people doing the fighting.

I didn't skip the fact that your views on southern pride changed. I stated in the first paragraph of my huge rant that you dispelled your assumptions. I also addressed your idea about the official reasons of the war by proving that it was not just about slavery, even to Lincoln.

my central point is that the southern pride you observed would have existed in some form in those days too, and people would have resented then, just as much as now, having assumptions made about them (out of northern pride?), especially when those assumptions seem to influence the policy of a government that is supposed to represent them.

The US civil war was the second war of independence, to ensure that European powers could not divide and rule the Americas, and the secession, in my opinion, happened because the Southern confidence was bolstered by what they perceived as commitment from European powers to support their move.  So the breach of the terms of the constitution had to be enforced, or the Union itself could not continue in any reduced form.

where do you get this? wasn't the south already richer than any european country other than england? There was a perception that the south more resembled the older european society, but the north and south were competing with eachother for the west, so it seems they were more focused on the threat posed by eachother than a threat by an outsider. saying it was the second war for independence is extremely ironic since the rebels lost.

[Pterrydactyl]

There's a reason that politicians start wars and soldiers fight them.

Yes, the root cause of the civil war may have been slavery, but that's not why the soldiers fought.

I promise you, the majority of the southern army wasn't made up of rich slave-owners.  There may have been some, but the majority were men who felt the call to duty.  Their states had seceded from the rest of the US, and now, they were going to be attacked.  Most of them didn't fight to keep slaves or keep black people down, but to defend their nation. 

Yes, they might not have had the moral high-ground, or been in the right, but they fought because of their pride in the southland and to defend themselves and their decision to seceded.  Just like those in the north saw the succession from the US as a hostile act, and fought to reunite the confederacy with them.

We can look back and see the politics of why the war started, and theorize why it was fought, but the truth is that the soldiers of the confederate forces fought for what they believed was right.  Not necessarily for slavery, but because at the time, they thought that was what they needed to do.

[Buck Turgidson]

where do you get this? wasn't the south already richer than any european country other than england? There was a perception that the south more resembled the older european society, but the north and south were competing with eachother for the west, so it seems they were more focused on the threat posed by eachother than a threat by an outsider. saying it was the second war for independence is extremely ironic since the rebels lost.

The west was barely a factor in this - they were not competing for the west, each had more than enough indians to kill and rob. 

The US War of Independence, from the start, was due to European politics, and frankly only the logical outcome of the 7 Years' War only a decade before.  The single most important battle in Western history since the fall of Constantinople was fought on Canadian soil - the Battle of the Plains of Abraham.  This battle put Quebec, and therefore all of North America, into the hands of the English, and effectively kicked France out, as settled in 1760.

The French King responded by supporting, and fomenting the US War of Independence, in order to redress the new balance of power, so a decade later, with heavy French naval and army support, the US won its war in 1776.  Lafayette and his advisors, mostly from the French bourgeoisie returned to France with ideas they picked up in America, and in 1789, the French revolution was underway under the banner of 'liberté, fraternité, égalité' (liberty, brotherhood, equality).  In 1793, Napoleon fired his whiff of grapeshot, and you know what happened after that - it took until 1989 for the world to stop killing itself in millions and accommodate America into the global balance of power.

Both the French and the English favoured the South, because it was an aristocracy, and because they wanted to see the Union fail - in they eyes of monarchist, it was still a rebellion...  But they never acted on their promises to the south as they were both over-extended.  All members of the US were very aware of this, and where the South thought they could profit, the North took matters into its own hands to enforce the terms of the Constitution.

Here are 2 links that talk to these points:
http://www.civilwarhome.com/europeandcivilwar.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britain_in_the_American_Civil_War

Also if you have a chance to read the best book every written on the US Civil war, it is JFC Fuller's 'Generalship of Ulysses S Grant' - makes Lee look a lot smarter, but Grant got the job done.