Your forebears fought to preserve slavery. God Almighty I’m so bloody sick of you Confederates. You started a war and lost. Get over it. Are you an American or a Confederate?
“Your forebears fought to preserve slavery.”
You don’t know jack about my forebears, or why some of them fought for the Confederacy.
My family shed blood on both sides of that conflict, jerkwad.
And for your information, I fly Old Glory outside my house 24/7/365.
FOAD.
You couldn’t possibly be as bloody sick of us as we are of you.
My forebears did not fight to preserve slavery, and most Confederate soldiers did not fight for that. Thousands of their letters prove it. Even McPherson, who is certainly not Confederate friendly, admits that.
A few states seceded in part over slavery — among other things. The states of the upper South seceded because Lincoln tried to coerce them into sending troops to invade the seceded states. See, it’s not as cut and dried as the all-slavery, only-slavery folks like to make it seem.
Moreover, it is open to question that the Confederates started the war. People say “firing the first shot” (at Sumter) started the war, but the firing was in response to aggression (Anderson moving troops into Sumter and threatening Charleston in dispatches sent north, that he knew authorities in Charleston would intercept and read). That aggression, that move to the fort, which preceded the firing and caused it, is what started the war. Without it, there would have been no start.
Am I an American or a Confederate? Yes. There is no “OR”. They’re not mutually exclusive. Confederates were Americans, for the same reason we are ... it is part of our national name, just as it was theirs. See? Fill in the blank: The Confederate States of _______. I’ll give you a hint: it starts with A and it ends with a, and it ain’t Antarctica.
What I am is a Southerner. That is my primary identification — it has been since before I could articulate it — and the South, including its time as a separate nation, the CSA, is what gives meaning to the United States, for me. So in that sense, yes, I’m a Confederate.