Americans Owe Confederate History Respect

The Time Has Come To Take A Stand After attending the Confederate Memorial Day service on June 1 in Higginsville, I found myself believing our nation should be ashamed for not giving more respect and recognition to our ancestors.

I understand that some find the Confederate flag offensive because they feel it represents slavery and oppression. Well, here are the facts: The Confederate flag flew over the South from 1861 to 1865. That's a total of four years. The U.S. Constitution was ratified in April 1789, and that document protected and condoned the institution of slavery from 1789 to 1861. In other words, if we denigrate the Confederate flag for representing slavery for four years, shouldn't we also vilify the U.S. flag for representing slavery for 72 years? Unless we're hypocrites, it is clear that one flag is no less pure than the other.

A fascinating aspect of studying the Civil War is researching the issues that led to the confrontation. The more you read, the less black-and-white the issues become. President Abraham Lincoln said he would do anything to save the union, even if that meant preserving the institution of slavery. Lincoln's focus was obviously on the union, not slavery.

In another case, historians William McFeely and Gene Smith write that Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant threatened to "throw down his sword" if he thought he was fighting to end slavery.

Closer to home, in 1864, Col. William Switzler, one of the most respected Union men in Boone County, purchased a slave named Dick for $126. What makes this transaction interesting is not only the fact that Switzler was a Union man but that he bought the slave one year after the issuance of the Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. Of course, history students know the proclamation did not include slaves living in the North or in border states such as Missouri.

So if this war was fought strictly over slavery, why were so many Unionists reluctant to act like that was the issue?

In reviewing the motives that led to the Civil War, one should read the letters soldiers wrote home to their loved ones. Historian John Perry, who studied the soldier's correspondence, says in his three years of research, he failed to find one letter that referred to slavery from Confederate or Union soldiers.

Perry says that Yankees tended to write about preserving the Union and Confederates wrote about protecting their rights from a too-powerful federal government. The numerous letters failed to specifically say soldiers were fighting either to destroy or protect the institution of slavery. Shelby Foote, in his three-volume Civil War history, recounts an incident in which a Union soldier asks a Confederate prisoner captured in Tennessee why he was fighting. The rebel responded, "Because you're down here."

History tends to overlook the South's efforts to resolve the issue of slavery. For example, in 1863, because of a shortage of manpower, Lincoln permitted the enlistment of black soldiers into the Union Army. Battlefield documents bear out the fact that these units were composed of some of the finest fighting men in the war. Unfortunately for these brave soldiers, the Union used them as cannon fodder, preferring to sacrifice black lives instead of whites.

These courageous black Union soldiers experienced a Pyrrhic victory for their right to engage in combat. However, history has little to say about the South's same effort in 1865. The Confederacy, its own troop strength depleted, offered slaves freedom if they volunteered for the army.

We know that between 75,000 and 100,000 blacks responded to this call, causing Frederick Douglass to bemoan the fact that blacks were joining the Confederacy. But the assimilation of black slaves into the Confederate army was short-lived as the war came to an end before the government's policy could be fully implemented.

It's tragic that Missouri does not do more to recognize the bravery of the men who fought in the Missouri Confederate brigades who fought valiantly in every battle they were engaged in. To many Confederate generals, the Missouri brigades were considered the best fighting units in the South.

The courage these boys from Missouri demonstrated at Port Gibson and Champion Hill, Miss., Franklin, Tenn., and Fort Blakely, Ala., represent just a few of the incredible sacrifices they withstood on the battlefield. Missouri should celebrate their struggles instead of damning them.

For the real story about the Missouri Confederate brigades, one should read Phil Gottschalk and Philip Tucker's excellent books about these units. The amount of blood spilled by these Missouri boys on the field of battle will make you cry.

Our Confederate ancestors deserve better from this nation. They fought for what they believed in and lost. Most important, we should remember that when they surrendered, they gave up the fight completely. Defeated Confederate soldiers did not resort to guerrilla warfare or form renegade bands that refused to surrender. These men simply laid down their arms, went home and lived peacefully under the U.S. flag. When these ex-Confederates died, they died Americans.

During the postwar period, ex-Confederates overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party. This party, led in Missouri by Rep. Dick Gephardt and Gov. Bob Holden, has chosen to turn its back on its fallen sons.

The act of pulling down Confederate flags at two obscure Confederate cemeteries for the sake of promoting Gephardt's hopeless quest for the presidency was a cowardly decision. I pray these men will rethink their decision.

The reality is, when it comes to slavery, the Confederate and United States flags drip with an equal amount of blood.

Chris Edwards is a local musician and MU graduate student of history. He is a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and of the board of Missouri's Civil War Heritage Foundation.

I don't know about you but I would rather have been one of Thomas Jefferson's slaves than have been a coal miner.

Well, that's your right. A coal miner can quit, leave and go do something else. A slave can't. A coal miner's kid can go do anything with his life. A slave's kid is a slave, too. But, hey, to each his own.

I mean, you might be happy serving Jefferson, but maybe tomorrow he'd sell you to pay for some frippery at Monticello that distracts him for a week or two, and you end up stuck in a malarial swamp for a few years until you die of disease or out in the field working from sunup to sundown. Unless, of course, you didn't work hard enough, in which some sadistic bastard will open your back for you. Your spouse and children would either stay with Jefferson (if he still owns them) or they'll be sold someplace else. Maybe your beautiful young daughter will be given to one of the master's house guests to rape as his plaything. Would you ever see them again? Who cares. You don't count. You're livestock. But let's say you're smart, and you claim your inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness (you could have sworn that you heard that expression from someone, but from whom???) You run away. You're soon chased by dogs and worse and even if you do escape, maybe North, you have worry every single day of your life. See, the slave owners have rigged the system so that they get credited with federal representation for 3 out of every 5 of you there are, as an insult to your bondage. They have ensured that at any moment agents of the state may legally kidnap you and spirit you away back into slavery. Oh, and if you are a woman, and you have a child in, say, Vermont, years after you ran away, that child is a slave too and is kidnapped along with you. Neat, huh? When you return, will you be branded? hobbled? killed outright? Who knows. Who cares, really. You're not a person. You're just a slave. Property. A thing.

But if you'd rather be a slave, that's your business.

You stated the following in response to my suggestion that those, who suggest that the Southerners were guilty of Treason in leaving the Union, are comparable to the Nazis:

I disagree here. The Nazi reference is interesting in that they eliminated the traditional role of the Länder and made the state a unified state. The Bundesrepublik after the war revered the Länder to a federated state. I would not say that the Federal Gov't in the US, even at its strongest, ever eliminated the existence of the state governments.

The Reconstruction Congress did everything possible to reduce the State Governments in the South to puppets for an over-riding totalitarian vision of what American Societies should conform to. It is very much analogous to the Hitlerian concept of one Germany, with one Will (his). The America of the Founding Fathers was something very different. South Carolina and Massachusetts could both adhere, because it was premised on an understanding of what values were common and what were not.

We were not, by reason thereof, a House Divided Against itself, because we understood that we were not a single House but a friendly neighborhood; one which allowed each Household to manage their own affairs in all the vast areas, where our values were not common. The South seceded, because for the first time, a Government was elected with only the perceived values of some of the people in one Section. That was a situation that George Washington, the one American who clearly defined the common values, specifically warned against.

William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
[Where the resources include not only several essays directly relevant to these questions, as they pertain to the present era, but also addresses by such luminaries of the earlier era as Webster and Calhoun, to help put these issues in a truer perspective.]

A coal miner can quit, leave and go do something else. A slave can't. A coal miner's kid can go do anything with his life. A slave's kid is a slave, too. But, hey, to each his own.

At the present time, both a coal miner's kid and the descendant of one brought here to be a slave, both have the rights to quit a job, etc.. But it was not always thus. And this illustrates the absurdity of those who want to treat the existence of Slavery in the Old South as some sort of outlandish crime against civilization.

Prior to the reign of George III--the one the Founding Fathers repudiated--both coal miners and salt miners in the North of England were deemed the property of the mines in which they labored. Their daughters, on the other hand, could gain a monetary stipend by bearing future coal miners. While it may not have been called slavery, it was the same thing.

The fact is, that virtually every race and sub-race on the planet, has at some time used some form of forced labor, or bondage system. It is one of the most frequently recurring social patterns in the human experience. You and I may feel it is a mistaken system; but neither you, nor I, have been anointed by God to define its morality. That does not, of course, mean that we cannot rationally argue against its reimposition in other, perfectly valid terms.

William Flax

If states suceeded every time they didn't get their way in national elections, we wouldn't have a country left.

The issue in 1860 was not about getting their way. There was a large bloc in the new party, which openly assailed the South and its people; which wanted to repudiate the bases of the original Federation.

Let us reverse issues and times. For, an example, what if Hillary Clinton were to actually be elected President in 2008, with a overwhelmingly, Secular Humanist Congress, and she were to avow an intention to change the religious orientation of rural and small town America, in the interests of diversity; and to punish for perpetrating "Hate Crimes," any prelate or minister, who dared suggest that there was such a thing as a True Religion; vowing to show the same contempt for what the First Amendment actually says--as opposed to the ACLU nonsense--as those who were later known as the "Reconstructionists" vowed to show to Article IV, Section 2.

Since the suppression of religion cuts across State lines, the reaction would more likely be revolution than succession. But the outrage, that might bring it about, is clear.

William Flax

Come on, "everything"? I forget reading about the mass slaughter of former reb politicians and soldiers, and the concentration camps where all the little reb children were put to death... An "over-riding totalitarian vision"?? The South had to suck it up for a dozen years or so, and then they were left alone to oppress their blacks for another 80 years. Big deal. How this is over-riding totalitarianism is beyond me.

The America of the Founding Fathers was something very different. South Carolina and Massachusetts could both adhere, because it was premised on an understanding of what values were common and what were not.

There were differences between the states, for sure. However, that does not mean that the Constitution created a neighborhood or a social club or a contract or anything else. It created a state. By ratifying the Constitution, the states granted the Federal Government powers only inherent in fully sovereign states, such as the power to declare war, carry on foreign relations, etc. Since, for example, Virginia did not have the powers of a fully sovereign state, it was not a fully sovereign state. But the document did provide a way for the states to change the manner in which sovereign power was distributed - that of the amendment process. Had the southern states been able to pass an amendment to the Constitution reverting to themselves their full sovereign powers they gave up upon ratification of the Constitution, then they would have been free to go. They did not, however, have the right to declare themselves in a state of rebellion and expect it to be respected by the other states or the Federal Government.

Changing the context doesn't really help. Regardless of how many motives the South had to succeed, slavery was central, and the Confederacy should therefore not have been allowed to exist.

You have a very strange perspective on history, to which I have already responded in another reply, to another poster. Slavery is not the defining issue in the determination of human morality. Slavery, for example, was tolerated and accepted in both the Old and New Testaments of the Western Bible. It has existed in one form or another in virtually every non-Biblical religion, as well.

I believe that it is a mistaken system--unfair to both slave and master, for a variety of reasons. But you cannot revise the whole human experience, the way many hereabouts have tried to do, in order to make an angry statement.

And so far as relations between the races? There was then, and still is now, more goodwill between Caucasian and Negro inhabitants in the South than in the North. The reason why the Old South was considered the last true Civilization was because it accorded everyone respect, from the greatest plantation owner to the lowliest field hand. There is no equivalent respect between different classes and conditions in America today.

No, the system was not a good one. But it was not the consummation of evil, either. Read what Booker T. Washington, who rose from it had to say, a generation later: Booker T. Washington.

William Flax

No, it merely shows that there is the potential to reform even the most vile social systems so that the individual's God-given rights are respected by the state. Slavery in the United States was an outlandish crime against civilization, humanity, and the "inalienable rights" supposedly valued by Jefferson.

And it was equally as vile, and equally worthy of elimination by all means at the disposal of those fighting against that injustice.

This, again, does not mitigate against the evil inherent in slavery, whether it occurred in pre-Columbian Patagonia, Sub-Saharan Africa or the Antebellum South. Simply because everyone commits murder does not make murder moral. It merely means there are many immoral people.

You and I may feel it is a mistaken system; but neither you, nor I, have been anointed by God to define its morality.

I disagree. By virtue of the fact that we were endowed by God with intellect, reason and a sense of morality, I believe that we are not only permitted or anointed by God to define the morality of evil systems such as the slave system in the Old South, but are commanded by God to recognize and denounce the immorality inherent in them.

That does not, of course, mean that we cannot rationally argue against its reimposition in other, perfectly valid terms.

If anyone considers himself a conservative and believes in the rights of individuals and if the subject of reimposition of slavery is raised, I would expect him to do more than simply argue against it rationally.

I'm sure black inhabitants of the South throughout its history would disagree. I don't know what notion of respect you refer to, but I do not find much respect in slavery or Jim Crow laws, which were predicated on the notion that blacks were mentally, morally, and socially inferior. Sure, slavery existed thoughout human history, but history turned against it, and the fact that most people, at least in our country, today find it morally repugnant is a good thing. Now, I have no intention of lambasting the South, it is part of our country, and the North was complicit in slavery as well, but sugar-coating oppressive race-relations and a slave-ownership society is contrary to the values of our great nation and the self-evident truths upon which it was founded.

The Constitution did not create a State, nor did it ever claim to create a State. You are reading into it words that were never there.

A "state" is simply a body politic. A republic is a body politic, and the Constitution established the Federal Republic. Remember Ben Franklin: "What have you created?" "A republic, if you can keep it"?

On the other hand, it most definitely created a compact--which is the equivalent, in the relations between States, of a contract between individuals.

No, it did not. It, by its terms, is a law; in fact, the supreme law of the land. It binds everyone under its jurisdiction, regardless of whether they agree with the law or not. A contract requires the agreement of the parties to the contract to be enforceable.

Further, it cannot be a compact between the states, because it does not derive its power from the states, but from the people. It explicitly states that it was ordained and established by "the people of the United States," not the states. It required the states' participation for ratification, etc., because it incorporated the continued existence of the states. But it was an exercise of the authority of the people.

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