I don't know about this guy's little logic lessons.
"Solely about slavery" is a straw man. If the war was about slavery -- largely about slavery -- that's enough to make people ill at ease about the Confederacy.
"Racism" is a 20th century concept. Most -- virtually all -- 19th century Americans, when they thought in racial terms, would qualify as racists today.
"Racism" wasn't a major issue dividing North and South. But slavery was. Of course it wasn't the case that everyone on the Union side was anti-slavery and every Confederate pro-slavery. But slavery was at the root of the North-South divide.
So what do we have: "The War Between the States had much to do with slavery, and the Confederacy had a lot to do with slavery as well."
That's logical, so far as I can see. It's historically accurate. Jerry Patterson doesn't say anything that refutes it. It accounts for what people feel about the Confederacy and its symbols.
It's not that the North or the Unionists were "pure" and the South or Confederacy somehow shamed or sullied by slavery, it's that the US was moving beyond slavery and the CSA was rallying around a "Southern Way of Life" based to a large degree on slavery. Some people find it hard to get beyond that, and denying it doesn't help.
If the Confederate flag represented slavery, the U.S. flag must represent slavery even more so.
Slavery existed for four years under the Stars and Bars and for almost 100 years under the Stars and Stripes.
But the US flag has represented what we might call "post-slavery" or "anti-slavery" or "non-slavery" for 140 years and "post-segregation" or "anti-segregation" or "integration" for 40 years. Confederate symbols haven't.
Retroactive cleansing of history is doomed to failure because it is, at heart, a lie.
I don't know if he's right about that, either. Every generation "cleanses" its history to some extent by making it conform to its own ideals. It looks like that's what Jerry's trying to do.
I think Patterson's main point is that the Confederacy was led by some good and noble men who felt they were doing the right thing. The simple 10 second explanation for the Civil War being about slavery is far too simple, as are all other 10 second explanations.
The war was fought and it is over. It does no good to demonize the Confederacy today. Heroic men fought on both sides and it was a tragic period in American history. I think it's okay to honor the dead on both sides. Southerners felt, rightly, that they were getting the short end of the stick with this new union.
I'm glad the South lost because the result was the end of slavery in this country, and slavery is unthinkable as a concept here today. It hastened the end of something which was barbaric but commonplace at the time.
But there is no good reason to deprive Southern families of having respect, not shame, for their ancestors who fought in the Civil War. They felt their cause was just, and they were willing to lay their lives down for it. And it's shameful that some people can't recognize that, or if they do, wilfully ignore it.
The Confederacy is not akin to the evil regime of Nazi Germany. It never had a new philosophy or dogma other than "we don't want to be dominated by you and forced to change our ways."
Right or wrong, we fought the deadliest war in American history over that. And the question ultimately was answered. The Confederacy was defeated which was probably inevitable given the manufacturing capacity of the North.
There's nothing honorable about telling southerners that they can't be proud of the sacrifices of their ancestors.