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I am not a Confederacy hater. I believe the Confederacy had many noble aspects however I also am not an Confederacy apologist.

:-) I don’t consider you a Confederacy “hater.” I just disagree with you as to the relative importance slavery had — or could maintain — had the Confederacy survived beyond the War. Economically, the institution itself was destined to fail. If nothing else, the agricultural South was “market-driven,” and keeping slaves was becoming an ever more expensive proposition.

We’ll never know how that scenario would have played out, but I would have been willing to bet that the transition, while it would have been slower, would have been far more peaceful and cost far less than 600,000 military (and hundreds of thousand more mostly Southern - black and white) lives.

I, too, view many of the aspects of the Confederacy as noble. That does not mean I believe it to have been perfect. I do not dismiss slavery as an amoral fact of life in that era. I (like both Lee and Jackson) recognize chattel Slavery as evil, I thus would consider myself a “realist” about the Confederacy.

Conservatives must STOP ignoring the positive principles set forth by the Confederacy as though they were ALL somehow tied to the practice of slavery. That is just not true, and doing so has only served to take us further away from our Constitution and the vision of our Founders for many long decades.

Conservatives must STOP ignoring the positive principles set forth by the Confederacy as though they were ALL somehow tied to the practice of slavery.

The slavery issue as applied by the Marxist adherents of Clinton-ism and Obama-ism is a straw man, a bloody shirt wherewith to rally the black faithful, who don't yet realize how they're being used. Thomas Sowell, Alan Keyes, Ward Conerly, and others have been trying to warn black voters about people like Farrakhan and the old civil-rights leadership who just cry "cracker, cracker, cracker" at election-time, just the way the Klan used to do in the South; but so far, less-educated black voters haven't reached the sophistication shown by Sowell and the rest, although upscale black voters are beginning to: Hence the drive for DREAM Act, and the importation of fresh masses of the ignorant and tractable.

Most of the modern arguments about slavery don't rise above the level of a smear on Southern conservatives, and it is a mistake to engage them as anything other than that. They are not conscientious objections from principle or practical concern.