Confederate flag should be left in the past

Apparently folks were upset with Mike Thomas' article about Dixie and Racism

Well they let him know about it. This is his scalawag response. I lost all respect for Thomas.

Well he certainly knows how to please Kwaisi Mfume and Julian Bond.

Follow the link to view the entire article. Thomas is losing it.

FRmail to get on/off Dixie list

well said!

those who are not WITH us in the fight to preserve our ancestors are AGAINST us. the is no place for compromise here.

for dixie,sw

This boy is a lost cause.

To the victors go the spoils, and that includes (apparently and unfortunately) the right to rewrite history. Let's face it, the damnYankees won, and they've rewritten history. According to their version, the "Civil War" was about slavery. Although I'm an Iowan, born and raised, I've said it many times: If it wasn't so misunderstood, I'd fly the Confederate Battle Flag with pride, as a symbol of State's Rights and the limited Federal government this great nation was intended to have. The Constitution was a casualty of the War Between The States.

According to their version, the "Civil War" was about slavery.

Um, can you show me documentary evidence, words of actual rebel leaders, that indicate it was not (and no, I won't accept oblique phrases like "fighting to preserve our traditions" or whatever).

I want to see SPECIFIC statements that show why the rebel leaders thought they were fighting, that is different from the official, published Secession declarations by viz. South Carolina and Texas, et al.

Otherwise, you're just talking through your hat.

I am a Confederate supporter, all the way, and there is not a drop of racism in me.

I could tell that from the "yellow-bellied, freedom-hating Yankee" remark.

...a symbol of State's Rights and the limited Federal government this great nation was intended to have...

And yet in Jefferson Davis you had a president who believed in neither. Had the south won their rebellion then who knows what sort of path the confederate government would have taken?

Dear Mike Thomas:
Unless a flag is something you respect and cherish, you are not entitled to respect for your opinion.

Best regards.
you are entitled to run off at the mouth all you want.

yellow-bellied, freedom-hating Yankee

If you believe that statement is "racist" you have chosen your name well...

OK, how about bigoted?

You are a yellow-bellied, freedom-hating Yankee. I am a Confederate supporter, all the way, and there is not a drop of racism in me.

LOL - an oxymoron if ever there was one. What a maroon.

According to their version, the "Civil War" was about slavery.

It wasn't about slavery? Jeff Davis and the boys sure thought it was.

It wasn't about slavery? Jeff Davis and the boys sure thought it was.

Well what did they know?

"Edmund Ruffin was writing to Yancey, saying that it would be a "clear & unmistakable indication of future and fixed domination of the Northern section & its abolition policy over the southern states & their institutions, & the beginning of a sure and speedy progress to the extermination of negro slavery & the consequent utter ruin of the prosperity of the South." The only possible answer to this, he wrote, must be secession. In his diary, Ruffin wrote that his sons hoped that Lincoln would be defeated but that he did not. "I most earnestly & anxiously desire Lincoln to be elected -- because I have hope that at least one state, S.C. wil secede & that others will follow -- & even if otherwise, I wish the question tested & settlted now. If there is a general submission now, there never will be future maintenance of our rights -- & the end of negro slavery may be considered as settled. I can think of little else than this momentous crisis of our institutions and our fate. Few men were as realistic or as outspoken as Edmund Ruffin. There were even times when it seemed as if the pro-slavery and anti-slavery parties were repeating the same ugly words. Yancey himself got into New York, in the middle of this campaign, and he made a light-hearted taunting speech which was strangely like the thoughts which that Cincinnati campaign newspaper, the Railsplitter, had given to the north a few weeks earlier.

Slavery, said Yancey, was an institution necessary to the south and to the north as well; and furthermore, it was nothing any northerner need worry about. "It is an institution, too, that doesn't harm you, for we don't let our niggers run about to injure anybody; we keep them; they never steal from you; they don't trouble you with that peculiar stench which is very good in the nose of the Southern man but intolerable in the nose of a Northerner." Yet the north might elect Lincoln, who would "build up an abolitionist party in every southern state," and Yancey warned that this would not be borne: "Wirh the election of a black Republican, all the south would be menaced. Emissaries will percolate between master and slave as water between the crevices of the rocks underground....The keystone of the arch of the Union is already crumbling. A more weighty question was never before you. One freighted with the fate of societies and of nationalities is on your mind."

--"The Coming Fury" p. 98-99 by Bruce Catton

What did the seceding states say publicly was the reason for their secession?

"Declaration Of The Immediate Causes Which Induce And Justify The Secession Of South Carolina From The Federal Union"

(Original may be found HERE:

We maintain that in every compact between two or more parties, the obligation is mutual; that the failure of one of the contracting parties to perform a material part of the agreement, entirely releases the obligation of the other; and that where no arbiter is provided, each party is remitted to his own judgment to determine the fact of failure, with all its consequences.
In the present case, that fact is established with certainty. We assert that fourteen of the States have deliberately refused, for years past, to fulfill their constitutional obligations, and we refer to their own Statutes for the proof.
The Constitution of the United States, in its fourth Article, provides as follows:
"No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up, on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due."
This stipulation was so material to the compact, that without it that compact would not have been made. The greater number of the contracting parties held slaves, and they had previously evinced their estimate of the value of such a stipulation by making it a condition in the Ordinance for the government of the territory ceded by Virginia, which now composes the States north of the Ohio River.
The same article of the Constitution stipulates also for rendition by the several States of fugitives from justice from the other States.
The General Government, as the common agent, passed laws to carry into effect these stipulations of the States. For many years these laws were executed. But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her [New Jersey] more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her [New York's] tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation.
* * *
The ends for which this Constitution was framed are declared by itself to be "to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity."
These ends it endeavored to accomplish by a Federal Government, in which each State was recognized as an equal, and had separate control over its own institutions. The right of property in slaves was recognized by giving to free persons distinct political rights, by giving them the right to represent, and burthening them with direct taxes for three-fifths of their slaves; by authorizing the importation of slaves for twenty years; and by stipulating for the rendition of fugitives from labor.
We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assumed the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
* * *
The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.
Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanctions of a more erroneous religious belief.
We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do.
Virginia
...the federal government having perverted said powers, not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of Southern slaveholding states;
Now, therefore, we, the people of Virginia, do declare and ordain, that the ordinance adopted by the people of this state in convention, on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, whereby the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified, and all acts of the General Assembly of this state ratifying or adopting amendments to said Constitution, are hereby repealed and abrogated; that the union between the State of Virginia and the other states under the Constitution aforesaid is hereby dissolved,...
Georgia
The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property, and by the use of their power in the Federal Government have striven to deprive us of an equal enjoyment of the common Territories of the Republic. This hostile policy of our confederates has been pursued with every circumstance of aggravation which could arouse the passions and excite the hatred of our people, and has placed the two sections of the Union for many years past in the condition of virtual civil war....
[N.B. See the list of "Declaration Of Cause Of Secession" for several states HERE, and note that IN EVERY INSTANCE the ONLY topic addressed is SLAVERY. TARIFFS ARE NOT MENTIONED. "States' Rights" are not mentioned except as in relation to the right of the Slave states to continue the institution].
Alabama
....And as it is the desire and purpose of the people of Alabama to meet the slaveholding States of the South, who may approve such purpose, in order to frame a provisional as well as permanent Government upon the principles of the Constitution of the United States,
Be it resolved by the people of Alabama in Convention assembled, That the people of the States of Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri, be and are hereby invited to meet the people of the State of Alabama, by their Delegates, in Convention, on the 4th day of February, A.D., 1861, at the city of Montgomery, in the State of Alabama, for the purpose of consulting with each other as to the most effectual mode of securing concerted and harmonious action in whatever measures may be deemed most desirable for our common peace and security.
Texas
WHEREAS, The recent developments in Federal affairs make it evident that the power of the Federal Government is sought to be made a weapon with which to strike down the interests and property of the people of Texas, and her sister slave-holding States, instead of permitting it to be, as was intended, our shield against outrage and aggression;...

It is important to expose the so-called CSA for the monstrosity it was.

Walt

Could you please provide declarations of secession for the other seceding states? Let me go ahead and provide North Carolina's to get you started

We, the people of the State of North Carolina, in Convention assembled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, That the ordinance adopted by the State of North Carolina in the Convention of 1789, whereby the Constitution of the United States was ratified and adopted, and also, all acts and parts of acts of the General Assembly, ratifying and adopting amendments to the said Constitution, are hereby repealed, rescinded and abrogated.

We do further declare and ordain, That the union now subsisting between the State of North Carolina and the other States under the title of the United States of America, is hereby dissolved, and that the State of North Carolina is in the full possession and exercise of all those rights of sovereignty which belong and appertain to a free and independent State.
Read three times and passed, 20th day of May, 1861.

That's the declaration Walt. And you know? Believe it or not there are 5 other states that you haven't provided a declaration for. Whatever was the reason? Perhaps it was lincoln's total lack of regard for the Constitution. Why don't you go ask Asa what he thinks. It's Friday and I'm up for a laugh

What you quoted from was the North Carolina Ordinance of Secession, billbears. All southern states issued those but four took the step of issuing a Declaration of the Causes of Secession. That is what Walt is quoting from. I'm surprised you didn't know that.

It's Friday and I'm up for a laugh

Laugh at what Yancey said.

The stench now comes from people like you.

Walt

I realize that. My point being is that 7 states seceded from the union without declarations, only ordinances in establishing their respective governments. Walt's constant posting of these 4 declarations does no more to prove the war was over slavery than cherrypicked quotes from Davis does. All it shows is that 4 of the 11 states felt it important to declare reasons, nothing more