Response to Stogie at Saberpoint on Southern Heritage and the Confederate Flag

My old friend Stogie disagreed, at the comments, with my earlier post, "Response to Stogie at Saberpoint on Southern Heritage and the Confederate Flag."

Click that link to read my response there, but Stogie's posted a full entry on the debate at his blog, "Note to Confederate Descendants: Don't Back Down on the Confederate Flag #Charleston #Confederate."

Here's the comment I left a little while ago:

Stogie, I've always respected your opinion on this, and I've learned a lot from you.

Honestly, though, I find your take on the Civil War and Southern heritage rather bizarre. Of course, I'm not from the South, so it's not a visceral issue for me. My dad, however, was born in Missouri, a slave state. His grandparents were slaves. How am I supposed be sympathetic to the "heritage" argument when that heritage includes proud support for chattel slavery? I'm sorry you get hatred in your heart when others simply don't agree with the heritage argument. I think the culture is to the point, on the left and right, that it's simply no longer acceptable to revere the heritage and discount the racist slave roots of the Confederacy.

See Jonathan Tobin, "A Flag and the Fatal Intersection of Heritage and Hate":

"For those who plan to respond, as they always do, to discussions about this topic with emails regurgitating neo-Confederate talking points about the Civil War being a conflict about state’s rights rather than slavery, let me state up front that I’m not buying it and neither is any other serious student of history. The Civil War did hinge in part on constitutional questions but the notion that slavery was incidental to the outbreak of the conflict is simply absurd. Without slavery, there would have been no war. The south seceded because it feared limits on the expansion of slavery would eventually doom the institution. To protect a heritage built on the uncompensated labor of slaves and their vast investment in human “property,” the states that formed the Confederacy waged a bloody war that costs hundreds of thousands of American lives and left the south in ruins. It would take a century for the region to recover completely."

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/06/19/confederate-flag/?...

I'm going to leave it at that.

One of the things most interesting to me about this whole debate is how uninvested I am with it. I can live with those who want to understand the Civil War as a "War Between the States," since I believe that's how their ancestors saw it. And it doesn't matter to me if these same folks reject the idea that at base the Civil War was indeed about the issue of slavery. That matter's been settled, on the battlefield, in the Constitution, and in the history books. Frankly, Southern revisionist looks like crackpots sometimes. I think now with this flap over South Carolina Republicans will unequivocally reject any lingering sympathy with the Southern heritage argument. Watch, the South Carolina state legislature is going to come under relentless pressure to repeal the authorizing legislation on hoisting the state flag on statehouse grounds. It's become a divisive side issue for the GOP presidential field --- unfairly, I'd add. But politics ain't beanbag.

Pres Lincoln - REPUBLICAN John Wilkes Booth - DEMOCRAT Raising of flag in SC -DEMOCRAT REMOVAL OF FLAG - REPUBICAN pic.twitter.com/S6kCje5eWj

— Color Me Red (@ColorMeRed) June 22, 2015

In any case, I'm fine to agree to disagree with folks on this. But what I'm not fine with is the continue smearing of "the right" as down with segregation and racism. The Democrats will always be the party of Jim Crow segregation and domestic terrorism. Call me a crazy bigoted Yankee if you will, but that's my piece and I'm sticking with it.