User blog:High Prince Imrahil/The Confederate Flag

"I believe that the ability for a state to leave The Union was a right. An inalienable right that The North sought to destroy, and a right that the farmers of the south were willing to take up arms to defend.

And look at what we have today: Our nation is trillions of dollars in an ever-climbing debt, our culture is going to hell in a hand basket, and our politicians are literally mocked around the world for being the most dishonest liars ever.

The Confederacy had a chance to break free from that. To forge its own destiny, to start a better nation. But Lincoln decided that if America burned, the south would go down with us.

Would America have survived as two nations? Would they have grown weak and been conquered by Britain or France? Or would the divided land have made things more manageable, and allowed both nations to prosper far more then we see today?

To these questions, we will never have answers. But The South wanted to take a shot at it, to leave The Union and build a new nation. The Confederacy banded together, willing to sacrifice their homes, families, and even their lives for liberty and freedom from the north.

The Confederate flag may have been misused by the KKK over the years, but that's sure as hell not what it represents. It represents a band of people that were willing to pay the ultimate price for their freedom, and in the end, did. That is why my profile picture remains as it is."

Well, I was hoping that my stirring speech would help, but apparently you still insist upon clinging to the (frankly, rather naive) view that The American Civil War was about slavery.

I tried eloquence. This time, I'll let some facts do the talking:

-Ninety percent of the Southern population did not own slaves.

-Most slave owners had less than 5 slaves.

-Only 3 percent of the population owned plantations.

Still don't believe me? Well, if you don't trust me, trust Honest Abe himself! I would highly suggest you read through The Greeley Letter, which contains some rather interesting quotes. Such as:

"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it [...] What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union" -Abraham Lincoln

That's right, folks! Lincoln himself not only admitted The Civil War wasn't about slavery, but stated that if The Civil War WAS about slavery, he would have just as soon kept slavery and avoided the whole thing.

hmmmmmmmm....

To summarize my viewpoint, the civil war being about slavery and the Emancipation Proclamation (which wasn't even released until several years INTO the Civil War, for those of you that don't know) was nothing but a bunch of Northern propaganda made to make the southerners the bad guys, and try and turn the Civil War into a crusade. Unfortunately, they succeeded on both counts.

"But gee, Imrahil, why didn't The Confederacy just ban slavery, if that's not what The Civil War was really about?"

Because when you're in the middle of a bloody war, you don't exactly want to disband your entire economy. The importation of slaves was actually ILLEGAL under the Confederate constitution, and I fully believe that, had they won the war, it wouldn't have been long at all until slavery was banned in the south as well. But in the midst of the war, to free slaves was to plunge the entire South into chaos, and virtually commit suicide as a nation. The North saw that The Confederacy would be unable to ban slavery until the war was over, so The Union used slavery as a point of all kinds of propaganda about how evil the south was, knowing that the south couldn't free slaves in response.

This begs the question, what WAS the Civil War about, if not slavery?

Simple: money.

The North was industrial and the South was more agracultural. The South seceded because of high tariffs, and unfair tax rates. But The south was not only the cotton king, but controlled all American ports from Virginia to New Orleans to The Mississippi River. The North was simply not willing to loose all this money.

Your honor, the defence rests it's case.