Tom Paine 1949
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The North won the war and made the rules
in reality the south joined the union as free states and had a right to leave if it wanted too
As the descendant of Confederate soldiers I honor their bravery in battle
I’m proud of them
but I also understand that slavery was bad for America and a united America was better for world history
However libs who call the confederates traitors or compare them to nazi’s can kiss my ass
Of course the winners in war usually make the rules. Sometimes those rules are called laws, as with the 13th Amendment. As losers in the Civil War of course the South payed a heavy price. But it wasn’t long before rebel Southerners were back in Congress, while Negroes were driven back into super-oppressed caste status under Jim Crow. The West kept developing and the North thrived. Soon there were new corporate and industrial “rules” and laws and new technology. The Gilded Age arrived, while whole sections of the South only slowly progressed.
I really understand your feelings, Mac-7. I am not at all deprecating the courage or fighting spirit of Confederate soldiers. Most Southern soldiers were not slave-owners and fought for their homes and way of life and what they firmly believed was “freedom.” I think you are clearly not in the “same camp” as Dudley Smith. But that is up to you to decide.
This is a history OP. It is not about the motivations of soldiers or ordinary people on either side. The OP and my own comments show the politics (as expressed in speeches) of Confederate leaders like Jefferson Davis & Alexander Stephens. My defense of Republican leader Abraham Lincoln does not flow from any regional bias.
If you read Alexander Stephens “Cornerstone Speech” you will understand why many people, myself included, and almost all African Americans, feel that a Southern victory would have been catastrophic.
While nobody can know for certain, I think a Confederate victory would have led — both North and South of the Mason Dixon Line — to creating new “disunited” states where Nazi-like and apartheid-like racists, or eugenics and Social- Darwinist spouting capitalist oligarchs, ruled supreme. There may have been more wars over geographical boundaries, but in the end I think Northern industrialists, Western mining interests, railroad capitalists and NY bankers would likely all have found common ground in the above.
Defending and understanding Lincoln as a great American leader is important for many reasons, among them to insure we never have to fight another Civil War.
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