Thread: Why is the Confederacy not worthy of contempt?

Quote: Originally Posted by Dissonance Minor side point, but did you mean in the Civil War rather than 'ever?' Joan d'Arc immediately popped into my head, I'm sure there are prior instances to be found. Sorry, I meant American woman . (Nzinga was the wrath of God to would be slavers in Uganda centuries before Harriet, Boudicca was raising hell 1500 years before Nzinga and Hatshepsut thousands before Boudicca, so warrior...

Quote: Originally Posted by WreckingCrew In particular, I view Lee as a traitor to the United States for resigning his commission in the U.S. Army in order to take up arms against it This is compounded by how effective he was for much of the war. On the other hand, we should have considered giving Braxton Bragg the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Oh I agree - but I would argue it was more their social position that was propped up by slavery rather than their economic one. The plantations could have been run more efficiently with wage labor, I'd argue. Abolition would certainly have destroyed the social structure; not that that would have been a bad thing.

Quote: Originally Posted by Zoe Y'all surely can come up with the most amazing excuses for why 200 or more years of slavery in the North don't really count. Has anybody here said that? Has anyone said "When they had slavery up in New York, it was just peachy!" What we're saying is that the Confederate States of America is not worthy of our support. Of course we should remember it, in a historical sense, but...

Quote: Originally Posted by Zoe Why is the North not worthy of contempt? It only makes sense to ask this question if you think the South = Confederacy. It doesn't. And you know this. The "South" was in existence long before the Civil War and continues to exist today. It doesn't have a government or a united belief system. It is simply a regional designation that happens to correlate with certain cultural artifacts....

Quote: Originally Posted by you with the face Obviously you are. Since you asked. It really is possible for you to misinterpret anything you read, isn't it?

Quote: Originally Posted by Jackmannii It's better than naming the back of the building after her. You have no idea of the irony involved here. You know what looms behind the bus terminal/headquarters ? A butt ugly 5 story or so jail. And for the longest time, just to right of it was the farmers market. Not sure if that is still active or not though. No, I am not making this up.

Quote: Originally Posted by MEBuckner If the Confederacy had won its independence, this would be a whole other conversation. We'd all be arguing about, on the one hand, how can you support a country which didn't abolish slavery until 1937 [...] But none of that happened. And I think the root of this controversy is that many Southerners feel on some level that it did. That is, they see the Confederacy and its symbols as standing in a...

Quote: Originally Posted by Sampiro Meaning nothing personal though- and I really don't- I find it hard to bow my head to a biographical assessment of Davis from somebody who not only didn't know the legend of his wearing a dress when captured I didn't make a biographical assessment of Jefferson Davis. I simply said that monuments honor him because of his presidency of the Confederacy and not his political life prior to the...

Quote: Originally Posted by villa But slavery was a drain on the southern economy. Had economic concerns been paramount, then the sensible thing would have been a (reasonably rapid) phasing out of slavery. Slavery was a drain on the economy, but it was an insidious one. The southern states before the Civil War were dominated economically and politically by a small plantation elite who had all their wealth tied up in slavery and slaveholding....