[QUOTE="Frame_Dragger"][QUOTE="LJS9502_basic"] I think that the flag is displayed for many reasons....being from the north I'm not for the flag....but it's a part of southern heritage and the Civil War wasn't about slavery per se but state's rights.BranKetra
One major right in question was the right to own black people, and the power that gave wealthy landowners in the south. Yes, there are others issues that factor into it, but slavery was THE CENTRAL issue. The part that people revise around is that it wasn't an issue generally of moral outrage against slavery, but economic and political issues related to slavery. Still... it was primarily about slavery... trying to annex Cuba was about slavery, and the economic power it offered. The pivot on which revisionism begins to turn is the revisionism by the "winners" that it was all about Lincoln's moral quest to free the slaves... which is absurd. So, from that point of romanticism being debunked, a story that is even more absurd is spun focusing on tarrifs and other state's rights that were largely a part of the escalation to war. It's not unlike Holocaust deniers using stories that humans were rendered for soap in concentration camps as a basis to call the veracity of the entire thing into question. If that's the heritage someone is so proud of, they may not be racist, but it's not saying anything good about them. Pretty much. It could be that the southern states were bothered by the principle of being controlled by the federal government, as some say. In a way similar to Britain with taxation without representation, only this time it's controlling the potential votes in a given area. It was at least one good enough reason to form a confederacy.Yes, they wanted power much as any group did, but the fulcrum upon which that balance of power rested was owning other human beings. The South tried to expand slavery into new territories (includng Cuba lol), and the North (Fed) opposed this because it would cause them to lose political power to the Southern states. As LJS9502_basic and others have pointed out, not everyone in the South had money to own slaves, but to extrapolate that it meant they were not vested in slavery is incorrect. It's also true that the North was primarily (until Lincoln) concerned with the power issues, not moral ones, but there were abolitionists around well before the war too.
It was not without a moral dimension, and the South was not without a practical one, but all of it revolved around the practice of owning people to weild power. The control of the federal government could only be ensured by the elimination of slavery, which would reduce the power of the south. As we see now, that leaves plenty of regions relatively impoverished compared to areas which had eliminated slavery early. Of course, that's a fait accompli; the states that outlawed slavery first needed it LEAST, and the hold-outs (believed that they) needed it most.
To divorce the war, and the symbol of the side that was fighting for the right to remove all human rights from other people... as a means to all of the other things people talk about under the aegis of "state's rights", is total horse dung. Yes, the north, like the British, tried to use tarriffs to artificially maintain power, but in the end it was inevitable that either the southern states would give up slavery and join the union, or fight a war. The choice was to fight a horrific war, and that flag is a symbol of nothing so much as fields of blood and the desire to maintain a standard of living by treating black people as badly as slaves have ever been treated in history.
Edit: @LJS9502_basic: See above as response as well. Those issues were all related to power that was only maintained by owning people. The base of the power structure that was to be maintained was based not just in OWNING slaves, but the slave trade. Trying to remove that and look at the other issues in isolation is like removing the base of a skyscraper and expecting it to float.
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