NAACP Wants To Honor Kid Rock, Faces Boycott

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Nope, they just felt the federal governemnt under Lincoln's administration was overstepping its bounds [[with taxes and regulations). The slaves just happened to be one of the commodities they wanted the federal government to keep its hands off of. There wasn't an issue however from either side with slavery itself, other than to manipulate them to gain political control.

It seems that in the end, the Southern revisionist historians actually *won* the Civil War. *sigh* Not only every mainstream scholar of the Civil War, but every 19th century Americanist, would disagree with this point of view. And yet, it persists.

Pam is absolutely right. Not only WAS secession and the Confederacy all about slavery, all of the other reasons given to explain away fighting to preserve a slave society are underpinned by slavery. Economics? The Southern economic system was as dependent upon the the commodification of humans as ours is on oil today. Politics and philosophy [[states' rights)? The only way one could argue that "states' rights" were not about slavery are people who don't really know much about American history between 1830 and 1860. Every single major event between those dates led up to 1860-1861. Do you mean to tell me that Southerners, whether slaveholders or not, merely shrugged when a little lady named Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her novel? That "Bleeding Kansas" bled because of some high, lofty ideal? That there was a Missouri Compromise because of...

We have the words of contemporaries themselves to put this notion to rest. On March 21, 1861, Confederate Vice-President Alexander Stephens made the following statement in his Cornerstone Speech:

...The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions-African slavery as it exists among us-the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the Constitution, was the prevailing idea at the time. The Constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly used against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it-when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."

Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. [Applause.] This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Charleston Mercury, 1865, "We Want No Confederacy Without Slavery"

It was on account of encroachments upon the institution of slavery by the sectional majority of the old Union, that South Carolina seceded from that Union. It is not at this late day, after the loss of thirty thousand of her best and bravest men in battle, that she will suffer it to be bartered away; or ground between the upper and nether mill stones, by the madness of Congress, or the counsels of shallow men elsewhere

From the Confederate States Constitution, Article IV, Section 2:

No slave or other person held to service or labor in any State or Territory of the Confederate States, under the laws thereof, escaping or lawfully carried into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor; but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such slave belongs, or to whom such service or labor may be due.

From the Confederate States Constitution, Article IV, Section 3:

In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.

Sure, the Civil War was about "states' rights" and "economics." It was also about the kind of nation that we would be. I thank every man, woman, and child who served in or supported the Grand Army of the Republic. I do not take for granted the blood that was shed to liberate my ancestors, for most historians and scholars believe that American manumission would not have occurred for at least another generation. Instead, it would have ended in the 1880s or 1890s, as it did elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere.

As for the men in gray and the women and children who loved them, it is too bad that part of their way of life involved treating my ancestors as semi-sentient horses and cattle. [[Actually, some of them treated their livestock better.) They have had generations of sympathy thanks to Margaret Mitchell and the romantic portrayals of plantation life, the priorities of the South now dominate our national discourse and geopolitics, and the abolitionist movement has been recast as a bunch of crazies with a lot of blood on their hands. It has been 150 years and we are still dealing with the effects of a series of decisions in the colonies during the 17th and 18th centuries to end terms of indenture for Africans. It has only been 50 years since a good faith effort was made to make those of African descent full citizens. That flag can never represent freedom and "rights" to me.

As for neo-Confederates who like to wave their flags today, they don't bother me much. I'm far more concerned about the forces here and now, in 2011, who are seeking to beggar us ALL, no matter what our racial or ethnic background. Let a defanged, almost toothless NAACP give anyone they want their awards. The rest of us need to be sober and vigilant, and most of all, united.