The proclamation fails to mention any reference to slavery.

~ Ahh, the good ol' days....~

Ironically, one of the main reason why the Confederacy lost was the ineffectiveness of "state's rights" in waging war. When Jeff Davis created taxes and asked for more troops, many Southern Governors told him off. Because of this weakness, the South was crushed.

These Tea BAggers are the same way. They couldn't win a war against Grenada.

Alabamian? I think you mean Alabaman.

Time to nuke em.

I'm with @1: we shouldn't "forget" Confederate history, it's an important part of who we are. But we can't forget about slavery either, it's an important part of what the Confederacy was.

Confederate does not = Racist... That's an assumption on your part.

@6 next thing yer gunna tell me is that my cat's hitler mustache has nothing to do with his daily extermination of the Jew Birds.....er....i mean Jay Birds

The Confederacy had a lot less to do with slavery than most Northerners think. Although yes, it has subsequently been turned into something that's substantially racist.

Which is Ignorant Fucking Redneck month? Oh. All of them.

We shouldn't forget the traitors the North fought against. Your great great grandpappy was a traitor douchebag.

Coming from a long line of the most derided demographic in American history, Poor Southern Whites, I'm pretty sure some of my ancestors wore grey during the Civil War. Despite holding on to some "southern" traditions, mostly food and funny sayin's, we never really talk about the Confederacy. It's not really something to be proud of.

I've come to view talk about the "glorious confederacy" as code speak for white supremacy, just like "school choice" means "overturn Brown v. Board", and "family values" means "overturn Loving v. Virginia & Lawrence v. Texas".

As the sayin' goes, "Nothin' about this that doesn't stink."

"No matter which side you're on"... Are there really sides anymore? I mean, it's sort of inappropriate to identify as a Confederate, no?

@13 exactly. If your "side" was defeated, then it ceases to exist.

@5 - I wasted way too many years of my life at school and working in Virginia. Each and every person I knew who proclaimed pride in their Confederate heritage also proved themselves to be racist. "Confederate Pride" always had been and always will be code for "We don't like niggers", just like "Intelligent Design" is code for "The baby Jesus made the whole wide world out of nothing in six days and you're going to hell if you think otherwise," and "States' Rights" is code for "We don't like niggers."

Man, was it a blast the last time I was in Der Vaterland for Nazi History Month a couple of years ago. Sure, there was some controversy, but that's just through the lens of the conquering peoples' bias. Back then, it was just a bunch of like-minded folk fighting for the right to do their own thing.

State's Rights, my shiny metal ass. All eleven of the states that seceded to form the CSA were slave states. Five slave states remained in the Union. If, as these people claim, State's Rights was the paramount rationale for secession, then why did nearly one third of states where slave-owning was legal at the time NOT secede, and why did not a single free state join the Confederacy?

The War was about States' Rights. It was about whether states had the right to permit slavery.

As a black guy born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, which was the first state to secede from the Union, I will say that the Civil War was about the right for the rich to own slaves. Remember SC seceded from the Union over states rights. States rights at the time included individual's rights to own property. Slaves were considered chattel. Chattel's basically tangible movable property. Because of that, states rights included states laws regarding ownership of property aka slaves. Since slaves were the workforce of the South, freeing the slaves would be detrimental to the economy of the South due in part that the industry was heavily based on agriculture. Freed slaves = loss in income to the plantation owners.

The aftermath of the Civil War was a bunch of pissed off white people who had to look at blacks, who they had so much power over when they were slaves, in the eyes as equal human beings rather than sub humans, in addition to the fact that they lost a shit load of money at the hand of the government due to losing their human property aka slaves

Anyway, I don't wanna go on with the history lesson. I feel like in back in South Carolina talking to a bunch of dumb white hicks.

@ 18, North Carolina almost didn't join the CSA either. It was a very narrow decision there.

Secession wasn't just unpopular in the free states, it was also unpopular in the mountainous regions like the Western Carolinas and east Tennessee. Naturally, these were the places with no large plantations and almost no slaves. That's why a big chunk of Virginia broke away and formed a new state.

Once a traitor always a traitor. And the South still demonstrates how willingly they jump to treason against the Union.

@21 - West Virginia seceding from Virginia is still a sore spot of some Virginians today, which has led to all the jokes about West Virginia and the disdain towards it. Western Virginia viewed eastern Virginia as the rich slaving owning part of state where most of the plantations were.

@ all - When I'm back home and hear someone say that they're the XYZ-(insert "X-removed" if applicable)-relative of Robert E Lee, I want to slap them in the face with reality. It's like some measure of status in their meager insufficient life.

@6, 9, 15, others: I actually don't think the Civil War was all about slavery. A lot of it was simply the notion over whether or not the Federal government has the right to make domestic policy. It was also about the balance of regional power that was created in the Three-Fifths Compromise.

So, yeah, I think it's important we know that. But it's also important to know that one of the major domestic policies at issue was the question of legal slavery. And I think if you just leave slavery out - or suggest it wasn't significant - you do our history as much of a disservice as you do if pretend slavery was the only thing that caused the Civil War.

Why not have Civil War history month instead of Confederate History month? That way you can share your rich history w/o coming off like racist assholes!

@15 - Usually, if I see a Confederate flag either being worn, on a car, or hung in front of a house, I instinctively know they're a racist. I was doing a century bike ride through King and Snohomish counties last year and passed by a house near Monroe that had the Confederate flag in the front yard. A few years ago, I was with a interracial friend, who's originally from Michigan, at a bar where Hells Bells was playing. While we were waiting for them to perform, we saw this idiot wearing a shirt that had the confederate flag on it. We both stared him down. During the show, the lead singer's a black woman. She saw him in the audience and gave him the look of disdain. If looks could kill, he'd been dead that night.

So point is that outside the South, blacks hate seeing that flag, but we'll leave people alone and let them bury a grave for themselves.

@25: No shit. If Ol' Virginny really wanted to commemorate the history of the time period rather than fly the rebel flag (so to speak), they'd make it about the Civil War and not the Confederacy. Some estimates put 10% of all soldiers from the South as wearing blue rather than gray.

@ 4: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionar…

"That's where we came from. That's who we are as Americans, no matter which side you're on," Helton said.

No it is actually who you are as someone who's family decided they were no longer Americans but were forced into identifying as Americans again.

Word is McDonnell's now backed down to the liberals. Someone read the tea leaves... This post could use an update? Maybe? Haha, if you want.

Alabamian? I think you mean Alabaman.

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." —Abraham Lincoln

If they really want to display their pride in the CSA, then why do they always display the battle flag instead of the Stars and Bars? The flag they use is the battle flag, and it was most definitely a sore spot for those who fought under the flag of the USA.

The "rebel" flag, the one that I use as a handy indicator of morons driving a vehicle or living in a dwelling, never historically represented the CSA as a nation. It was used in battle as it was easier to distinguish in the field from Old Glory than the Stars and Bars.

This discussion is making me hungry for biscuits and red-eye gravy.

Dammit.

Abolition was *the* defining issue in America in the mid-19th C. No issue today can compare, not even "Muslim Terrorism." There was much warfare & terrorism (on both sides, I might add) before the outbreak of "civil" warfare. They didn't call it "Bleeding Kansas" for nothing.

There was no other issue that the CSA wanted "special rights" from the fed. None. So the "states rights" thing is just a red herring.

The south of today is like the south of yesterday: they were holding onto a morality that had become obsolete. European countries were not only banning the slave trade, they were beginning to hunt and confiscate the traders. It was inevitable that the US would follow suit. Except the south, who seems to believe ignorance, cruelty and social injustice are "cultural values." We should get LC in here to back me up on this.

Never forget that Texas was founded so that Americans could have slaves. Before that, that portion of Mexico had no slaves.

@ 24, if the Civil War was about anything, it was about the two competing economic models that the North and South had - slave-based agrarianism vs. industrial capitalism. Economics is almost always at the heart of any conflict, particularly one that two sides just can't work out.

It's no disservice to say that slavery was the only cause; all the questions you bring up were rooted in it. The concept of strong federal government vs. states' rights was born out of the slavery issue, as was the 3/5 of a person rule. Dig deep enough on any stated reason southerners gave for rebelling and you'll find slavery.

@37: Well, yeah, sort of. I guess the point I'm suggesting is not so much the North's moral objection with slavery but their political and economic objections. I think there was also a degree of fundamental disagreement over the balance of power between states and the Feds in how domestic policies are made and enforced. (Remember: the North was typically more Federalist.)

I'm not denying, knowing the North's notorious history for this, there was a large degree to which they were going down there to show the South what's what in terms of the ol' arc of the moral universe. That was definitely a huge part of it, just because that's clearly part of the history of their relationship. But in the Northern perspective, this moral argument is often played up and the economic argument is played down.

I just also don't think we can ignore that the North benefited hugely, both in terms of economic and political power, dragging the slave-owners forward into the next century. The Northern liberals' political/economic interests and those of the slaves aligned, and that's what made it make sense for abolition to become a huge debate. I think this is basically what you're saying too, so I won't belabor it too much.

@40: I'm not sure "few" Northerners would have risked their lives to free the slaves. But the North mobilized, principally, to defend the Union - the notion that no state can leave the Constitutional compact because it wants to.

That idea was probably the most fundamental of mobilizing factors, no matter how they personally felt about slavery, the morality of abolition, or racism.

All that being said, Matt's point still stands. The South seceded - and thus made defending the union necessary - for economic and political reasons that were substantively related to slavery. So it's not all wrong to say "the war was about slavery," it's just oversimplifying the point.

I mean, this isn't really debatable, is it?

@40: Lincoln was also a liberal and a progressive, and would probably spin in his tomb if he knew what modern-day Republicans were up to.

@ 39, you're right - the importance of the abolitionists (who really did believe slavery and racism were morally wrong) was actually quite small in the years leading up to the Civil War. Their influence grew a lot as the war dragged on. Lincoln didn't issue the Emancipation Proclamation until 1863 - it wasn't something most Northerners, including Lincoln himself, really wanted at the outset.

Here's a fun bit of trivia. The years that we were governed under the Articles of Confederation (roughly 1783-1789) were troubled because the US government was too decentralized to be effective, but there was one significant achievement that came out of it - The North West Ordinance, which governed how the "northwest territories" (Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana) were to be admitted to the Union as states. It specifically forbade slavery in those territories. What's not so well known is that they came within one vote of passing a South West Territories ordinance that would have done the same thing, thus keeping slavery from ever being legal in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, or Kentucky (and also thus Florida or Louisiana - not yet American territories). Most historians agree that keeping slavery confined to the states that had it then would have led to its eventual demise.

Now, that's not to say that maybe there wouldn't have been some other constitutional crisis regarding the balance of power between the Feds and the states, but it's hard to imagine one leading to civil war.

@32...actually they typically display the navel flag... the "battle" flag was square.

@45: Is the navel flag made of belly-button lint?

@ 46 - Oh SNAP. :)