Quote:
Originally posted by sugar and spice
But where did I say that?
Clearly the slavery debate was not what the Civil War was all about. There were a lot of factors, of which slavery was not the main concern. The aforementioned money issues and disagreements on how government should be run were, of course, a major part. But most of the time when people say the Southerners were going to war because they disagreed with the form of government at the time, part of this involves the fact that they wanted an unregulated slave trade. Let's not kid ourselves.
Nor do I think that the majority of white Northerners were chomping at the bit to end slavery. There were white abolitionists, of course, but they were an extreme minority. The majority of Northerners didn't really give a isht.
Bottom line: the Civil War was about a lot of things, and to simplify to being just "about slavery" or "about money" or "about government" is silly. But let's not pretend that slavery was not part of the issue, because it was. (And conversely, let's also not pretend that slavery was the whole issue, because of course it was not.
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Heather, you're correct here, but this is not what is being pushed as per this argument, and even here you vastly overstate the role of slavery in the Civil War (while at the same time diminishing it - it's called "stealing thunder," and a fantastic forensic move).
Anyway, regardless, this was entirely my point - I was trying to ensure that people didn't slide all the way across the bench seat of revisionist history and think that in any way the northern forces were going to war to free slaves, at least the vast majority.
Now, to relate this back to the original thread . . . I can see how you could relate the confederacy's battle flag with slavery, but honestly that connection for me is more temporal than literal. Now, this might be because I don't have any ancestral connection to slavery, and my view is obviously tainted by that. Of course, this also works in reverse - hence, the dress is tacky, because it's widely known that this connotation exists for some, but it's pretty obvious that the actual denotation behind the flag is somewhere in between the two views.