The Confederate Flag

[VandalSquirrel]

Originally Posted by Elephant Walk

Guess which flag was flying on those ships?

The American flag.

Not the Confederacy. I believe the Confederacy banned the importation of slaves with the ratification of the CSA's constitution.

For the record, I fly the Bonnie Blue. It exhibits Southern Pride to those who love the South and looks like part of the Texas flag to those who have no knowledge of history.

The legal importation of slaves into the United States of America was banned January 1, 1808 (voted on in 1807), it is found in this little known document called The Constitution, in the same section as some habeas corpus nonsense. People got kind of nervous after the French had some issues in Haiti, Britain had also banned the Atlantic Slave Trade in 1807, but still had slavery until 1834 (Act was in 1833) excluding anything owned/run by the East India Company and what is now Sri Lanka. Spain abolished slavery in 1811, except in Cuba, the now Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, which didn't happen until the 1880s or during and after the Civil War.


The real importation of slaves didn't stop until later, with the last known ship smuggling people in being the Clotilde in 1859 that brought slaves from Africa to Mobile, Alabama. http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/question/july05/ Slaves were still brought in through New Orleans and Texas (Jean Lafitte) and with both Spain and France still allowing their colonies in the New World to have slavery it is not impossible to believe that people were smuggled between 1808 and 1859. To move those who were born in country when all slave states were concentrated in the Southern part of the United States boats were often used and it wouldn't be unimaginable that people were picked up along the way to a larger port like New Orleans

What I find more interesting about your Bonnie Blue is you associate it with Texas, but the areas it originally represented in 1810 didn't include Texas. I also find it amusing the guy who wrote the song associated with the flag was Irish born and I can't readily find much information about him, which is odd for something so important in relation to this flag controversy.