Normally, I wouldn’t bother with this idiot, but the combination of lies, stupidity, racism and insanity he displays in his article about the Confederate Battle Flag is too much to bear. TL, DR: assume that the opposite of everything he says is correct, and you won’t go far wrong.
Baldwin’s text in plain letters, mine in bold.
Ladies and gentlemen, I submit that what we see happening in the United States today is an apt illustration of why the Confederate flag was raised in the first place. What we see materializing before our very eyes is tyranny: tyranny over the freedom of expression, tyranny over the freedom of association, tyranny over the freedom of speech, and tyranny over the freedom of conscience.
To some extent, this is true. Cherish that paragraph, because almost everything else the Baldwin will write is a lie.
In 1864, Confederate General Patrick Cleburne warned his fellow southerners of the historical consequences should the South lose their war for independence. He was truly a prophet. He said if the South lost, “It means that the history of this heroic struggle will be written by the enemy. That our youth will be trained by Northern school teachers; will learn from Northern school books their version of the war; will be impressed by all of the influences of History and Education to regard our gallant debt as traitors and our maimed veterans as fit subjects for derision.” No truer words were ever spoken.
They’re actually quite false. The South dominated writing of Civil War history for almost a century. BTW, the document in which Cleburne wrote that led to him being branded a traitor by other Confederates. For the reason, read on.
History revisionists flooded America’s public schools with Northern propaganda about the people who attempted to secede from the United States, characterizing them as racists, extremists, radicals, hatemongers, traitors, etc. You know, the same way that people in our federal government and news media attempt to characterize Christians, patriots, war veterans, constitutionalists, et al today.
It wasn’t “history revisionists” who called the Confederates racists. It was the Confederates, who admitted they seceded to maintain slavery and white supremacy. For example, Confederate VP Alexander Stevens, who said “Our new government is founded[,] … its foundations are laid, its corner-stone 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 normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Folks, please understand that the only people in 1861 who believed that states did NOT have the right to secede were Abraham Lincoln and his radical Republicans.
Also untrue. Millions of Northern Democrats believed that unilateral secession was illegal. James Madison, one of the authors of the Constitution, and author of the Bill of Rights, also thought unilateral secession was illegal, as he said in a famous letter to Daniel Webster.
To say that southern states did not have the right to secede from the United States is to say that the thirteen colonies did not have the right to secede from Great Britain.
The U.S. didn’t secede from Great Britain. It revolted against British authority, and the people who signed the Declaration of Independence made themselves liable to execution for treason when they did so.
One cannot be right and the other wrong. If one is right, both are right.
Horsepuckey. The U.S. wasn’t founded to maintain slavery by those who’d participated in elections, and who only revolted when they lost said elections.
How can we celebrate our Declaration of Independence in 1776 and then turn around and condemn the Declaration of Independence of the Confederacy in 1861? Talk about hypocrisy!
The Confederacy didn’t issue a Declaration of Independence. But four of the original seven Confederate states did. A fifth wrote such a Declaration, but didn’t officially promulgate it. A sixth issued a warning of why they’d secede if a Republican. ALL said they were doing it to save slavery. The only hypocrisy is Baldwin’s, pretending that the cause of “slavery and white supremacy” was something else, and that revolution was not revolution. And that, btw, is why Cleburne was labeled a traitor to the Confederacy. He proposed that slavery be abolished in it.
In fact, southern states were not the only states that talked about secession. After the southern states seceded, the State of Maryland fully intended to join them.
A double-barrelled lie. Maryland was a Southern state. And when a resolution and a bill for secession were offered, they were defeated in the legislature. A secession convention was called, but it didn’t vote an ordnance of secession.
In September of 1861, Lincoln sent federal troops to the State capital and seized the legislature by force in order to prevent them from voting.
Lincoln had one-third of the Legislature arrested in September, the pro-Confederate part. The two-thirds who were Unionist were not arrested.
Federal provost marshals stood guard at the polls and arrested Democrats and anyone else who believed in secession. A special furlough was granted to Maryland troops so they could go home and vote against secession. Judges who tried to inquire into the phony elections were arrested and thrown into military prisons.
In the special congressional elections of June, 1861, the Union candidates won all six seats. The Unionist governor won in a landslide in the fall. Baldwn calls the elections “phony” because his side lost.
There is your great “emancipator,” folks.
And there is your typical Confederate apologist. Though all indications are that a majority of Marylanders didn’t want to secede, he’ll claim that they were intending to do so. Maryland troops, all volunteers, are cheating when they vote. In Baldwin’s head, liberty = agreeing with him.
And before the South seceded, several northern states had also threatened secession. Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island had threatened secession as far back as James Madison’s administration.
Another lie. Various malcontents met in Hartford, Connecticut in 1814, to discuss their grievances over the War of 1812. The delegates to the Hartford Convention adopted a report advocating some constitutional amendments, but did NOT call for secession.
In addition, the states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were threatening secession during the first half of the nineteenth century—long before the southern states even considered such a thing.
I can find no history of this, except that sometimes there have been movements to split off part of a state and make it independent, or join it to another state.
People say constantly that Lincoln “saved” the Union. Lincoln didn’t save the Union; he subjugated the Union. There is a huge difference. A union that is not voluntary is not a union. Does a man have a right to force a woman to marry him or to force a woman to stay married to him?
No one forced any state into the Union. They ‘married’ it voluntarily. Does a spouse have a right to divorce, by simply saying ‘As of now I’m divorced, and I’ll decide what property I keep?’ No.
In the eyes of God, a union of husband and wife is far superior to a union of states. If God recognizes the right of husbands and wives to separate (and He does), to try and suggest that states do not have the right to lawfully (under Natural and divine right) separate is the most preposterous proposition imaginable.
Dishonesty, as the question was HOW the states could separate: unilaterally, or only by joint agreement of the states. Lincoln conceded the latter was constitutional, but not the former.
People say that Lincoln freed the slaves. Lincoln did NOT free a single slave.
More lies, and really outrageous ones. Lincoln signed two Confiscation Acts that freed Southern slaves of Rebel owners, and a bill that outlawed slavery in Washington D.C. As for the Emancipation Proclamation, “Around 20,000 to 50,000 slaves in regions where rebellion had already been subdued were immediately emancipated. It could not be enforced in areas still under rebellion, but as the Union army took control of Confederate regions, the Proclamation provided the legal framework for freeing more than 3 million slaves in those regions.” (Wikipedia).
But what he did do was enslave free men.
Typical Confederate nonsense: not getting what he wants, politically, is the same as being bought and sold like a domesticated animal.
His so-called Emancipation Proclamation had NO AUTHORITY in the southern states, as they had separated into another country.
That of course, is what the South claimed, and that is what the war was mostly about. But saying the eleven rebellious states were a separate country doesn’t make it true.
Imagine a President today signing a proclamation to free folks in, say, China or Saudi Arabia. He would be laughed out of Washington. Lincoln had no authority over the Confederate States of America, and he knew it.
On the contrary, as President, Lincoln thought he had much authority over the “Confederate States”, as they had not legally left the Union in his opinion.
Do you not find it interesting that Lincoln’s proclamation did NOT free a single slave in the United States, the country in which he DID have authority?
It’s not curious at all. He had no legal authority to end slavery in the North by proclamation. That’s why he urged the 13th Amendment be passed, to stamp out slavery in the North, and reconquered parts of the South.
That’s right. The Emancipation Proclamation deliberately ignored slavery in the North. Do you not realize that when Lincoln signed his proclamation, there were over 300,000 slaveholders who were fighting in the Union army? Check it out.
OK, let’s check it out. The number of individual slaveholders in the U.S., as determined by the census of 1860, was 393, 975. So apparently more than three out of every four slaveholders went North and joined the Union Army. Godzilla facepalm.
One of those northern slaveholders was General (and later U.S. President) Ulysses S. Grant. In fact, he maintained possession of his slaves even after the War Between the States concluded.
Complete lies. Grant at some point acquired ownership of a slave. What we know of said slave is his name, William Jones, where and when Grant got him (Grant bought him from his father-in-law, sometime in the late 1850s), and the date Grant freed him: March 29th, 1859, more than two years before Fort Sumter was fired upon. In freeing him instead of selling him, Grant passed up the chance to acquire around $1500.00, the equivalent of about $300,000.00 today, and free of income tax to boot. The other slaves Grant is said to have owned and not freed were his Missouri father-in-law’s. Grant had no authority to free them. But Missouri abolished slavery while the war was on, so they went free before the war ended.
Recall that his counterpart, Confederate General Robert E. Lee, freed his slaves BEFORE hostilities between North and South ever broke out. When asked why he refused to free his slaves, Grant said, “Good help is hard to find these days.”
Both claims are frequently repeated, and both are untrue. The only record of Lee freeing slaves took place in 1862, after hostilities had been going on nearly two years. They had belonged to Lee’s father-in-law, George W. P. Custis, who freed them in his will. They were supposed to be freed a maximum of five years after the death of his Custis, after the estate was settled. Lee finally freed them five years, two and a half months after his father-in-law died. And Grant never said that line about the difficulty of getting good help.
The institution of slavery did not end until the 13th Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865.
Speaking of the 13th Amendment, did you know that Lincoln authored his own 13th Amendment? It is the only amendment to the Constitution ever proposed by a sitting U.S. President. Here is Lincoln’s proposed amendment: “No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere within any state with the domestic institutions thereof, including that a person’s held to labor or service by laws of said State.”
You read it right. Lincoln proposed an amendment to the U.S. Constitution PRESERVING the institution of slavery. This proposed amendment was written in March of 1861, a month BEFORE the shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina.
Almost all wrong. The Amendment was written by then Sen. William Seward, who was attempting to end the secession crisis. It is known as the Corwin Amendment, and was both proposed and passed by Congress before Lincoln took office. It’s in most histories of the Civil War.
The State of South Carolina was particularly incensed at the tariffs enacted in 1828 and 1832. The Tariff of 1828 was disdainfully called, “The Tariff of Abominations” by the State of South Carolina. Accordingly, the South Carolina legislature declared that the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 were “unauthorized by the constitution of the United States.”
Think, folks: why would the southern states secede from the Union over slavery when President Abraham Lincoln had offered an amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing the PRESERVATION of slavery? That makes no sense. If the issue was predominantly slavery, all the South needed to do was to go along with Lincoln, and his proposed 13th Amendment would have permanently preserved slavery among the southern (and northern) states. Does that sound like a body of people who were willing to lose hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefield over saving slavery? What nonsense!
What lies! The South Carolina secession convention officially adopted two statements about why it was seceding, justifying the attempt by saying they needed to do it to preserve slavery. So did Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Texas. The Southern political leaders declared that the Republicans would abolish slavery through indirect means, whatever their promises to the contrary, and that secession was the only way of preserving slavery and white supremacy. The new Confederacy sent “commissioners” north to the other slaves states, telling them to get out now, or the Union would take their slaves away. As late as February 1865, the Southern “commissioners” who met with Lincoln and Seward were demanding that the war end with slavery intact. Lincoln informed them that it was too late to save slavery, the Congress had just sent an amendment to the states to abolish it. You could look it up. So could Baldwin, if he cared about the truth.
The problem was Lincoln wanted the southern states to pay the Union a 40% tariff on their exports. The South considered this outrageous and refused to pay.
Absolute horsepuckey. The Constitution forbids tariffs on exports, and none were passed, or proposed. But the Confederate Constitution allows it, in Article I, Section 9, clause 6. Baldwin may be referring to the Morill Tariff, passed AFTER the Deep South declared it had seceded, and which raised duties on imports to the neighborhood of 40%.
By the time hostilities broke out in 1861, the South was paying up to, and perhaps exceeding, 70% of the nation’s taxes.
More horsepuckey. The majority of taxes were paid by the North.
Before the war, the South was very prosperous and productive. And Washington, D.C., kept raising the taxes and tariffs on them.
Yet another lie. The tariff was lowered in 1832, 1833, 1846, and 1857. Wikipedia says the tariff of 1846 was “one of the lowest tariffs in American history,” and the tariff of 1857 cut the rates by a third. There was talk of raising the tariff in the 1859-60 session of Congress, but it didn’t happen. When Lincoln was elected, tariffs were the lowest they’d been in over forty years. By the way, when one third of your population is legally in the status of “property”, you can only claim the economy is prosperous by ignoring their extreme poverty. Ignoring the wrongs done to blacks is what most Confederate apologists do.
You know, the way Washington, D.C., keeps raising the taxes on prosperous American citizens today.
This is much the same story of the way the colonies refused to pay the demanded tariffs of the British Crown—albeit the tariffs of the Crown were MUCH lower than those demanded by Lincoln. Lincoln’s proposed 13th Amendment was an attempt to entice the South into paying the tariffs by being willing to permanently ensconce the institution of slavery into the Constitution. AND THE SOUTH SAID NO!
In addition, the Congressional Record of the United States forever obliterates the notion that the North fought the War Between the States over slavery. Read it for yourself. This resolution was passed unanimously in the U.S. Congress on July 23, 1861, “The War is waged by the government of the United States not in the spirit of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or institutions of the states, but to defend and protect the Union.”
What could be clearer? The U.S. Congress declared that the war against the South was NOT an attempt to overthrow or interfere with the “institutions” of the states, but to keep the Union intact (by force). The “institutions” implied most certainly included the institution of slavery.
At last, some truth, though not much. Congress and the Administration initially tried to wage the war without touching slavery. The resolution in question was passed as an attempt to persuade the South to give up on secession and stop the war.
Hear it loudly and clearly: Lincoln’s war against the South had NOTHING to do with ending slavery—so said the U.S. Congress by unanimous resolution in 1861.
Nothing to do with it in August, 1861. That changed.
Abraham Lincoln, himself, said it was NEVER his intention to end the institution of slavery. In a letter to Alexander Stevens who later became the Vice President of the Confederacy, Lincoln wrote this, “Do the people of the South really entertain fears that a Republican administration would directly, or indirectly, interfere with their slaves, or with them, about their slaves? If they do, I wish to assure you, as once a friend, and still, I hope, not an enemy, that there is no cause for such fears. The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington.”
Yeah, that’s what he said before the War of the Rebellion. Later, he dedicated himself to ending slavery.
Again, what could be clearer? Lincoln, himself, said the southern states had nothing to fear from him in regard to abolishing slavery.
Here’s what could be clearer: Lincoln said that, and the Deep South states said ‘We don’t believe you. Slavery in the Union is doomed. We’re getting out now, before you destroy slavery.’ And after a year-and-a-quarter of war, Lincoln changed his mind and determined to end slavery forever.
Hear Lincoln again: “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.”
Here’s the quote in somewhat longer form. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” The letter he wrote that in was dated August 22nd, 1862. A month previously to the day, he had told the Cabinet he had decided to issue the Emancipation Proclamation and free every slave he thought he could legally free. He was persuaded to wait for a Union victory first. He announced the Proclamation on September 22nd, 1862, a month to the day after writing that letter.
He also said, “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no inclination to do so.”
Part of his debates with Douglas, and his First Inaugeral Address, when he still hoped to persuade the Deep South to give up it’s attempt to secede. Interesting, isn’t it, that Baldwin doesn’t give dates on these quotes, or sources, or context? One might think he was trying to hide something.
The idea that the Confederate flag (actually there were five of them) stood for racism, bigotry, hatred, and slavery is just so much hogwash.
The Confederate flag(s) stood for the Confederacy, which adopted a Constitution that was mostly copied from that of the U.S. Constitution. But among the differences were specific safeguards to slavery. So yes, the Confederate flag(s) stood for slavery. The Confederate government said so, repeatedly.
In fact, if one truly wants to discover who the racist was in 1861, just read the words of Mr. Lincoln.
On August 14, 1862, Abraham Lincoln invited a group of black people to the White House. In his address to them, he told them of his plans to colonize them all back to Africa. Listen to what he told these folks: “Why should the people of your race be colonized and where? Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration. You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss; but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think. Your race suffers very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffers from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason, at least, why we should be separated. You here are freemen, I suppose? Perhaps you have been long free, or all your lives. Your race is suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best when free, but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of our race.”
Did you hear what Lincoln said? He said that black people would NEVER be equal with white people—even if they all obtained their freedom from slavery. If that isn’t a racist statement, I’ve never heard one.
No, he didn’t. He said that if slavery were abolished, they still wouldn’t be legally equal, which was true. There were many laws, North and South, that discriminated against blacks, and much prejudice that would keep them from social equality. As for the non-racist South, google Jim Crow and Ku Klux Klan.
Lincoln’s statement above is not isolated. In Charleston, Illinois, in 1858, Lincoln said in a speech, “I am not, nor have ever been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on social or political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white.”
Yes, during the third of the Lincoln-Douglas debates he said that. He said almost exactly the same thing in the first debate, at Ottawa, Illinois, and then immediately added: “I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”
Ladies and gentlemen, in his own words, Abraham Lincoln declared himself to be a white supremacist.
No, he declared himself as believing that the two races couldn’t get along on a basis of equality, and thus preferred his race in the superior position. An important difference. And in his last speech in 1865, he said that at least some blacks should be entitled to vote. It was upon hearing that statement that Booth decided to murder him.
Why don’t our history books and news media tell the American people the truth about Lincoln and about the War Between the States?
Well, mostly because people like Baldwin frequently write them, and fill them with lies.
It’s simple: if people would study the meanings and history of the flag, symbols, and statues of the Confederacy and Confederate leaders, they might begin to awaken to the tyrannical policies of Washington, D.C., that precluded southern independence—policies that have only escalated since the defeat of the Confederacy—and they might have a notion to again resist.
By the time Lincoln penned his Emancipation Proclamation, the war had been going on for two years without resolution. In fact, the North was losing the war.
No, it wasn’t. Southern invasion of the North had been turned back, while Northern invasion of the South had been succesful in many places. It was precisely because the North was NOT losing that he issued the Proclamation.
Even though the South was outmanned and out-equipped, the genius of the southern generals and fighting acumen of the southern men had put the northern armies on their heels. Many people in the North never saw the legitimacy of Lincoln’s war in the first place, and many of them actively campaigned against it. These people were affectionately called “Copperheads” by people in the South.
The majority of Northerners supported the war. And please note that a copperhead is a poisonous snake.
I urge you to watch Ron Maxwell’s accurate depiction of those people in the North who favored the southern cause as depicted in his motion picture, “Copperhead.” For that matter, I consider his movie, “Gods And Generals” to be the greatest “Civil War” movie ever made. It is the most accurate and fairest depiction of Confederate General Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson ever produced.
Another lie. In one distortion, the movie depicts Jackson as anti-slavery, a complete invention. Jackson’s own wife said that he thought slavery was God’s will, and not to be interfered with.
In my opinion, actor Stephen Lang should have received an Oscar for his performance as General Jackson. But, can you imagine?
That’s another thing: the war fought from 1861 to 1865 was NOT a “civil war.” Civil war suggests two sides fighting for control of the same capital and country.
The imbecility of Confederate apologists here is ridiculous. Before and during the Civil War, Southerners sometimes referred to it as a “civil war.” It was only after they lost that they claimed that it wasn’t a civil war, substituting symbol for substance.
The South didn’t want to take over Washington, D.C.,
Actually they did, and expected to; but Maryland refused to go along and secede.
no more than their forebears wanted to take over London. They wanted to separate from Washington, D.C., just as America’s Founding Fathers wanted to separate from Great Britain. The proper names for that war are either, “The War Between the States” or, “The War of Southern Independence,” or, more fittingly, “The War of Northern Aggression.”
Confederate dishonesty in a nutshell. Southern states siezed federal property without compensation, almost all before they proclaimed they’d seceded, and fired on Fort Sumter, and that constitutes Northern aggression!
Had the South wanted to take over Washington, D.C., they could have done so with the very first battle of the “Civil War.” When Lincoln ordered federal troops to invade Virginia in the First Battle of Manassas (called the “First Battle of Bull Run” by the North), Confederate troops sent the Yankees running for their lives all the way back to Washington. Had the Confederates pursued them, they could have easily taken the city of Washington, D.C., seized Abraham Lincoln, and perhaps ended the war before it really began. But General Beauregard and the others had no intention of fighting an aggressive war against the North. They merely wanted to defend the South against the aggression of the North.
More lies. Davis, Beauregard, and Joe Johnston discussed pursuing the retreating Union troops, but were afraid to order it. By the time they worked up the nerve, it had started raining, and the road was impassible.
In order to rally people in the North, Lincoln needed a moral crusade. That’s what his Emancipation Proclamation was all about. This explains why his proclamation was not penned until 1863, after two years of fruitless fighting. He was counting on people in the North to stop resisting his war against the South if they thought it was some kind of “holy” war.
The people of the North were mostly not resisting the war. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued in part to stop Britain from intervening, in part because Lincoln had decided that destroying slavery was necessary to win the war, in part because Lincoln decided that only the destruction of slavery would keep war from occuring again.
Plus, Lincoln was hoping that his proclamation would incite blacks in the South to insurrect against southern whites.
More horsepuckey. In his famous Cooper Union speech, Lincoln said that no extensive slave revolt was possible, because there was no way the slaves could coordinate their actions. He also pointed out that when John Brown tried to get a slave revolt going, the slaves refused to join in. Here’s a quote from the Emancipation Proclamation: “And I hereby enjoin upon the people so declared to be free [i.e., the newly freed slaves], to abstain from all violence, unless in necessary self-defence;”
If thousands of blacks would begin to wage war against their white neighbors, the fighting men of the southern armies would have to leave the battlefields and go home to defend their families. THIS NEVER HAPPENED.
No, it didn’t happen. But there was never any prospect of it happening. Around a hundred thousand ex-slaves did join the Union Army, though, and thousands more helped Union troops whenever they appeared in the South.
Not only did blacks not riot against the whites of the south, many black men volunteered to fight alongside their white friends and neighbors in the Confederate army.
Very few Southern blacks volunteered to fight for the Confederacy, and until 1865 the offers of those who did volunteer were almost always rejected. ‘No negro troops’ was official Confederate policy.
Unlike the blacks in the North, who were conscripted by Lincoln and forced to fight in segregated units,
Almost all Union troops, black and white, were volunteers
thousands of blacks in the South fought of their own free will in a fully-integrated southern army. I bet your history book never told you about that.
This is so dishonest, I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it. The Confederacy rejected black troops. It allowed a few blacks to enlist as musicians, nurses, and cooks, and hired more as laborers, teamsters, and other non-combatants. Some masters also took their slaves along with them as “body servants.” The Confederate government frequently impressed blacks as laborers, and sometimes used those impressed blacks in combat. But until 1865, it was official Confederate policy to reject blacks as ordinary Confederate soldiers. The only regular “black” troops in the Confederate Army were those who were so light-skinned they could pass as white. The number of black Confederate soldiers in the Civil War probably less than 0.5% of the Confederate total wartime forces. The number of black Union forces was around 10% of the much larger Union army. For every black Confederate soldier, there were maybe sixty black Union soldiers. And there were no officially integrated Confederate units.
If one wants to ban a racist flag, one would have to ban the British flag. Ships bearing the Union Jack shipped over 5 million African slaves to countries all over the world, including the British colonies in North America. Other slave ships flew the Dutch flag and the Portuguese flag and the Spanish flag, and, yes, the U.S. flag. But not one single slave ship flew the Confederate flag. NOT ONE!
Yes, the Confederacy did ban the overseas slave trade. Big deal. The British banned the slave trade in 1807, and tried to forcibly suppress it. It was hindered in this goal by the United States, with Southern Congresscum insisting that U.S. flagged ships could not be inspected by the British, thus allowing the slave trade to continue. Lincoln’s administation finally changed that. BTW, there was a minority of secessionists urging the resumption of the slave trade.
By the time Lincoln launched his war against the southern states, slavery was already a dying institution.
More horsepuckey. Slavery was thriving, and the price of slaves was rising. Recall that above, Baldwin himself says the Southern economy was “very prosperous and productive.” Too dumb to keep track of your lies, Chuck?
The entire country, including the South, recognized the moral evil of slavery and wanted it to end.
My Lord, but that is disgusting and untrue. The Confederate Constitution forbade the Confederate Congress from ever passing any law “denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves” [Article 1, Section 9, clause 4.]; required all Confederate states to recognize “the right of transit and sojourn in any State of this Confederacy, with their slaves and other property; and the right of property in said slaves shall not be thereby impaired” [Article IV, Section 2, clause 1.]; required that all territories in the Confederacy must be open to slavery, and the institution protected by the Confederate and Terrirorial governments [Article IV, Section 3, clause 3.]. That’s why Alexander Stevens, Vice President of the Confederacy said: “The prevailing ideas entertained by [Thomas Jefferson] 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. … Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone 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 normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” The real opinion of the South was ‘Slavery today, slavery tomorrow, slavery forever.’
Only a small fraction of southerners even owned slaves.
Around 37% of the households in original seven Confederate states owned slaves. Around 26% of households in all the slave states owned saves. That is not a small proportion. And Southern politicians continually claimed that the existence of negro slavery benefited every white.
The slave trade had ended in 1808, per the U.S. Constitution, and the practice of slavery was quickly dying, too. In another few years, with the advent of agricultural machinery, slavery would have ended peacefully—just like it had in England.
Slavery in England ended when a judge ruled it illegal. It didn’t ‘die’ of machinery. Slavery in Britain’s colonies ended when Parliament ended it by law. It didn’t ‘die’ of machinery there either. And given that cotton-picking machinery didn’t come along till 1944, there’s no reason to believe it would have died before then in the C.S.A. Given the use of slaves as “body servants” and mistresses, it might still exist. BTW, note Baldwin’s attitude: slavery of black people should have been allowed to continue as long as white people found it profitable. That’s flat-out racial oppression he’s endorsing.
It didn’t take a national war and the deaths of over a half million men to end slavery in Great Britain.
No, all it took was over a millenium of real Christians preaching that it was immoral, and should end now, regardless of whether it was profitable to the owners. In the Confederacy, such preaching was illegal.
America’s so-called “Civil War” was absolutely unnecessary. The greed of Lincoln’s radical Republicans in the North, combined with the cold, calloused heart of Lincoln himself is responsible for the tragedy of the “Civil War.”
Far from being greedy, Lincoln was willing to spend Federal money on compensating slave holders to emancipate their slaves, and more money to set up freed slaves in a country of their own. The Southern states refused. ‘Slavery forever!’
And look at what is happening now: in one instant—after one deranged young man killed nine black people and who ostensibly photo-shopped a picture of himself with a Confederate flag—the entire political and media establishments in the country go on an all-out crusade to remove all semblances of the Confederacy. The speed in which all of this has happened suggests that this was a planned, orchestrated event by the Powers That Be (PTB). And is it a mere coincidence that this took place at the exact same time that the U.S. Supreme Court decided to legalize same-sex marriage? I think not.
Ah, this explains much. Baldwin is a paranoid madman, as well as a liar, fool, and racist. I think we can close now. Do remember, I support the right of anyone to fly the Confederate Battle Flag, as a matter of free speech. But I just don’t find it necessary or desirable to lie about the Civil War.
