TheSecretSix
Corporal
- Joined
- Nov 24, 2014
Everyone talks about the heritage of the Confederate South. But what is this heritage? What did the Confederate South actually leave us? We who are left here in this part of the country... We the people who are descended from those people who seceded, and who left the Union forever. What did the people who were living in the nation known as the Confederate South actually leave to us by their secession from the union?
After the war, these people did not say much of anything. There was a situation known as the Silent South in the which Confederate veterans and their families refused to discuss anything that happened during that time period.
Southerners to this day are eternally slighted by Hollywood, completely despised by the official historians who make them all out to be some sort of racist monsters of intolerance, and have encouraged a multitude of contemporary disdain for anything having to do with their 'lost' cause.
The symbols of the Confederate South are eternally heralded as absolute symbols of racism even though men like HK Edgerton on Facebook and his black Confederate 'flagger' friends insist otherwise, the symbol is internally seen as being one of blatant racism. At no time is it seen as what it truly is; a symbol against the collectivism of the American political party system of its day. The politics are never mentioned, never allowed to be mentioned, and are officially and completely ignored.
Even though there was never any stated law condemning the act of unilateral secession, and any condemnation of the Confederate South must be pieced together from after-action SCOTUS 'opinions'
and militia acts which were originally designed for completely different purposes, as well as implications and other vague remembrances, there was never any amendment to the Constitution passed giving the general government the right to invade a state in order to bring it back into the Union. And, to this day, there still does not exist such as a thing. It all basically falls under Alexander Hamilton's implied nonsense; this reading between the lines to suit the present purpose insanity.
Yet there does exist one thing, and this thing seems to be the most powerful force of all. There seems to be this undying and unmitigated hatred for the Confederate South and its active secession from the union to the embarrassment of the sectional president Abraham Lincoln. in truth, this hatred comes off as looking absolutely ridiculous from the viewpoint of a neutral outsider, yet this does seem to be the intended purpose of those people who lost the civil war; for none of those people wanted to go under minority rule, none of them wish to give up their political power in their own state to a group of freed slaves who were being convinced that their freedom had come from the northern invasion rather than from where it had truly come from; the South seceding from the union in the first instance, and condemning slavery as an art form in North America forever. No Southerner wanted to live under a federal top heavy United States of America, especially if it was to be run like the northern states ran their own governments up there. True there were southern 'unionist' sellouts, but those who were called True Confederates believed completely in the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal.
So what did these people leave us?
They left us one thing; they left us the fact that they had existed; that they had done what they had done for the reasons that they actually did these things, and that they did not care in the least what the North ever thought of them. They did not mind to be thought of as traitors, nor as criminals. They fought and they died trying to keep their country as they envisioned. And they would have their country, or else they would disappear in the process. And they chose to disappear.
In their silence, they did not expect us to believe as they did. They actually said nothing at all about any of it, and only spoke in their diaries and in their letters about the actual events as they knew them to be. the Confederate president indeed offer his apologia in The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, but an apologia is not an apology; it is a defense of one's opinions or conduct. The rest of the South offers no such thing, nor did it care to offer any such. The South never surrendered. Appomattox was the surrender of Lee and the 8,000; not of the Confederacy. The Confederate South never surrendered; it chose to be destroyed, instead.
The flag still exists. Like unilateral secession, the present-day government has neither the will nor the right to ban the flag in a law, or an amendment, like some sort of a swastika of racism. Those of such a political nature are completely disappointed time and again when they attempt to remove the symbol from consideration.
The important thing is that the South seceded from the union; anything else is a mere footnote to that event.
I did not know what the South had left us until I went to my first Civil War reenactment, and I drove to that side of the field where the big Confederate flags were flying impudently in the wind. It is quite a rush for a Southern person to stand there and see those flags, and indeed, that flag in particular... beating against the breeze.
The Betsy Ross flag must have surely felt the same way in the sight of those patriots of the Spirit of '76 of whom Thomas Jefferson ever mentioned with the greatest reverence. There is something thrilling about being completely despised, and yet feeling in your heart that you are, when it all shakes out, on the side of right as you see it.
It is a thrill that no one but a Southerner would understand, and it is worth all of the vitriolic venom and rage for the honor of standing in its shadow.
After the war, these people did not say much of anything. There was a situation known as the Silent South in the which Confederate veterans and their families refused to discuss anything that happened during that time period.
Southerners to this day are eternally slighted by Hollywood, completely despised by the official historians who make them all out to be some sort of racist monsters of intolerance, and have encouraged a multitude of contemporary disdain for anything having to do with their 'lost' cause.
The symbols of the Confederate South are eternally heralded as absolute symbols of racism even though men like HK Edgerton on Facebook and his black Confederate 'flagger' friends insist otherwise, the symbol is internally seen as being one of blatant racism. At no time is it seen as what it truly is; a symbol against the collectivism of the American political party system of its day. The politics are never mentioned, never allowed to be mentioned, and are officially and completely ignored.
Even though there was never any stated law condemning the act of unilateral secession, and any condemnation of the Confederate South must be pieced together from after-action SCOTUS 'opinions'
and militia acts which were originally designed for completely different purposes, as well as implications and other vague remembrances, there was never any amendment to the Constitution passed giving the general government the right to invade a state in order to bring it back into the Union. And, to this day, there still does not exist such as a thing. It all basically falls under Alexander Hamilton's implied nonsense; this reading between the lines to suit the present purpose insanity.
Yet there does exist one thing, and this thing seems to be the most powerful force of all. There seems to be this undying and unmitigated hatred for the Confederate South and its active secession from the union to the embarrassment of the sectional president Abraham Lincoln. in truth, this hatred comes off as looking absolutely ridiculous from the viewpoint of a neutral outsider, yet this does seem to be the intended purpose of those people who lost the civil war; for none of those people wanted to go under minority rule, none of them wish to give up their political power in their own state to a group of freed slaves who were being convinced that their freedom had come from the northern invasion rather than from where it had truly come from; the South seceding from the union in the first instance, and condemning slavery as an art form in North America forever. No Southerner wanted to live under a federal top heavy United States of America, especially if it was to be run like the northern states ran their own governments up there. True there were southern 'unionist' sellouts, but those who were called True Confederates believed completely in the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal.
So what did these people leave us?
They left us one thing; they left us the fact that they had existed; that they had done what they had done for the reasons that they actually did these things, and that they did not care in the least what the North ever thought of them. They did not mind to be thought of as traitors, nor as criminals. They fought and they died trying to keep their country as they envisioned. And they would have their country, or else they would disappear in the process. And they chose to disappear.
In their silence, they did not expect us to believe as they did. They actually said nothing at all about any of it, and only spoke in their diaries and in their letters about the actual events as they knew them to be. the Confederate president indeed offer his apologia in The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, but an apologia is not an apology; it is a defense of one's opinions or conduct. The rest of the South offers no such thing, nor did it care to offer any such. The South never surrendered. Appomattox was the surrender of Lee and the 8,000; not of the Confederacy. The Confederate South never surrendered; it chose to be destroyed, instead.
The flag still exists. Like unilateral secession, the present-day government has neither the will nor the right to ban the flag in a law, or an amendment, like some sort of a swastika of racism. Those of such a political nature are completely disappointed time and again when they attempt to remove the symbol from consideration.
The important thing is that the South seceded from the union; anything else is a mere footnote to that event.
I did not know what the South had left us until I went to my first Civil War reenactment, and I drove to that side of the field where the big Confederate flags were flying impudently in the wind. It is quite a rush for a Southern person to stand there and see those flags, and indeed, that flag in particular... beating against the breeze.
The Betsy Ross flag must have surely felt the same way in the sight of those patriots of the Spirit of '76 of whom Thomas Jefferson ever mentioned with the greatest reverence. There is something thrilling about being completely despised, and yet feeling in your heart that you are, when it all shakes out, on the side of right as you see it.
It is a thrill that no one but a Southerner would understand, and it is worth all of the vitriolic venom and rage for the honor of standing in its shadow.
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