Manufactured controversy. They are tearing down a statue in Portsmouth, VA tonight. I think that some level of remembrance here in the south is appropriate. I know that renaming Lee chapel where the man is buried was not appropriate.
Even on this board there is a lot of hate the south rhetoric. Sorry y'all. My family owned slaves like seven generations ago. We were in the war, still have Bank of Richmond money brand new in the photo album. I have never owned or displayed a confederate flag, never will. I am most certainly not guilty about being white or from here. My take on the war, the south fought to preserve slavery, the north to subjugate the states to the federal. The end of slavery was good, but probably coming soon anyway if you look at industrialization and the rest of the nations that abolished slavery without a war. The industrial north did not and would not deal fairly with the south, it very much mimics our modern urban/rural divide. The north by and large didn't give a crap about slavery, so I tire of the noble rhetoric. They just shipped them north after the war and made slavery by another name. Sadly, our current state of affairs came from the wrong result of the war. The end of slavery was not worth the eternal subjugation of the states to the federal. It had until then been an open question of states vs. federal. And an idea that a state that freely entered a union could leave it.
