Here is an interesting article regarding this subject:
Could American Holocaust have been avoided?
By Jack Anderson
25 January 2000
Bigotry is an evil that has led to some of history's worst crimes, the Holocaust being the worst among them. But there are all forms of bigotry, and we are witnessing one of the most peculiar of them in the current controversy over the Confederate flag.
It is a situation made for demagoguery. The claim is made that the flag is a symbol of slavery and secession, and therefore worthy of our disdain. The problem is that the slogan is great alliteration, but terrible history. Here are the facts:
Until the election of 1860 the winning ticket or cabinet was always regionally balanced, but the Republicans of that year chose Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and Hannibal Hamlin of Maine. Their message was clear: Southerners were not welcome. This was not simply a matter of slave states versus free states, but of competing economies and ways of life. As a result, the Republicans did not even bother to campaign in the South, but their divisive ticket won the electoral vote anyway, over a divided Democratic Party. They won it with the smallest plurality in American history: 39 percent.
South Carolina and six other deep South states then foolishly seceded, rather than bear up to the new administration until the next election. Then, even more foolishly, they allowed themselves to be maneuvered into a confrontation at Fort Sumter, a completely bloodless battle that Lincoln used to call for an invasion of the South. That decision, regardless of loyalties, must be regarded as the worst single political decision in our history, because in the stroke of a pen he did what no other event could accomplish: He forced the four upper South states out of the Union.
Those states : Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas had recently voted by overwhelming majorities to reject secession, and each of them, by similar majorities, reversed those votes when compelled by Lincoln to choose between fighting for or against their fellow Southerners; civil wars allow no neutrals. And those states went on to provide more than 50 percent of the manpower for the Confederate armies, which guaranteed a long and bloody war.
Gen. Robert E. Lee's wife, Mary, best expressed the upper South sentiments when she declared South Carolina and Massachusetts ought to fight it out and leave everyone else alone. In short, the average Southerner was not fighting for slavery or even secession. After all, fewer than 5 percent of Southerners were slaveholders (385,000 out of a free population of 8,361,677, according to the 1860 Census), and the men in the ranks were hardly willing to die to protect their officers' right to perpetuate that peculiar institution. They fought because they were invaded.
And by fighting, they died by the thousands. More than 25 percent of all military-age Southern men and 10 percent of all military-age Northern men died in the war, making the Civil War America's holocaust. It was an unnecessary war, which Lincoln claimed was endured solely to preserve the Union. As he wrote to Horace Greeley in 1862, "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...."
Yet it is interesting to ponder what might have occurred had he simply blockaded the seven seceding states instead of invading them. Any course that kept the upper South in the Union would have been preferable to the carnage his invasion inflicted on the nation. The official death toll is listed at 623,000, but that does not include civilian deaths nor lives shortened by war wounds.
So when South Carolina flies the Confederate flag and Georgia retains the emblem in its state flag, the majority of their citizens are not celebrating slavery and secession. They are honoring the ultimate sacrifice paid by their forebears. And the misuse of the Confederate flag by such despicable organizations as the Ku Klux Klan or the Neo-Nazis is devastating to the sons and daughters of Confederate veterans, just as it is devastating to all citizens when the American flag is desecrated, carried upside down or flown by American communists, bigoted skinheads or even by those same Neo-Nazis.
Now the demagogues rally round the phrase of slavery and secession, using their false version of history to denigrate an honorable memory. |
