Do not buy into the lie that the Confederacy was about State’s Rights. Not true. It was all about keeping the institution of black slavery in perpetuity.
And, as are most unjust causes, the Civil War was ultimately all about money.
Thanks to a correspondent who knew how to access the relevant historical archives for the State of Texas, I have now read the 1861 document called “A declaration of the causes which impel the State of Texas to secede from the Federal Union.”
Let me express myself as clearly as possible:
The idea that the Confederacy was not about slavery, but more about State’s Rights is a total load of horse hockey.
You can read the whole document here, but I’ve copied the more relevant portions below. The bolded texts are mine:
Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated States to promote her welfare, insure domestic tranquility [sic] and secure more substantially the blessings of peace and liberty to her people. She was received into the confederacy with her own constitution, under the guarantee of the federal constitution and the compact of annexation, that she should enjoy these blessings. She was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery–the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits–a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.
. . .
The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slave-holding States.
. . .
Please, please read the rest of it. There is one reason and one only: they wanted to keep their slaves into perpetuity because they were sure that was part of the God-ordained order.
They are not “beautiful statues.”
So stop the silliness that a move to remove those monuments that celebrate the continued oppression of slaves is a way to “erase history” or destroy some beautiful statues without cause.
Those “beautiful statues” represent the worse of humanity. We have placed on pedestals those men who led a cause to keep a whole people group in chains, gave them the right to impregnate the women at will and sell off the children for a profit.
As I said at the beginning, it is all about money. Always.
Most monuments need to go, but those that stay should be relabeled as part of our shameful past so we may learn truth from them.
Germany does not have adoration-type memorials to Hitler around for people to venerate. Instead, Germans own their past disgraces.
We should do the same. It is the only path to a more just future.
Photo Credit: Carol M. Highsmith – Library of Congress Catalog, Public Domain.
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