THE CONFEDERACY AND THE DUNCES PT. 2

Just another statement of general principles re: the Confederacy on some forum...

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Neither the Union nor the Confederacy was innocent of making profit from slavery, the South simply made more, to the extent that they didn't want to give up those profits when the North sought to marginalize them politically. And when I say "they," I mean not just "rich Southerners," but everyone who profited from Southern States enjoying prominence in politics. For that matter, the whole country profited from the industry of the South, and the same logic you use against the Confederacy could be turned against the Union. After all, the Union promoted emancipation as a war strategy, but what did it do for freedmen after the war? Allowed the South to institute Black Codes; allowed those "rich Southerners" to reclaim their property if they signed loyalty oaths. So, even though the Southern States  were "traitors," the "legitimate authority" of the Union can be seen as being no less opposed to the interests of black people. So your basic reducio ad absurdum would be that neither Union nor Confederate officers should be honored, because neither one did much to help black people.

The North did not fight the war, as Lincoln supposedly claimed, to free slaves. The serious abolitionists had moral reasons for wanting abolition, but the general indifference of the post-Civil War North to the fate of freedmen indicates that black people were just pawns that the North had employed against the South.

Given that neither side acted for dominantly moral reasons, neither side deserves monuments on that basis. But by the same token, since there is a "lack of morality" equivalence between them, one should not be denied while the other is allowed. Monuments may or may not be used at times for political reasons, but the dominant reason is that of a culture writing itself a Valentine that romanticizes the strengths and ignores the faults. You want to say "the South was nothing but a rotten cesspool," when the truth is that, judged from the position of the slavery issue, the whole country was a rotten cesspool. But there's no political advantage to be had from getting rid of all monuments in the U.S., so it all becomes about "Southern heritage is nothing but slavery" and making the South into a scapegoat for the sins of all.