The Stars and Bars II

Recently great attention has been placed on symbols of the Confederacy in our nation. It almost seems like there is a near consensus that such symbols belong in museums and nowhere else. But Trump, who is still supported to one degree or another by a large minority of the population and might be re-elected, passionately believes that there is nothing wrong with such symbols.

I have named this post “The Stars and Bars II” because I did a post about 11 years ago called “The Stars and Bars.” It’s about how legitimizing the Confederate flag contributed to a woman (whose story I read about in the publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center) becoming a Nazi skinhead.

A lot of people believe that the Confederacy was about independence from tyrannical Washington DC rule instead of being about slavery. But when they considered ending slavery to get military support from Europe and win the war, they decided not to. Slavery was more important to them than independence.

When people invoke states rights in connection with the Confederate cause, what they don’t know or ignore is that the Confederate states were unhappy with those northern states that passed laws interfering with the Fugitive Slave Act and which banned slave-owners from bring slaves with them while inside those states. They were against individual states passing anti-slavery laws.

The Confederacy didn’t believe in freedom. According to the movie “CSA: The Confederate States of America” (which is a fake documentary looking at an alternative history where the South wins), they intended to colonize Latin America if successful.

The idea that the South was oppressed by the North is ridiculous. In two ways their voting population was over-represented in the US government.

First, as I explain towards the bottom of this post, the way the US Senate works is undemocratic to the benefit of the smaller states. I have yet to create a 100% fool-proof argument, but take the number two for two Senators and divide it by the population of Wyoming, the smallest state and do the same thing with California. The tiny percentage of a vote that residents of the former have in the Senate is MUCH bigger than the same for Californians, about 67 times bigger. There is nothing wrong about small states being out-voted by big states, it’s not like living in a small state puts you in a protected class and you need some sort of Affirmative Action. I’m willing to bet that the population of the average Confederate state back then was probably about 1/10 the size of the population of the average Union state (UPDATE 9/4/23 I just found a way to sort of nail this down without a lot of work- the average Confederate state had 5.25 congressional districts and the average Union state (including the border states) had 7.4 congressional districts).

There’s also the 3/5 Compromise, where in terms of allocating US House districts, each slave was counted as 3/5 of a person. I’m sure in some Confederate states before the Civil War, this meant at least an additional House seat.

So, the states that formed the Confederacy had MORE power per non-slave resident than the States that remained in the union. They were not oppressed by the North. Even with their inflated political power, they were often just out-voted. Considering that the Constitution gives every state an additional two votes in the Electoral College based on having two Senators, which creates a small and false degree of equality between the states, that statement applies to the election of Lincoln as well.

They were also, if it’s not obvious, just racist. One example of that is that some Black Union soldiers captured by the Confederacy were killed instead of being held as POWs and more generally Black POWs were treated differently than white POWs.  One of the military installations that Trump wants to keep named after a Confederate general, Fort A.P. Hill, is named after someone who had his men execute Black POWs. According to this (two other things in this post come from there), when Texas seceded, it was explicitly in favor of the idea that the white race is superior.

The Confederacy was all about racism and slavery and had no legitimate claim to being oppressed by the North. The Confederate flag is a symbol of racism and should be removed from anything official and military bases named after Confederate generals should be renamed and statues etc. about the Confederacy should be removed to museums where they belong.