This was published in the Boulder Weekly Jan. 26th 2023, here. The column I'm responding to is here.
Editor,
As much as I usually love Dave Anderson’s columns, his latest, about the Civil War, could have been better. I’d like to offer some facts that Dave at least kind of left out. In recent years I have frequently gotten the impression that a LOT of Americans are confused about the Civil War. People think it was about states’ rights and not slavery and racism. In recent decades many people in the Republican Party who were either closet racists (or had been fooled by them) thought it was fine to have the Confederate flag displayed wherever people wanted to display it, including as part of state flags.
The Confederacy and it’s symbols were and are about slavery and racism. The Confederacy was NOT about state’s rights as some have claimed. Those who pushed for it’s creation complained that northern States had anti-slavery laws. At one point, the Confederacy’s leaders briefly considered ending slavery to get military support from Europe- support that probably would have resulted in victory against the Union. They decided to keep slavery, meaning that slavery was more important to them than independence from Washington D.C. And there was at least one incident where Black Union soldiers captured by the South were executed instead of being taken to POW camps as were the White Union soldiers.
When Donald Trump needed a new Secretary of Veterans Affairs in 2018, the position was filled by Robert Wilkie, a man with a history of involvement with the Neo-Confederate movement. In 2020 Trump passionately opposed re-naming military bases named after Confederate military leaders, including one responsible for the incident where Black POWs were executed. In 2017 Trump talked about the Civil War and said that the former President Andrew Jackson would have handled the slavery issue better than Lincoln did and the Civil War would have been avoided. Jackson was a passionate opponent of abolitionists and would have compromised with the South and slavery would have continued with (at most) minor changes to it's geographic scope and/or life time and/or there may have been minor changes in how slaves were treated. Or he may have done absolutely nothing about slavery- if it were up to Donald Trump, slavery might still exist today.
As Dave said, the Neo-Confederate view is part of the MAGA movement.
Tom Shelley
Boulder
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