Monday, February 2, 2004

Neo-Confederate Nonsense (1)

The Jackson (MS) Clarion-Ledger likes to print letters from neo-Confederates. A large majority of Mississippi voters in 2001 did vote to make Mississippi the Confederate flag state. But, still, can't they get any better letter-writers than people repeating drivel from pro-Confederate pamphlets?

A man from Pearl explains that the Civil War couldn't have been about slavery because only 5% of Confederate soldiers owned slaves, a common neo-Confederate argument. There weren't any WMDs in Iraq, either, but we went to war over them, didn't we?

But we don't need analogies. We can look at the extent to which slavery was declared by the Rebel leades themselves as the cause of war and the extent to which nonslaveowning whites supported the institution. There's also the fact that anyone who owned 20 or more slaves could pay a bounty to someone else to take his place in the Confederate draft. And I've already given too much attention to a man who writes, "The truth is that Lincoln and Grant both owned slaves!" Which, of course, is not true at all.

(Cont. in Part 2)

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