This highly regionalized holiday exists only in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. As described in today's Times Daily (Page 2B), The Alabama Commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, says that it is "...proper to recognize the sacrifices of people he believes 'legally seceded from the United States to defend their homes, families and economic system."
And just what was that "economic system?" Well, it is clearly defined later in the article by a quotation from Mississippi's declaration of secession, adopted in 1861, which says:
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery--the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun."
Looking to an even higher authority within the United States of the Confederacy, we find these utterances by its Vice President, Alexander Stephens, who, in his so-called "Cornerstone Speech," said:
"The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution — African slavery as it exists amongst us — the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the 'rock upon which the old Union would split.' He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted."
Stephens went on to say
"(Jefferson's) ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. ... Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner–stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition."
Now--over and against all this clear explication for the basis of secession, we still hear the relentless cant of those who wish to ignore history and argue that secession was not about slavery, but about "states' rights." I seem to remember that during the civil rights strife of the 1960s and 1970s, there were many voices in the South who tried to make the same argument about racial segregation. "States' rights" is, obviously, a more noble motivation for one's cause than slavery or racism, so it is not surprising that defenders of slavery and racism would seize upon "states' rights' as justification for enslavement of their fellow men and women and for denial of constitutional rights on the basis of skin color.
Celebrants of Confederate Memorial Day--go ahead and do whatever it is you do on this day, but please do not trot out the old and stale and just-plain-wrong notion that it was "states' rights" that drove the secessionist cause!
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