umm black people own them today because they are uneducated in that sense of history. Blacks fought on the southern side because as slaves they did what they were told.. and were told by the south that the North wanted to make things worse for them. They thought they were fighting for freedom when in reality they were fighting AGAINST it without knowing it.
You just don't seem to want to let go of your iron-clad black-and-white view of things. We've been over this territory, but I'll try again:
There are black families today who still have original CSA battle flags because their ancestors fought for the South. They were fighting for their homes, for masters they were loyal to and loved -- especially for their homes, once Sherman got turned loose, because they knew that with him coming, it didn't matter if they were slave or free, their homes and everything they held dear was going up in flames.
How could slaves fighting on the confederate side give them freedom. That doesn't make ANY sense. Before Lincoln's election there were wide debates on the morality of slavery. I've seen new documentaries on the Discovery channel. Slaves would runaway to the north at the thought of freedom. Do you know what they went through when they were captured? People that didn't own slaves still were obligated to turn slaves in. Slaves could not go anywhere without a pass from their owners. As they made it to the north... the slave catchers would follow them and sometimes kill them. They were seen as property.
Read some history: various states in the South were already giving blacks their freedom for signing up, long before Jefferson Davis made that proclamation -- which was before Lincoln made his. There were free blacks in the South, and not all slave-owners were whites, either; the main slave owners in Charleston, for example, were -- ready for this? -- black women, running their own households and businesses. They, too, emancipated slave men who wanted to go fight.
Not all blacks in the South were slaves. The only firm law was that whites could not be slaves, a law that more than a few whites wished weren't there, because they, the original "po' white trash", lived worse than most slaves, and they would have gladly sold themselves (yes, slaves could own property, but only transportable property) into slavery just to have better places to live and regular meals.
As to what fled slaves went through when captured, that's irrelevant to this.
As for the north taxing the south on cotton.
Irrelevant.
There was a free black man before the civil war broke out. He started pamphlets about freedom and rebelling against the south from within. Slaves got a hold of it and started mass killing their owners as well as other whites from nearby homes/plantations. When the owners got a hold of it they became scared. They did NOT want their "property" to be educated because that gave them POWER. Eventually they went north and killed the free man... who was just minding his own business and helping others. Now when the civil war broke out... the south was weary about arming their black slaves with good weapons seeing their past with rebellion break-outs.
The other side of that is that many white slave owners felt that the ones whose slaves rebelled deserved it, because the owners who got rebelled against were the cruel ones.
And when the war broke out, many men joining up took their slaves with them, and those slaves weren't given guns not so much because of any wariness but because there were barely enough guns for the whites. The blacks taken along were trusted, loyal, honored companions who also happened to be property, but in the army they weren't treated as property -- especially once Lee got a handle on things, because he demanded that all the men, regardless of color or status, be treated with dignity... and he was loved for it, by all his men.
Blacks fought in the civil war on the southern side.. yes. Remember.. they could barely READ. The slave owners could tell them WHATEVER they wanted to hear. If they didn't they'd kill them... or if they won they could be back with family again. To some it was freedom to finally be with their family such as their parents, children, aunts, etc. The ones that COULD read all fled the south. Thousands were killed trying but thousands got away and LEFT the south and fought on the Union side. The union wasn't perfect but what was happening was fate.
There were free, educated blacks in the South, and blacks tended to believe them. You remember all those black women in Charleston, who were the major slave-owners in the city? Many of them could read, many ran their own businesses, and they got the word out to blacks everywhere about what was really going on.
Speaking of fate, if tempers hadn't gotten out of hand, slavery would have ended anyway -- the cold hand of economics was already working its course, as those black women in Charleston demonstrate: free blacks, whenever they could, bought other blacks, and frequently they freed them, and free blacks succeeded by working hard just as much as whites did.
In fact, it is likely that if it weren't for the Civil War, blacks could be better off today, because their freedom would have come on its own, and the hatred driven not so much by race but by a lost war would be absent.
Yes, blacks who fled north often signed up for the Union armies -- once they were allowed to. Most white soldiers in the North were fine with blacks being free, but they didn't want to fight next to them. Even then, they tended to be segregated into "colored" units... whereas in the CSA armies, the races were mixed.
I wonder why the NAACP and HRC as well as other civil rights organizations are against it. But you know those groups that fight for our rights as minorities don't know what they are talking about. As gays we are minorities. And there are not as many gay activists at civil rights groups as their used to be. Me, age 19 walked into one last year and they turned their heads as it was mostly older people. Young gay people don't care about the gay community they just say they do. They are happy they have their gay bars and that they can screw guys without being arrested and thrown in a mental ward. That's why hardly anything is being done today. We go to gay pride parades in June and get drink.. well I dont but others do. They forget what the whole point of the march is about. To many its just a big party where they can meet a hook up to get laid. Pathetic. The few rights we have today is from people that fought hard generations ago. So if you can't understand your own group as a minority... then you and many other gay citizens will never understand OTHER minorities.. and thats why you sugarcoat history and are ignorantly covered with wool over your eyes. But that's not your fault.. you were probably raised like that.
The NAACP finds the CSA battle flag a convenient piece of propaganda, so they only tell one side of the story. They don't want people to know that slaves in the south could earn their freedom the same as in the Revolutionary War, by serving a year and a day in the armed forces, even at the beginning, or later in the war just by signing up and fighting. In fact more than a few whites were upset with Jefferson Davis for his law, because it meant that if a black could run away and get to a CSA army and join up, he was no longer a slave and couldn't be hauled back home.
You'll also find that in the army, blacks had the opportunity to learn to read, and many did, because as supply personnel they needed to be able to, and even till the end of the war the supply logistics had a black majority.
Things like this don't help your argument -- "can't understand your own group as a minority"?
If you're going to argue by making things up, try for something people around here will believe!
"Sugarcoat"? I don't sugarcoat nuttin', hunny -- I look at the whole deal.
You're being a total absolutist on this, which requires either deliberate blindness or blithe ignorance. That same ignorance is what you complain about in your fellow young gays, while being guilty of it yourself.
About how I was raised: I was raised that if "everyone believes" it, there's a good chance it's wrong, that if the government says it, be very suspicious, that if something sounds like a fairy tale it's probably a lie, that if some group of people tells the same story over and over they're probably hiding something, that if you really want to know something you have to find it out for yourself, and before sounding off... study up on what you're talking about.
You're not doing well on those: you're great at believing what "everyone does"; your version of the South is like the dark side of a fairy tale, where things are very, very evil with no trace of good; you've fallen in with folks who tell the same story over and over (and they are hiding something); you clearly haven't gone to a whole lot of effort to find things out for yourself (how many books about the Civil War have you read this last year? I've read three.); and you're sounding off without knowing what you're talking about.
Oh, you've got a bunch right: there was horrible treatment of slaves in the South -- but the flip side of that is that the neighbors of those who treated their slaves that way didn't think much of it, as well as the fact that it had long since been learned that the better you treat your slaves, the more prosperous your plantation or business becomes; there were terrible escaped slave laws -- but the flip side of that is those were there to satisfy a mean-hearted, loud-mouthed minority; there were foolish masters who expected their slaves to believe everything they were told -- but the flip side of that is that there was a very effective black underground "news service", fed by free blacks to other blacks, by black slave-owners to their slaves to pass on to other slaves, so a white slave owner couldn't sail too far from the truth.
Right up to the eve of the Civil War, the situation of blacks in the South was improving. There were more and more free blacks, and they were in general treated as equals by their white neighbors and customers. White owners who were businessmen treated their slaves as employees, because it was good business sense, and more and more of those freed their slaves in their wills, or for good service (and the former slaves stayed on to work for a wage, mostly). White plantation owners more and more let slave families stay together, because it raised slave morale and got better work, and black slave supervisors, often freed for good service, were more and more common.
The Civil War wasn't about slavery, until Lincoln declared it so (beginning a long Republican tradition of invoking a higher moral cause to gain support for a very dirty business, BTW) -- it was about politics, and about pride, and about fear. Slavery would have died a peaceful death, and there wouldn't be icons to paint as utterly evil... like the CSA battle flag.
BTW -- did you know that blacks fighting for the South could command other men, and get medals? Their descendants are proud of those things, too.
