Probably because its so false that no one has felt the need to respond. However, you've brought it up at least twice, and now Dagless is parroting you, so I guess it needs to be responded to.
https://www.axios.com/the-year-that-confederate-statues-were-erected-2474424759.html
If you disagree, perhaps you could show your proof to the publishers of that site.
I've read through eleven pages of posts and couldn't possibly quote and respond to every one that stood out, so I'll have to post cold here. Excuse me for what may seem like a rambling group of thoughts. It probably is, but I'm just trying to explain and defuse a lot of what is going on here with history. Regarding these monuments and the opportunistic trouble surrounding them, I want to offer folks some information that I hope they reflect on and perhaps get a better perspective of current events and the dangers we now face. For those of you who are so used to hanging labels on people as a way to avoid debating things, feel free to call me a Nazi white supremacist Trump supporter and go on with your life, blissfully ignorant to the damage you do to society as a whole, all while claiming you "did something" by refusing to accept my viewpoint. Above all, have fun.
For those few here who have repeatedly mentioned that these Confederate monuments were erected to intimidate black families, you would not be accurate. Most of them were not paid for by state or local governments to support Jim Crow laws, but in large part paid for by private organizations including the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the United Confederate Veterans, and Sons of Confederate Veterans. They have prominent display in public places because they are memorials to war dead, and not memorials to slavery. Any statement to the contrary is the viewer projecting their own views on those memorials, or worse, listening to groups seeking to use the issue of slavery to further their own ends.
One of our esteemed posters mentioned early on that calling the war between the states a "battle for states rights" was simply semantics and that it was purely to ensure slavery, and then he posted links to the 1861 Confederate Constitution as proof. If you want to speak of semantics, then you should be right at home with that argument. Pay no attention to the tariff debates prior to the secession, go look for proof in a document generated post-secession. If a few lines like that would be some kind of obvious proof that the south was seceding to protect slavery, then you should have a field day with Lincoln's obvious distaste for the slaves as a species, all spoken prior to secession. Lincoln repeatedly said blacks were incapable of equaling whites, as they were obviously a different species. This was both his view and a reflection of the northern mentality of the times. He pushed not for emancipation, but for northern-style abolition, where the slaves would be forcibly seized and deported outside of the Union. Southern-style abolition, on the other hand, largely dealt with manumission, where the slave was freed arbitrarily, or purchased and then freed by charity, or freed after a labor schedule was fulfilled. I should point out that there were contrarian movements on both sides of the line, with northerners favoring southern-style freedom and vice-versa. To deny this would be to play into yet another version of the "North vs South" paradigm, where each side projects evil on the other side. I have no intention of subscribing to the buzz-word bingo that is part of the current public discourse.
I'll further mention Lincoln's well documented support for keeping slavery in the slave states, and he supported a Constitutional amendment that would enshrine slavery in US law. If the so-called slave states wanted support for slavery in the Union government, they need look no further than old "Honest Abe". So why would they leave that? Most likely because of the steel import tariffs that Lincoln promised Pennsylvania steel interests that he would pursue with armed force if necessary. Those tariffs would prevent cheaper UK steel from entering southern ports, thereby hitting their already fragile economy even harder, while protecting those Pennsylvania factories.
It should be noted that initially, only four states seceded, and that secession was largely related to military threats to collect the tariff. When the Union military was mobilized against those four states, the rest of the states involved in the debate decided to vote to rebel.
During the war, Lincoln authorized his rabid generals - most notably William Sherman - to pursue the war as they saw fit, without regard to the people. Sherman's troops looted and raped their way across Georgia in a march that today would be prosecuted as a war crime. Its especially criminal when the slaves they were allegedly freeing also died, as they were left without shelter or provision to die in the approaching winter. While Lincoln was publicly lamenting that "brother would kill brother" in the war, his generals had troops marching under orders to treat the southerners as lower than the lowest animal, and Johnny Reb's noncombatant family members were considered fair game.
Estimates of southern war dead range from 600,000 to over 900,000, and was quite possibly much higher. A large portion of the dead were civilians including women and children, as well as slaves.
I'd like to point out that as was mentioned earlier, many of those slaves were sold into the slave markets by tribes that conquered other tribes in Africa and had deals with the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and British slavers. Some of those slaves were sold into the south (and the north too, don't forget that slavery began in the north as the result of a northern court decision and then spread to the south) in domestic slave markets owned and run by blacks, and some of them were bought by black plantation owners. For that matter, there were also freed slaves who fought for the Confederacy, as well as born-free blacks who also fought for the Confederacy, voluntarily. That is once of those "inconvenient truths" that gets buried by the NAACP at every turn.
Much is made of the KKK and Nathan Bedford Forrest being a former Confederate general. Not much is said about the societal unrest that brought about the formation of the KKK. The US federal authority that occupied the states in rebellion banned white southern males from holding public office or voting. They brought in northerners to hold those offices - the famous "carpetbaggers". They also built up a bureaucracy at least partially staffed with blacks, as a further salt in the wound. While there were men in the KKK as well as out of it who would have looked down on blacks no matter what station they occupied in life - just as there are now - that view coalesced around Forrest's movement to launch a guerrilla war against what they perceived as further northern force being visited against their lives, especially damaging since these were lives lived under occupation, that lasting for two decades under what was known as "Reconstruction". This Union policy tried to rebuild southern society around northern ideals, and was a lasting contributor towards future racism.
(cue the slavering buzzword hordes: "Did he just blame the north for the creation of the KKK? Does he not know they were all southerners? It doesn't matter what the north did, the south was evil!!" No, I didn't blame the north. I blamed the Reconstruction policies. The southerners did not have to raise arms against this in aggression, especially on innocent families. People reach a breaking point, and they do evil things. After four years of war and devastation that were the result of a peaceful seccession, perhaps they were done with seeking peaceful resolution. I don't defend it, I simply try to understand it and not have a knee-jerk response.)
I want people to think about this, and not just throw up some knee-jerk response. When people are forced to do something they don't want to do, resentment builds. People have pride, and when that pride is injured, they will respond irrationally in some cases. Right now we have a movement built largely around hysteria, stating that open display of the Confederate memorials is tacit approval of racism. "How is that so?" one wonders, and the answer one gets is "because the south favored slavery, and the north fought to free the slaves". Yet it isn't true. There are people who swear the south was out to have slavery for generations to come - including at least one person here - but that is also not true. Jefferson Davis was at the forefront of a group who wanted to end slavery within 30 years, and they wanted to have a plan to do it, and not just dump tens of thousands of slaves on the labor market at once. Doing so would displace low-skilled white labor as former slaves would take any wage to survive. Davis and his fellow countrymen seemed to realize the danger that would pose, i.e. resentment amongst whites.
I feel this is very similar to the debate that is had in political circles regarding public welfare. It simply should not have ever existed. I and many others want it to disappear. But what of the needy people that depend on it, and aren't there to game the system? What happens to them if the rug is pulled out from under them in one move? How is that any different from slavery ending in a moment, and then dumping tens of thousands of uneducated people on the labor market, with no capital resources and no marketable skills? Obviously there has to be an exit strategy. So would fighting a war to "free" welfare recipients be the answer? Or should there be some plan to eliminate welfare over a generation that would minimize the damage to the people and the economy?
(Cue the hordes: "He just equated welfare recipients with slaves! Racist!!!" No, I just pointed to similarities in circumstance between slavery and welfare as institutions, not as similarities in the human quality of slaves and welfare recipients. Nothing more. Move along.)
How is it that this isn't taught in schools? Why is it so important for the north to portrayed as saints and the south as devils? Does it have anything to do with the military adventurism that came from that victorious north over succeeding generations? The subjugation of Indian tribes? Teddy Roosevelt's not-so-hidden threat against the entire world in the form of the Great White Fleet? The involvement in the destruction of lawful governments and the establishment of puppet states in over fifty nations worldwide? Yet the south is the villain, right? Southern armies were just a few miles away from DC at one point in the war, and if this was truly a war to control the government (the definition of a "civil war"), then they could have ended it there. They didn't. This was a war for self-determination, which regardless of some of the components of that, was an honorable thing.
Right now, there are public figures (and some not-so-public) who are using this debate over memorials as a hot wire to achieve some other aims. The uneducated responses I see to daily activity in our country points to this. How in the world did people come to associate Donald Trump with Fascism? First, it indicates that the majority of people have no idea what the term means, with the first letter either capitalized or not. Second, asking them to explain it brings up a litany of responses related to his tax returns, his morals, his business acumen, or some nebulous perceived Russian influence - in short, nothing at all related to fascism. I believe that this is just a learned acclimatization to Trump's pillory in the mainstream press. If you believe the (well documented) story about Operation Mockingbird, then this demonization gets a whole lot scarier. (For the record, if you want a textbook example of fascism, that bundling together of private industry and public office, look at the aforementioned alliance between Lincoln and the Pennsylvania steel companies. Irony of ironies...)
(For full disclosure, I don't like Trump, I don't dislike Trump. I voted for him on one single plank of his platform, which was ending foreign military adventurism and establishing peaceful trade relations with all nations, sort of identical to that which many of the founding fathers espoused. I find it terrible that he has been so far prevented from exercising that part of his platform, largely by the current Russia scare that is being beaten to death. Anything that he does that goes against the four terms of the militarist BushObama agenda can be credited to his obvious "ties to Russia/Putin", and his move is deflated. Any member of the legislature that independently agrees to back him, or at least deviate from the current adventurist hysteria, is called "Putin's favorite". Trump talks peace with other nations, he's their puppet. He bombs Syria, he's acting like a "true American". How disgusting, yet so obviously telling about the mentality in this country. )
Further, how is it that the people who are waving swastika flags are Nazis? Because they say they are? Because others say they are? They have nothing to do with the original Nazi organization, not even tangentially. They're more like a cult of personality. Their planks distill out all the most rabid stuff from the politics and infrastruction of the Nazis and use them like a weapon against people. They hate Jews, they hate blacks, they adore Hitler, they... what else? I doubt even they could tell you. The fact that the organized ones cling together wearing clothes that were outdated by 1950 or so should tell you something. They're just another buzzword slavering horde, and its more identity politics. There aren't that many of them, and their number wouldn't grow if they weren't such a hot issue right now. Uneducated people looking to be part of something that will give them a voice will now be interested in joining. No different than the violent socialist movements in liberal arts colleges, or the gangs that spring up in low income areas.
I'd like to close - for those of you who were able to read to the end - by saying that in a free country, every idea has to be up for debate. You cannot say "its settled" and then refuse to talk about it, or demonize anyone who wants to raise the issue again, and say you're in favor of free speech. I find it very disheartening to see how far people have drifted away from the Socratic method, where ideas were constantly discussed and refined, and towards a polarized ideology where good and evil can somehow be projected on to every discussion, with prizes for the winners as established by virtue consensus. Its gotten to the point where you can't talk about the Autobahn anymore without first offering a disclaimer stating you don't hold Nazi ideology. You can't talk about education without talking about giving people a "safe space". And you definitely can't talk about how people died to support individual determination without first accusing them of racism.
so be it.
