The party of Lincoln, the party of--damn, another Confederacy post.

This is Anderson Cooper with correspondent Roland Martin and Sons of the Confederate Veterans' Brag Bowling discussing the issue, and if anything, the polarization of the discussion suggests to me that it would be a great thing if we as a country became more aware of Civil War history, just because it has so much influenced our civil (and uncivil) discourse to this day.

The omission of slavery was a mistake on Gov. McDonnell's part, and the declaration itself struck me as being a pander to the folks I think of as "un-Reconstructed". The statement that slavery just wasn't that big a part of the Civil War strikes me as quite untrue. Most people explaining the merits of the Confederate cause touch upon the Tenth Amendment and the issue of states' rights, but just like the aphorism "All roads lead to Rome", the major states' rights issue of concern seemed to have to do with the property issues regarding human beings who were at the time considered property. It had something to do with determining the appropriate representation of the south in the US Congress as I dimly recall (Magellan and Columbus, the teachers would dwell on. Bloody Kansas and the Missouri Compromise, are touched on, but developing a political context? Pfft--things moved quickly in the high school classes where most of us got exposed to this stuff.) But that was also very much about slave states vs. free.

The Neo-Confederate claim that Constitutional principles were at stake, and that this was a matter of judging the merits of the Tenth Amendment against the VIth Article of the Constitution. But where Constitutional principles were at issue, why was it that the problems of the 1800's were resolved on a battlefield, and not in the courts? And also--why did young southern males who were not land or slave-owners participate in the conflict?

I think this is the sort of discussion students would profit from because the same issues affect us today. But in context, for the sake of the stability of the nation, the federal principles of the VIth Article seem to have held primacy. I've seen comments regarding this issue on HuffPo and other big blogs discuss Madison and Hamilton as if somehow the Federalists would have been anti-Federalism. In regards to the shock that the US government would ever order soldiers against US citizens to enforce the Federal law--you could go back to the Whiskey Rebellion when George Washington put down the rebels against a grain tariff to see that it's got a precedent. That precedent was echoed when the shots were fired at Ft Sumter and Abraham Lincoln did what he had to do, and it was echoed again when Dwight Eisenhower called up the 101st Airborne and federalized the National Guard of Arkansas to see to it that an African-American child could get an education at Little Rock High School.

Anyway, my take on it is: people learning more relevant history is always good. Omitting things we don't like to recall, such as the terrible and peculiar institution that caused a nation within our nation to suffer, is wrong and short-sighted. And the issues raised by the "balance" our forefathers tried to inject into the Constitution are still with us today.

But I'll also add that the discussion can't take place without acknowledging that race also played a part in this. Part of the playing-down of slavery comes from a recognition of slavery as an active evil by denying the liberty of another person. But we are really still close to a time in our history when segregation, which denied the equality between people of different races, was still in force, and that perceived inequality was the basis of assuming it was alright to keep people in servitude. But we recognize racism now as an especial form of ignorance, such that the very label of "racist" is considered a very grave epithet. And so it happens that the last political party or movement to outwardly embrace either the cause of segregation or the business of polishing the halos of the Confederate martyrs, is going to look like an ass to those of us who have grasped that ultimately, the Confederate cause itself was based on the wrong ideals, and that too many people died for them.

Or something like that. I should have had more Civil War education in school.