Traitors' Day in Southern United States

Today in Florida and Georgia in the US is Confederate Memorial Day. Other states throughout the southern United States have similar observances on different days throughout the first half of the year.

Officially, this day is set aside:

"As a day to honor those who died defending the Confederate States of America during the American Civil War."

This holiday is celebrated by ten of the eleven states that comprised the Confederate States during the American Civil War, and Kentucky (my home state) which was a Union state throughout the war, but due to lingering racism, likes to pretend it wasn't.

It is a really sad statement about Southern society that this day is celebrated. This war resulted in more than 970,000 casualties (3 percent of the population), including approximately 560,324 deaths, and was brought about by an act of sedition by the so-called Confederate States of America. The political and military leaders of these traitor states violated the US constitution, and caused a lot of death and suffering over their barbaric desire to maintain slavery as the foundation of their socio-economic structure.

A lot of revisionist historians (mainly from the South) have tried to claim that the war was about states' rights and the interpretation of the 4th Amendment to the US constitution which grants these rights, and that slavery had nothing to do with it, but this is simply bullshit. In the last thirty or so years, as racism has become less accepted in this country so has this stupid revisionist opinion.

The first state to pull out of the Union was South Carolina shortly after the election of Abraham Lincoln as president of the US. All anyone has to do is read South Carolina's letter of secession to see what the reasons were. Yes there is a lot about the rights of states within the federal government, but what right were they seceding to defend?

"For twenty-five years this agitation [the anti-slavery movement in the US] has been steadily increasing, until it has now secured to its aid the power of the common Government. Observing the forms of the Constitution, a sectional party has found within that Article establishing the Executive Department, the means of subverting the Constitution itself. A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States [Lincoln], whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

This sectional combination for the subversion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.

On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.

The guaranties of the Constitution will then no longer exist; the equal rights of the States will be lost. The slaveholding States will no longer have the power of self-government, or self-protection, and the Federal Government will have become their enemy.

Sectional interest and animosity will deepen the irritation, and all hope of remedy is rendered vain, by the fact that public opinion at the North has invested a great political error with the sanction of more erroneous religious belief.

We, therefore, the People of South Carolina, by our delegates in Convention assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, have solemnly declared that the Union heretofore existing between this State and the other States of North America, is dissolved, and that the State of South Carolina has resumed her position among the nations of the world, as a separate and independent State; with full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent States may of right do."

Adopted December 24, 1860

Over the next two months, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas followed South Carolina's example.

Upon taking office in March of 1861, Lincoln called the secession "legally void," and said that he had no intention of invading the South, but would use force to maintain possession of Federal property and collection of various Federal taxes, duties and imposts.

In April of 1861 Confederate troops captured Fort Sumter in South Carolina, and Lincoln called up the army to take it back. Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina then joined the Confederacy, and the war was on.

The war lasted 4 years and two months, and ended with the South in almost total economic ruin, and caused divisions in the country that in some ways continue to this day.

Celebration of the soldiers fighting on the side of the Confederacy during this war is the celebration of traitors and enemies of the United States. It would be no different if we as a nation had a holiday honoring the Japanese airman who died at Pearl Harbor, or if the Polish had a national day of mourning for the German soldiers who died capturing Warsaw. If we are going to celebrate traitors and people who cause the loss of American lives, then lets go all out and have a special day of grief for the 19 bastards who died perpetrating the 9/11 attacks.

I'm glad that I now live in a state that, while far from perfect, has monuments not to traitors, but to the poor sons of bitches that fought and died for their country during that stupid war.