And here it is. I'll try to be brief, but this is a topic of which I am VERY well educated and could talk on for hours, but I won't.
1. White people didn't invent slavery. Slavery has been around since Biblical times. The Old Testament contains laws that regulate slavery, which was a common practice in the ancient world. For example, Leviticus 25:44-46 allows Israelites to purchase slaves from other nations as inherited property. The Bible also lays out rules on how both slave owners and slaves should act, even calling for Israelite slaves to be released after six years.
2. Blacks in Africa were enslaved by other blacks, and were then sold to other countries. The common misbelief is that the slave traders would conduct raids into Africa and capture the locals, then ship them off to other countries (specifically America) and sell them. The truth is that the African tribes - specifically the Zulus - would raid villages of other tribes, enslave the people, then sell them to the slave traders. The slave traders never went any further into Africa than where they were docked.
3. At one time slavery existed in every state of the Union. Yes, even though it was admitted into the Union as a free state, Slavery existed in California. People who moved to the state brought their slaves with them, and California did nothing to prevent it. The state even adopted a version of the 1852 Fugitive Slave Act which helped return runaway slaves to their owners.
4. Blacks owned slaves, with one of the wealthiest Southern slave owners being a black man. Antoine Dubuclet of Louisiana owned approximately 100 slaves and was only one of several wealthy black slave owners. William Ellison Jr. was a former slave who became a blacksmith, and by 1860 he was one of the wealthiest property owners in South Carolina, owning 63 slaves and 900 acres of land.
5. The average Confederate soldier was fighting to protect his homeland, not to preserve slavery. Sure, they knew that the Southern politicians were all about preserving slavery and they knew the reason for it, but the main reason they fought was to protect their homes and their lands from the "Yankee invaders." If you want to read something that tell you why the men on both sides fought, then I strongly suggest you read "For Cause and Comrades." It's a book made up of letters, journals, messages, and diaries from men on both sides of the conflict and it tells why each of them fought. (Hint: Most Yankees were fighting to preserve the Union, not free the slaves - including General US Grant.)
6. Most slave trading companies were based in Boston. Yes, there were several in the South, but the biggest and most successful slave trading companies were based in Boston.
7. The Confederate flag never flew from a slave ship. Every slave ship from America flew the Stars and Stripes, not the Stars and Bars.
8. The Confederate States of America outlawed the slave trade before the United States did. When the Confederate Constitution was drafted and approved in 1861 it specifically outlawed the importation of any new slaves into the Confederacy. But it did nothing, however, to abolish slavery entirely as it allowed current slave owners to keep their slaves. The United States didn't abolish slavery until AFTER the war with the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution.
9. Harriet Beecher Stowe never saw a Southern plantation. She actually never set foot in the South at all. She wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin" based on the interviews with former slaves and stories in the Yankee newspapers that she had read. In other words, her book was based not on facts but on heresay.
I could go on, but I think you get the point by now.
I'm just as proud of the South as I am of the United States, and for the same reasons. Both have made HUGE mistakes (like how the US treated both the Irish and the American Indians, for example), but in the entire history of the world there has never been a 'perfect' country or one that didn't make mistakes. Americans have always believed in standing up for what they believed in, and that's true even today. While not all of the people of the South believed in slavery, they did believe in defending their homes from an invader, so they went to war for it - just as their grandfathers went to war to repel the British invaders 85 years prior.
That's why I'm proud to be both an American and a Southerner, and that's why I fly both the Stars and Stripes AND the Stars and Bars.
And if you have a problem with that, then that's a 'you' problem and not a 'me' problem.
