Wait, I thought the slaveowners declaring secession from and raising arms against the legitimate government was was led to the creation of the United States.
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Well, both sides had slaves at that time.
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The same holds true true for the civil war.
It has previously occurred to me that part of the reason why white northerners like to focus on the “treason against the United States” angle is because it’s just about the only thing the Confederacy did that wasn’t also done by the North.
Treason was by far the least of the Confederacy’s crimes. Keep in mind that John Brown and Geronimo were also “guilty” of treason against the United States.
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Treason doth never prosper, what’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.
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As a Briton I find it endlessly amusing when people claim there shouldn’t be statues of confederate generals “because they were traitors”.
Better tear down those statues of the Founding Fathers, too! Damned traitors!
The issue with the Confederate General statues isn’t that they were traitors, it is that those statues are seen as a message to the black community that the town council would have preferred it if they had remained as slaves.
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Yes, I know that’s the (much) bigger problem, but some people like to go on about them being traitors as well, especially when trying to rile up the sorts of people who fly Confederate flags.
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Since we appear to be having an extended digression on the subject of treason, I may as well post this again… 
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Does Britain have any monuments built to honor the colonists who rebelled against the crown?
(Also slavery wasn’t one of the central issues driving the American Revolution as the British Empire had no apparent designs on ending slavery in the colonies at the time).
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Hey, this is only going to get you dunked on if you didn’t mean it rhetorically. (There’s a statue of George Washington in Trafalgar square.)
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I asked it because I genuinely didn’t know. Seems to have been a gift from the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1924, and it probably would have been rude for London to refuse it considering that the US had just sent so many young men to fight alongside England in WWI. So the context is a little different than all those statues of Robert E. Lee.
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You’re right about context, and that the US didn’t form solely to establish and maintain slavery as its primary goal (unlike the Confederates).
IMO, the arguments (like the one you were replying to) comparing George Washington with Confederate generals aren’t being made in the best of faith. Stripping out the context and crying “hypocrisy” doesn’t make monuments that specifically glorify racism any better.
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But that hadn’t been the point. The point made was that the South’s “sin” was treason, by declaring secession. And that’s a flat, pointless argument, like treating a whistle blower like someone who sold state or company secrets for money or just for kicks.
I don’t think anyone’s main objection to Confederate monuments has ever been because of a principled opposition to treason, with no mention of their support of systemic racism.
This is also way off topic, because Alice Sheldon never even fought in the Civil War.
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How utterly convenient that it’s off topic now, and not 30 comments back when it was about a couple in a desperate situation.
I feel like you’ve pointed out the difference here, by yourself.
(I also don’t feel that Sheldon spent her life going to war to continue the practice of slavery, nor do I think she froze black people and women out of her profession, for that matter. If there’s new evidence for anything like that, I’d look at it.)
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- The primary reason the North fought the war was to prevent secession.
- The primary reason the Confederacy is vilified today is because they fought a war to preserve slavery.
- If the South had actually fought for secession for principled reasons, had won said war, and had eventually become one of the United States’ staunches allies a few generations later then the context of Confederate monuments would be entirely different.
I also agree with @tuhu that none of this is particularly relevant to the topic.
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Any objection to renaming the award for Octavia Butler? She was working class, pulled herself up by her temp-job bootstraps, never plagiarized or killed anyone, and was a fine and feminist writer. Of course, she was African-American and this might not sit well with the closeted racists who so vehemently protest the Campbell decision, but their tears mean nada to me.
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