The Cornerstone of The Confederacy Was Permanent Black Enslavement and Destruction of the United States; Confederate Flag Wavers, Is That What You Honor?

By Joe Rothstein

On the Fourth of July, two friends of mine, Stephanie and Joe Kelly, posted on my Facebook page a speech by Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy. Stephens delivered this speech to a cheering crowd in Georgia a few weeks before the south fired on Fort Sumter, South Carolina to launch the Civil War.

The speech summarizes the rationale for secession, why southern states were leaving the United States to establish their own country. In posting the speech on Facebook, Joe Kelly, said, “The speech is a powerful history lesson for better perspective on our current times.”

And that it is, for it neatly packages the “heritage” that those who fly the Confederate flag and defend Confederate monuments, identify with and honor.

Here, edited from the full version (available on line at
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles) is what the Civil War was all about:

“The new (Confederate) constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution, African slavery, as it exists amongst us as the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.

“Thomas Jefferson had anticipated this, as the “rock upon which the old Union would split.” He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he…