Re: Fast track to offense
"It stands for racism, hatred, and slavery and always has."
Nope, as any scholar of American History will tell you. (But who listens to them?
It stood for Sates rights, the whole succession movement came about because the Federal Government was expanding its powers in ways that abrogated State Rights.
Slavery wasn't even mentioned until the second year of the war, when the northern states started demanding that the Federal Government end the bloody massacre.
Slavery? Funny thing that. The Emancipation Proclamation only ended slavery in the conquered territories. (Their term, it's right there in the proclamation itself.)
There were Northern states that continued to use slavery for another 2 years afterward, until the 13th amendment was finally added to the constitution.
Funny, that is almost never mentioned these days, or that slavery was practiced in many so called free northern states, before during and after the civil war.
"The historian Joanne Pope Melish, who has written a perceptive book on race relations in ante-bellum New England, recalls how it was possible to read American history textbooks at the high school level and never know that there was such a thing as a slave north of the Mason-Dixon Line:" - http://slavenorth.com/