Editor’s note: The following letter is in response to the letter “May the Spirit of the Confederacy Live Forever” by Larry Spencer, published last week.
Whether or not Confederates were officially made American veterans in 1958 has little to do with the motives and politics of their leaders.
I find nothing “sacred” about their positions on slavery and destroying the United States by secession and their insistence that “all men are NOT equal and born free.”
The argument that the Confederate leaders did not want to “control and operate” the government is just fantasy, notwithstanding the evidence that they wanted to establish a “Confederacy” and make the right to own slaves in perpetuity the number one priority.
It is a failed argument made by the president that, “What’s next? George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?” No, because while it is true that both men owned slaves, there is no evidence that either man would dissolve the union to keep slaves.
It is difficult to take men from one generation and compare their motives with the next generation. Comparing the reasons for separation from an external and outside our country, Great Britain, and the reasons for the Civil War being an “internal” struggle between those loyal to the United States and those getting rich from slave labor and cotton.
I find the argument spurious and divisive with the broad comment that there is “Hatred for the South” because it is some kind of bastion of “spiritual and intellectual redoubt of liberty,” it is because it still clings to the belief and the proposition that one drop of blood that is not Caucasian makes that person socially unacceptable.
I believe that as long as this attitude prevails, little progress can be expected. It would shock many Americans who have always considered themselves white that they are not considered white in the “South.” Among these are Italians, Greeks, Jews and the list goes on.
We are one people, but we must also be a patient people, time to assimilate into this great nation is not easy, and it would go a long way for people hiring other people to ask of themselves, “Do I believe that the person applying for this job capable of doing this job?”
Richard Nielsen, Royal Palm Beach
