Alleged moderate Virginia Republican Governor Bob McDonnell has reinstated April as "Confederate History Month" in the great Commonwealth of VA, after it had been abandoned by his two Democratic predecessors.
According to the governor's proclamation, April was chosen because it was the month that Virginia decided to abandon the United States and join the Confederate States of America. The proclamation is curiously silent about rhe reasons for VA joining the CSA, but if we look back to the first paragraph of Virginia's Ordinance of Secession, we get a pretty good idea.
The people of Virginia in their ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America, adopted by them in convention on the twenty-fifth day of June, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, having declared that the powers granted under said Constitition were derived from the people of the United States and might be resumed whensoever the same should be perverted to their injury and oppression, and the Federal Government having perverted said powers not only to the injury of the people of Virginia, but to the oppression of the Southern slave-holding States
(via Matt Yglesias)
People can (and do, at great length) argue about the relative importance of slavery over tarriffs, or industrialization, etc. as causes of secession and the Civil War, and whether we in the present can judge Southerners from 150 years ago, who were raised with completely different world views and prejudices.
However, I think that we can say, for certain, that it is utterly wrong for a state government (particularly one representing a state where 20% of the population is Black) to honor treason against the Constitution of the United States, which resulted in an armed rebellion that fired on the flag of the United States and led to the deaths of 650,000 Americans, all in the defense of the enslavement of their fellow human beings.
No comments:
Post a Comment