[brightball]

For what it's worth, the people of the city of Charleston is responding to the tragedy about as beautifully as anybody could ask.

Everybody outside of the state seems to be on the other end of the spectrum at the moment. Outside groups are actively driving in to try to stir things up and the people at AME have been calmly singing them away.

It's been amazing to watch. You have a big chunk of the country that seems like they're begging for chaotic racial incidents and the people in Charleston saying "No...this ends here."

[markbnj]

Yes, it is really the popular reaction across the country that I am referring to. I don't personally condone banning symbols, but at the same time I think that, historically speaking, if you've been able to fly the flag of a failed rebellion over your capitol for any significant period of time that is pretty liberal on behalf of the winner of said rebellion. Wherever you come down on that, the flag is certainly beside the point here.

[brightball]

There are very people remaining claiming it's not time to take it down. People get defensive about it because most of them take pride in being from the south and that was the most applicable symbol to represent the whole region. It got even more popular with the Dukes of Hazzard. For people like that, they get defensive when people accuse them of racism when nothing could be further from the truth. They aren't thinking "racist flag" they're thinking "southern flag".

On the other hand, it means something all together different for a lot of other people and once people really got that through their heads, there was no question it needed to come down. Very few people are defending keeping it where it is at this point.

[ryanobjc]

Not to mention a failed rebellion that was deliberately formed to protect the economic institution of slavery!

Symbols are important, and for great evils people at different times have decided to ban symbols. And it's time for this one to be banned.

Don't think of this as a knee jerk reaction, this has been on the tables for a century. Finally now public sentiment has turned, and savvy politicians have put the phrase "never let a crisis go to waste" to good use.

[brightball]

There's a lot of interesting reading on the subject. Each state had it's own reasons for secession. Slavery was a part of each but the significance varied dramatically by state. Here's a really interesting read I found on it while all of this was going on. In South Carolina at least, it does look like the states rights side of things was a much bigger factor.

http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/secession/

Robert E. Lee even called slavery a moral and political evil in a letter to his wife and speculated about how long it would take to be eliminated. Here's the 1856 letter.

http://www.civilwarhome.com/leepierce.html

With all this going on right now, researching what's out there from the various perspectives has been interesting.

[secstate]

Well shit, why are you downvoted? For linking to documents that dare to "revise" history and look for original source material to determine why the United States went to war?

Most curious in your first link is the fact that of the four states whose declarations of causes were evaluated, South Carolina used more of the document to argue for states' rights than slavery (37%, 20%).

Obviously slavery had a huge part to do with the conflict, but for a state that still had the Confederate States of America's flag over their capital, it seems their primary reason for war was to preserve their rights as a state in the union.