Michael, you have proven your assertion that things will be forgotten and circumstances mired in different interpretations. The American Civil War certainly was primarily fueled by the institution of slavery. This debate had been going on since the time of Jefferson. I will remind readers of the Missouri Comprimise of 1820 and the 30-30 line. What we see primarily is a conflict that was not so much a moral debate, as an economic one. The agrarian "south" provided raw materials through an exploitative plantation economy to fuel the industrial engines of the north. Without the south, the great textile mills of New England could not function. Likewise, the later machinery produced by the north which enabled steam powered transport were essential to the escalating modes of production of both regions. Britain and France benefitted tremendously from this arrangement, and for that reason it was necessary to negotiate an exclusion of them from participating once the hostilities began.
This debate continued to rage through the Kansas-Nebraska Act, and the failed Crittenden Comprimise. We might truly state that the K-N Act was the final catalyst for the split. Economics, and the rule of emerging wealth through mode of production were the overriding forces that required the strong stance of northern resistance; the "house divided against itself" threatened not only economics but social control. The corrolary to Europe has some credence, and would have had more effect on western expansion had the division between the states stood.
So as a symbol, the "confederate flag" in any form is little more than a statement of systematic oppression, murder, enslavement, and torture of a peoples for economic gain, and the celebration of the plantation economy and mindset. It does not represent anything noble or genteel. It is the banner of a people who had become arrogant, self-righteous, and possessed with a sense of superiority no different than any despot or regime. The fact that the system would have collapsed under its own weight and mechanization within a decade is immaterial. We still experience discrimination and disenfranchisement due to attitudes perpetrated and social conditioning inculcated in an oppressed people today. We could whistle "Dixie" too; you know the lines--"Oh I wish I was in the land of cotton, where old times are not forgotten..."
