Here is the source of a lot of the troubles associated with the Civil War. When you fight a war to force states to remain in a country that the majority did not wish to remain in, you are going to have some problems.My friend, I haven't made my point clear enough to be understood, let me try again.
The reason I think the Rebel flag should be retired is because it was the battleflag of an army fighting the United States. That is the same reason I think the Confederate statues should be retired, the men depicted fought against the United States.
The widespread opinion that the war was fought to preserve slavery is just added incentive to do what I advocate, but not the determining factor. There is no contradiction in my argument once you understand what I'm getting at.
It's as simple as that. Trying to confuse the issue by talking about Washington's ownership of slaves, or dismissing the fact that the Rebel flag was the battleflag of an army that fought our country, is not the issue, in my very humble opinion.
Is there any common ground?
Surely we can all agree that we are glad the Confederacy lost the war.
That is the original sin of Lincoln's "new birth of freedom." It was fundamentally antidemocratic.
Having won that war, the Union was forced to eject popularly-elected state governments and replace them with appointed military governors. Alabama was disestablished and became part of Military District No. 3. That is also fundamentally antidemocratic.
Having fought that war in such a way as to "make them howl," having killed tens of thousands and destroyed billions of dollars worth of private property, well, folks do not take kindly to being treated that way by the government that is claiming their loyalty.
After the war, once southerners elected Representatives and Senators to represent them in Congress, and northern Republicans did not like the men southerners elected, so they refused to seat any of them, even the pro-Union representatives (this despite Art. IV, Section 4 of the US Constitution which says no states can be deprived of its representation in the Senate without the state's consent). Republicans effectively disfranchised millions of southerners. People do not take kindly to that. In fact, they tend to resent it.
The Federal government behaved so atrociously during Reconstruction that Congress forbade the army to engage in law enforcement in the US (The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878). The army's bad behavior gave birth to the Solid South. There was almost no Republican party in the South for a century. I would recommend you take a look at Walter Fleming's Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama. An Alabama bishop was arrested because he failed to pray for the president of the United States. (Fleming, p. 326) A young white man in Greensboro got into an altercation with a black US soldier, and ended up shooting a white Union officer, then escaped. The army grabbed the shooter's brother (who was not involved) and got ready to hang the wrong man. The townspeople bribed the US Army commanding office to the tune of $10,000 and the innocent man was released. (Fleming, p. 269)
This was the toxic brew in which Civil War monuments were erected. Eventually the federal government did re-earn the loyalty of southerners, but communities all over the South still erected monuments to the local men who had fought trying to protect then from the wrongs mentioned above.