Debate: Is the confederate flag racist? or is it heritage?
Side: No its heratege

The official voted-on state proclamations, made contemporaneously by the people seceding, on why they were doing so cannot seriously be portrayed as people focusing on side issues...They can when they are official proclamations of a minority of the states in rebellion, and don't represent anywhere close to a unanimous position in the states in question.Except it had.There were a couple states that were still in the process, but nearly every northern state had 0 slaves by 1860AFTER secession had begun and militarization had already started. Nevermind the fact that there is a difference between slavery being banned and 0 people owning slaves. Nobody in my neighborhood owns a tractor, but tractors are perfectly legal. Would you care to link me to a legislative ban on slavery in the US prior to the emancipation proclamation?A) See my statement above about Lincoln's prioritiesB) Lincoln's position (and likely a correct one) was that he could not emancipate all slaves without a constitutional amendment. The Emancipation Proclamation only affected combatants because it was justified as a war power.Speculation that seems to be premised on placing former politicians on a pedestal, when everything we know historically and presently about individuals with power suggests that we should not. We will never know Lincoln's actual motivations- only the sanitized versions he announced publically after significant time spent with advisors.Utter silliness. If the states themselves tell you the CAUSE - how can you then claim mere correlation?Easy- because It wasn't "the states themselves tell[ing] [the Union] the cause," but rather representatives of a minority of the states in rebellion noted it as one of the causes.The Republican platform of 1860 is completely dominated by slavery, secession, etc. - they were at this point basically pleading to just get back to pre-Dred Scott which was going to make slavery, for all intents and purposes, legal in every state.For all intents and purposes, extra-jurisdictional recognition of slaves as property would not make the entire north slave states, if only because the land in the north was predominately unsuited for large-scale farming as it was in the south, and the primary labor jobs in the north weren't suitable for completely uneducated, unskilled labor. It had far more to do with expansion into the West than boosting slavery in the north. Never mind the fact that when the first state seceded, there were still slaves in nearly every northern state anyway.If your argument is that slavery wasn't racially biased - I think you will have a very long way to go to prove that case.Slavery came before the resulting racism; the first slaves in the americas were white, and the african slave trade, once established, resulted in a much larger supply of slaves at a cheaper cost than elsewhere. The predominance of black slaves was essentially one of supply and demand. Racist attitudes in respect to slavery arose after the fact. Much modern racism directed towards black people, I conject would be directed towards latinos instead, were we sourcing slaves from the americas.In fact, it is one of the vectors of attack Lincoln used against it. Some people used the existence of slavery in the Bible as evidence that it was acceptable and Lincoln's argument was that the Biblical version of slavery was not based on race, so Biblical slavery would allow for white slaves:Except, there were white slaves, as I've already touched on."In Kentucky, perhaps, in many of the Slave States certainly," said Lincoln, "you are trying to establish the rightfulness of Slavery by reference to the Bible. You are trying to show that slavery existed in the Bible times by Divine ordinance. Now Douglas is wiser than you, for your own benefit, upon that subject. Douglas knows that whenever you establish that Slavery was right by the Bible, it will occur that that Slavery was the Slavery of the white man—of men without reference to color—and he knows very well that you may entertain that idea in Kentucky as much as you please, but you will never win any Northern support upon it."And Lincoln displays his ignorance just as much as any church portraying a caucasian Jesus does. Biblical slavery did not involve 'white' people, but rather individuals from the middle east.Do you know the causes better than the states themselves? or the soldiers? Can you name any factor that superseded race? Kansas/Nebraska Act, Bleeding Kansas, John Brown, Harper's Ferry, Missouri Compromise, the Fugitive Slave Act, Dred Scott, etc. etc. etc. - nearly every source of tension underlying the war had slavery as its underpinning.Do you claim to know the causes of the states based off of the words of representatives of a minority of the rebel states that the Union chose to keep records of?Even if we assume they represented all of the states and not just their own- does the average member of the senate necessarily represent the position of the majority of the individuals from his state?Do you believe that the rank-and-file soldiers of the confederacy believed they were fighting for slavery, specifically? Or that their officers believed that?Do you further claim that the Union government was completely transparent, and didn't cover up undesirable information while exaggerating aspects that portrayed the Union in a favorable light? That's a standard that no government I'm aware of has ever lived up to.