Honour Abe's Commitment to Repatriation
by Daniel Barge
With the recent attacks on Southern identity, which some have likened to cultural genocide, there has been a lot of talk recently about Southern pride, history, and honour. Those who are attacking the South in the guise of the Confederate flag and other monuments of the Civil War claim that the Confederacy was all about slavery, and therefore an evil entity, not unlike Nazi Germany.
To back this up they refer to the famous "Cornerstone Speech" by the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, delivered at the Athenaeum in Savannah, Georgia, on March 21, 1861. In this speech Stephens pointed out something that, to his contemporaries, must have seemed rather obvious:
“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man...”Among those contemporaries, we must include Abraham Lincoln, and we can also include many people from our own era; White Liberals, for example, who continue to attest to the unequal nature of the Black man by continuing to avoid him, his neighborhoods, schools, and social life.
