In article . net, "Dwight
Stewart" writes:


If the Civil War was about slavery, then why was there a war at all? Prior
to the war, the slave states were the majority in both the House and Senate,
insuring no legislation could be passed to end slavery. Slavery was only
abolished after the war by not allowing the former Confederate States (which
included several, but not all, of the slave states) to participate in that
vote.


(snip) why, in it's aftermath, did one of the most famous
Confederate Generals, Nathan Bedford Forrest,
organize the Ku Klux Klan? (snip)


When you answer that, perhaps you can also answer why so many Northerners
join the KKK.

Dwight:

I consider the KKK to be about racism, not slavery. It was originally
started as a response to the heavy-handed political disenfranchisement
of the former Confederate states by Northern "Carpetbaggers" who
essentially swept into the South and took over in the aftermath of the
Civil War. I don't believe that was right and never said so. However,
the KKK, instead of targeting the mostly white Yankee politicians
who violated the constitutional rights of the citizens of the Southern
states, chose instead to target ethnic and religious groups, such as
blacks, Catholics, and particularly Jews. Therefore, their motives were
wrong from the start.

The South has a lot to answer for, IMHO. (snip)


Why would they have any more to answer for than the Northern states that
profited from the sale of slaves? Or more to answer for than those who used
indentured or bound black workers in the North, even into the early 1900's?
Or more to answer for than the many countries around the world which
practiced slavery in this last century (the 1900's), the previous century,
or in the many centuries before that?

I never said that slavery wasn't practiced in the North.

(snip) Modern-day Rebels with the Confederate flags on
their pickup trucks don't do much to heal the wounds of
the past. (snip)

Perhaps because they have absolutely no responsibility for what happened
in a past long before they were born.

However, in the context of our modern and presumably more enlightened
times, they represent something that is, best, an anachronistic example
of age-old prejudices. We should all be united under one flag, and that
flag has 50 stars and 13 stripes -- not a big "X" running through it.

73 de Larry, K3LT