re: Alabama Governor Bentley has Confederate flags removed from Capitol grounds

Slavery was more the catalyst that provoked the bigger issue of state's rights for most southerners. It's not that southerners just hated black and wanted to keep them enslaved. It was that they didn't want some politicians from another part of the country making a decision that had such a big effect on their economy. At the time the southern economy was based almost entirely on agriculture driven by slavery.

Most were morally opposed to slavery and saw the evil in it, but thought it necessary to the economy. 99% of slaves were owned by the richest 1% of the population. So most southerners didn't personally own any slaves, or if they did they were more of a house servant then out in the fields picking cotton and getting whipped. But even for those that didn't own a slave, the industry still supported everybody.

They wanted to come to that moral conclusion to end it themselves, instead of being told by somebody who had never set foot south of DC. If left to their own devices to deal with human rights on their own, as the rest of the world was at that time, I imagine there would have been less violence and anger about it and likely less lingering resentment and hate in the long run.




By no means am I typing this in supports of slavery, I'm just trying to provide insight into the line of thinking in the south at the time.
It turns out they were right about the economy as it took over 100 years for the south to recover in that regard. Now we can look back and plainly see that 100 years of poverty is better than even more day of keeping another human in chains, but you can also how that could be a scary and uncertain thing to look ahead to for the future of your family.