Honor Confederates just as we do unionists

As a long-serving active duty Army officer and historian, I feel a special bond to those who have served before me. In the case of the Civil War, I have equal affinity to honor the soldiers and officers who served, sacrificed and died both for the blue and the gray.

However, I want to bring some of our forgotten or ignored history into focus to show that Confederates were not fighting against freedom or oppression as Mr. Bob Dohn claims. Secession in 1860 was not primarily because of slavery. The party of Lincoln had assured the slave holding class there was no threat to slavery by passing the Corwin Amendment, the first 13th Amendment, making slavery legal everywhere it was legal at the state level.

With only 2.6 percent of whites in the slave-holding states in 1860 being slave holders, this was not a group that spoke for 100 percent of whites in those states that seceded.

The reason for secession was loss of representative proportionate power sharing in the federal government by Democratic Party majority states. The Congress had become a Republican Party majority in the decade before 1860, due to immigration, which increased seats for many northern states. The final straw was the election of Lincoln; meaning the Democrat veto was gone.

There were many secession threats that occurred in the Early Republic decades for the same reason. In 1794 and 1798, Jeffersonian Republicans threatened secession due to Federalist Party dominance. In 1814, the Federalists held the Hartford Convention to take New England out of the union when the Republicans were dominant. In 1830, South Carolina attempted to leave over tariffs.

The truth is, statues of Confederates are monuments to Americans who aligned with their state before the union. The same way the Founding Fathers did.

Harold Knudsen

Arlington Heights