Catholics supporting the Confederacy

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“As part of a coalition of prominent white and black New Orleanians, he not only argued to give black people voting rights but also pushed for integrated schools, public places and transportation.”

Far from perfect, but he did a lot of good after the war. Tried too, anyway. And he wasn’t the only one.
 
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There were a lot of folks who tried to do a lot of good…but it was years before anything really changed.
 
Yep. Even former CSA soldiers. But they’re all painted with the same brush.
 
Obviously a lot of Catholics who fought on the Union side disagreed with your friend. And probably some Catholics who fought on the Confederate side would agree with him.

Does it matter? It was 150 years ago and neither one of you were alive at that time to make the choice. I am also sure that many other factors besides Catholicism, such as where your family lived and how you earned your livelihood, played into the decision, just like people make their decision about who to vote for in a Presidential election considering some of the same factors.

How about re-focusing your friend on the moral issues of today that the both of you actually have to deal with?
 
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This again?

On the question of what could the simple hillbillies do, look up how West Virginia came to be.

On “blacks were no better off after the Civil War” consider the following:

Their labor was no longer stolen

They could leave if they had the means and inclination

Their family members could no longer be legally kidnapped.

On the original question of of a Catholic could licitly fight for the Confederacy, I hope it is obvious that his moral position would be better if he did not.

I’m Texan born and raised, but it still baffles me as to why anyone feels the need to glamorize the CSA and make excuses for them.
 
Ehhhh… Early Jim Crow laws prohibited a lot of what you said, and sharecropping, while the sharecroppers ‘could’ leave, they were usually so deep in debt to their landlord (usually their former master) that leaving was completely out of the question
 
Do you have a source for that assertion?

The Klan was rabidly anticatholic…
 
TechieGuy said:
On the question of what could the simple hillbillies do, look up how West Virginia came to be.

On “blacks were no better off after the Civil War” consider the following:

Their labor was no longer stolen

They could leave if they had the means and inclination

Their family members could no longer be legally kidnapped.
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Not…quite.
 
The Church doesn’t have an “official position” on every little thing.

Most things are up to individual judgement.

If you support the Confederacy because you think slavery was defensible then you’re going against church teaching. But if your support lies in the idea that the federal government doesn’t have as much authority as they claim they do, you’d be good.

Slavery was probably the most minor reason for the civil war. It certainly wasn’t Lincoln’s biggest concern.
 
No issue being Catholic… but a big issue being a good citizen of the USA
 
Why, when it’s already published and researched in a myriad of reliable sources?

I think you can go read history for yourself.
 
Labor was no longer stolen
-well, moving from free labor to almost free labor makes no difference for anyone involved.

They could leave if they had the means and inclination.
-I addressed this above- A sharecropper being able to leave, due to their perpetual state of debt, was essentially impossible

Their family members could no longer be legally kidnapped
-Well, the 13th amendment says
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Vagrancy, unemployment, and public loitering were all offenses that A-A’s during this time could be imprisioned and then sold out as hired labor for. And, coincidentally, almost every time an A-A was up for hire by local authorites, the former slave’s master almost always got the contract
 
Yep, yep, yep.

Lynchings; the horrors of “Mississippi Burning”; separate bathrooms, hospitals, drinking fountains, bus seats, lunch counters; cops looking the other way; encoded discrimination; Jim Crow…

All of that continued well into the 1940s.

The only difference is people couldn’t legally own people as property. I’m thinking where black Americans stood, though, as far as many others were concerned, was blatantly obvious - and it wasn’t as equals.

Lots of information out there on what life was really like in this country before 1964.
 
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If not for mechanization, sharecropping probably would have continued until the passage of the Civil Rights Act…
 
Maximilian75 said:
-well, moving from free labor to almost free labor makes no difference for anyone involved.
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And you know this…how?
Maximilian75 said:
A sharecropper being able to leave, due to their perpetual state of debt, was essentially impossible
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Why? What prevented them from just leaving? Are you claiming that this never happened or that the children of sharecroppers never left?
Maximilian75 said:
Vagrancy, unemployment, and public loitering were all offenses that A-A’s during this time could be imprisioned and then sold out as hired labor for. And, coincidentally, almost every time an A-A was up for hire by local authorites, the former slave’s master almost always got the contract
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Surely you are familiar with the practice of splitting up slave families by selling members to distant locations.

Hey, if you want to argue that slavery wasn’t all that bad compared to the condition immediately after Emancipation, knock yourself out - but which state would you have preferred for yourself?
 
The sharecropping system worked something like this:
Renter, usually an African-American former slave, works the land of a landlord, usually their former master.
The master takes care of the sale of the cotton, expecting the AA to produce a certain amount, usually way more than possible considering the quantity and quality of land they had.
The master sells the cotton, takes the majority of the profit, and gives the former slave a pittiance.
The master also says ‘hey, you made way less than you could have, and it was bad quality. No biggie, though- you can make it up next year.’
The illiterate former slave, not knowing any better, takes their 25% and gets back to work.

Repeat for 25 years, and you have an AA so deep in debt to the landlord that he cannot work his way out, and he doesent have the money to pay. If he runs away, he’ll be sent to debtor’s prision.

And sure, this is somewhat preferable to pre-65 slavery, but by no means the drastic improvement that some charecterize Reconstruction as.
 
RadTrad1 said:
Here’s my dilemma: I know that there were Catholics in the Confederacy and those who supported the Confederacy, but is there an official position regarding the Confederacy now? I have a friend (who is an extremely right-wing political Catholic) who claims that joining the Confederacy would have been the morally correct, Catholic thing to do.
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You’re not gonna find anything about it in the CCC, but c’mon.

I’m not gonna condemn illiterate Southern farm boys for taking up arms for the Confederacy, but that in no way justifies the ideological tenants upon which the Confederacy was based. At the time of the Civil War there were ~9 million people residing in the CSA, nearly 4 million of whom were enslaved. Without slavery, there was no way the CSA could have functioned: hence why the inhumanity of slaves was such a huge ideological cornerstone. Knowing what I know as a modern American, there’s no way I could morally get behind the CSA.
 
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