What does the confederacy mean to you?

Answer 1

It defines the Second American Revolution and states’ sovereign rights to self govern as stated in the United States Bill of Rights and the 10th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Robert E Lee married the great granddaughter of Martha Washington, and when Lee was offered the rank of commanding major general of the Union Army he remarked that "I have no greater duty than to my home state Virginia."

Stonewall Jackson remarked about the Yankees plundering and pillaging Southern cities; "We shall kill them all."

A North Carolinian farmer was asked, why did you take up arms against the Yankees? The North Carolina farmer replied, "Because they were in my front yard!"
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Answer 2

I see it as an historic departure to our turbulant and young past of the nation that was still in birth pangs in what it was wanting to become; individual states with full rights or a nation of states that followed the national government and what was decided was best for each state.

Many take this word out of context in what they assume it means. In the dictionary, it states the definition of this word as: an alliance between persons, parties, states, etc., for some purpose. Yet, there is one that many miss as what the meaning of the word "confederacy" instills, and that is this:
a combination of persons for unlawful purposes; conspiracy.

So you can see that many look at the confederacy in many different lights, espeically if they are going by what they think the word means or represents.

If the southern states did succeed from the "national union", of which they belonged, then the aspect of "unlawful purposes" comes directly to mind. Yes, I fully understand that at the time the northern states were the ones who had the monopoly on industrial know how and was more liberal in the freedoms granted to blacks, and the south was an agrarian society based on slave labor and that it was the right of the states to decide what was best for it, not the national government. WIth the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1860, the main cause of the war was that the national government opposed any new state that would allow slavery to take hold. Thus, the ensuing political battle for "rights" superceded the notion that the national governent knew what was best for the individual states, hence the opening salvo of gun fire on Fort Sumter in South Carolina with the "union" bringing in national troops to the fort when the SC government
believed it had sovereignty over the onwership of said fort. This helped forement a following of "confederate states" that within a month seceded from the union.

Too bad that people today, black and white, twist the historic significance to their own desires. The civil war and the "stars and bars" are so politically incorrect, people scream for it to taken away and pushed under the ash heap of history, as is the example of those trying to get states flags redesigned without their historic emblems of past represented. Such a shame.

"Those who forget history are condemed to repeat it."

Answer 3

In actual practice a confederation is a bit looser than a federation and there are more powers and diversities amongst the confederated states making for somewhat less cohesiveness. E.G: Tribes could be confederated, if sufficiently advanced, but a true federation could not likely be tribal. A nation is a very cohesive entity with laws, borders, often a unique language. True federal powers are superior to state powers -- as in USA the Supreme Court can overrule any other court. Indigenous peoples refers to original people for the area such as American Indians or African Tribes like Shona and Zulu. In Central American it would be Mayans or Aztec remnants, if any.

Answer 4

The same as individuals defend their interests, social groups do it, countries do it and everyone does it.
In the case of the "Confederate States of America" their interest was to keep blacks as slaves because this meant cheap hand labor and bigger earnings. Imagine if an enterprise, company, farm, or industry did not have to pay wages, they would triple their earnings. and investors would be filthy rich. That´s all they were thinking about.
If this meant to make themselves believe that blacks were not humans OK that was fine.They are not humans and I will get richer.
Nazis had the same theory, and also had slaves, all those subhuman Jews, Slavs, gypsies they worked well and free.
Its all a matter of interests not principles.

When Charles Darwin traveled to Brazil and found an Englishman owner of a plantation with slaves and changed views with him about slavery, this person of course vigorously defended slavery. Darwin commented in his book.
" When interests come in, intelligence and common sense go out"

Answer 5

The south.

Answer 6

There have been many confederacies throughout history... to which one are you referring?

Answer 7

It means a bloody and painful chapter in our history whose effects can still be felt today

Answer 8

It really does not hold any special meaning to me. It was just one of the warring sides in the American Civil War. I don't think much about it. If it holds special meaning to you, then more power to you.

Answer 9

Nothing.

It's outdated and means nothing nowadays.

A friendly hint: Do a better job on your question next time. It's kind of vague. Elaborate a little. I'm curious to know why you're asking.

Answer 10

'A Confederacy of Dunces' a terrific book and one of the best titles ever....

http://www.curledup.com/dunces.htm
"""The comedy of A Confederacy of Dunces is writ large in and between its many lines: a grand farce of overeducated white trash, corrupt law enforcement, exotic dancing and the nouveau riche in steamy New Orleans. The Pulitzer committee thought highly enough of Toole's comic prowess to give his only novel the Prize posthumously. Therein lies the tragedy of this huge and hugely funny book: John Kennedy Toole didn't live to see this now-classic novel published. He committed suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. It was his mother who was responsible for bringing his book to public light, pestering the hell out of Walker Percy, who was teaching at Loyola in 1976, to read it until finally that distinguished author relented. In his foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces, Percy laments the body of work lost to the world of literature with the author's death, but rejoices "that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers."

At the center of A Confederacy of Dunces is that contemptuous hypochondriac, that deadbeat ideologue, that gluttonous moocher Ignatius Reilly. A mountainous college graduate living off his mother's welfare check in her home on one of New Orleans seedy back streets. He spends most of his time waxing melodramatically philosophic, hiding out in the squalor of his bedroom, filling Big Chief writing tablets with his unique brand of Luddite/medievalist/anti-Enlightenment thought and penning incendiary letters to his sex-crazed ex-college-girlfriend Myrna Minkoff. His beleaguered mother by turns dotes and turns on him in their schizophrenic dance between adult child and aging parent.

Waiting on Canal Street for his mother to come back from an arthritis consultation with her doctor, Ignatius gets hauled off by a cop (who thinks the mustachioed mountain in tweed trousers, plaid flannel shirt and trademark green hunting cap looks suspicious). Thus begins a tailspin into one misadventure followed by another and another ad infinitum. Ignatius and his mother, traumatized by the event, step into a sleazy strip joint and drink themselves silly. As they leave, Mrs. Reilly promptly plows her Plymouth into a building.

The dollars in damages they need to pay for their little accident cannot be met by Mrs. Reilly's meager welfare check. So it is that Ignatius grudgingly begins a series of jobs that suck him ever-deeper into the seamy underbelly of 1960s New Orleans. Ignatius' impact leaves the poor souls in his wake insensible and gaping. His work at Levy Pants (file clerk) and for Paradise Vendors (hotdog-pushcart man) bring Ignatius to lead a workers' revolt and become an unwitting soft-core-porn distribution stooge. His arrogance (and flatulence) touch the people he encounters in horrible ways, yet his indignant, malicious blunders make it possible for those he's injured (intentionally or not) to come out better at the far end of the story.

Ignatius Reilly has got to be one of the most off-putting main characters in modern literature, but this hygenically-challenged intellectual oaf has something in common with a soap-opera vixen: you love to hate him. And he's got something in common with a train wreck: he makes you rubberneck and then you find you just can't look away. Ignatius' long-suffering but increasingly independent mother is the novel's unsung heroine. She's by turns insufferably dumb and surprisingly sly. Patrolman Mancuso's decline, fall, and eventual rise all derive from his brush with Ignatius, and his degradations at the behest of his police superiors has readers laughing behind their hands. You feel sorry for the guy, but (snigger) it's so damn funny! The black vagrant Jones is the only character in the whole bunch of idiots who can really see clearly, nevermind that he's forever looking out at the world through dark glasses and a cloud of his own cigarette smoke. A Confederacy of Dunces is simply and insistently a great, perfect comedy of errors and airs, a farce of Olympic proportions."""

Pax---------------------------