Civil War was all about slavery, pure and simple

ALEXANDER STEPHENS, the vice president of the Confederacy, made it very clear that the Confederacy rested not upon states’ rights or economic disagreements, but instead slavery and white supremacy. He stated in 1861 that the “cornerstone” of his regime rested on what he called the “great physical, philosophical and moral truth” that “the negro is not equal to the white man” and that slavery “to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

Because of this, the Confederacy waged war upon the United States. More than 600,000 Americans died in four years.

Nearly a century later, my grandfather volunteered to serve in the Army during the Second World War. He survived, but some of his friends did not. They died far from home, in desperate and bloody fighting against the Nazis in the Hürtgen Forest.

Last (year), a group of white men gathered in Charlottesville. Bearing torches and flying the Nazi and Confederate flags, many raised their right hands and gave Nazi salutes. The next day, four of these men knocked a black man named Deandre Harris to the ground, stood over him and beat him mercilessly with wooden poles. Another rammed his car into a crowd, killing Heather Heyer and wounding 19 others.

The president grudgingly condemned these white supremacists. The next day, however, he stated that some of the torch-carrying men were “very fine people” who wanted to protest “very quietly” and blamed counter-protesters for the violence.

Watch the Aug. 15 press conference in full — it is only about 20 minutes long — and then ask yourself if you stand by that man. David Duke, a prominent white supremacist and a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, certainly does; he thanked the president for his “honesty & courage to tell the truth … .” I know that I do not.

Republicans: the president is not one of your own. Yours is the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, and Dwight Eisenhower, the leader of the “Great Crusade” against Nazism. Do not let Trump sully their legacies. Speak against him. Cast him out. VAN SNOW Cheyenne, Wyo., former Albuquerque resident