You report that some 50 protesters were present when Confederate re-enactors gathered recently for their annual tribute to Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson ("Protesters urge Confederate group to move event held on MLK weekend," Jan. 17).
Tessa Hill-Aston, head of Baltimore's NAACP chapter, attended the event and said it made her "very uncomfortable" because "I know the history."
Here's the history: Absent the secession of the Southern states, there could have been no Civil War. Will Ms. Hill-Aston explain how Southerners came to secede despite being fully aware that remaining in the Union was the surest way of making slavery permanent in the 15 states where it already existed?
Secession was intended as a remedy for Southern grievances that were unrelated to slavery. With the U.S. government collecting 90 percent of all federal revenue from its tariff on imported goods, foreign governments were retaliating with tariffs of their own. Since Southerners produced two-thirds of all U. S. exports, the South also bore two-thirds of those retaliatory tariffs.
President Lincoln never signaled to Southerners any potential for a sectional quid pro quo, in which the emancipation of the slaves would be reciprocated by a repeal of the U.S. import tariff.
Southerners were fully possessed of Thomas Jefferson's sacred "consent of the governed" and fully entitled to withdraw it from President Lincoln's government because of a fundamental grievance quite unrelated to slavery.
Dennis G. Saunders, Columbia