But everyone is lowering that flag, to half-mast. The shooter could have been flapping that flag about like a hanky, and it doesn't matter: the country mourns the deaths by lowering its standards to half-mast.
Contrary to what you have said, there's no "magic" to the evidence of a relationship between the Confederate flag and the shooter.
The relationship between the flag and the shooter isn't what's magical. It's relating the flag to the actual occurrence of death by lowering it as a direct response. In capitulating with the demand to take down the flag, the state of SC is officially recognizing the colloquially racist meaning inferred upon it by the shooter, effectively ignoring the real reasons for which thousands of Americans died. It's an insult, and the SC constituency should interpret it as such.
Battle flag flying at the capital or no, Roof was going to shoot those people regardless. With this fact well in mind, Obama and his compatriots jumped on the crisis (see also: Rahm Immanuel saying, "Never let a crisis go to waste.") and made it about whatever other issue they found most convenient to their culture-killer mindsets.
I'm not familiar with the Apartheid or Rhodesian flags. For all I know, they're receiving the same shitty, dismissive treatment as the SaB.
So, the Confederate constitution itself contemplates slavery as a federal institution and one which could be extended through territorial acquisition. So, I guess, if the Confederate army had acquired, I don't know, Rhode Island (from memory of a train ride in 2010, north of NY but south of Boston, so my example is improbable), then slavery could be practiced there without inhibition from the Confederate government. Legally, that doesn't sound like slavery was on its way out.
Practically, I assume the English blockade on slave ships wasn't super effective, and that the economics of a slaving nation are lucrative. But I don't know the reality of that, and you didn't embellish on your position of the causes of a decline in slavery in the South pre-Civil War.
Nothing otherwise to say on this post: I am in the position of not having an opinion through lack of knowledge on the history and causes of the war. What you say is interesting and doesn't seem improbable.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not associating the cultural views of the average citizen to the political motivations of Southern Democrats or Jefferson Davis. They were not, in general, good people--be rest assured though that neither was Lincoln (see also: Sherman's March). But the mechanisms they put in place to preserve slavery were destined to either be amended or antiquated within another thirty years at the most. The succession itself may have bolstered the issue of owning chattel in response to Northern regulations, but it's a tough sell to say it was on the verge of profoundly
extending the practice of slavery on the NA continent.
