A Civil War re-enactor displays the Confederate Battle Flag which is different than the Official Flag of the Confederate States of America that you can see here.
It may have been the last time in history that such a sight was seen by mortal eyes.
Fifteen thousand men formed in 3 lines nearly 2 miles from end to end marching with lock step precision across 8/10 of a mile of open ground toward a barely discernible rise known locally as cemetery ridge – a name that forever after would be drenched in the blood of thousands of young men wearing both blue and gray. Snapping in the breeze were dozens of Confederate Battle Flags; the famous cross of St. Andrew on a red background with stars inset on the blue cross.
The majesty and color of the scene imparted a sense of awe and wonder to those watching. Robert E. Lee thought the scene “sublime.” Some of the boys in blue manning the stone wall at the top of the ridge actually cheered the Southerners good order. The visual must have been absolutely breathtaking.
Shortly thereafter came the shooting, the clubbing, and the stabbing as the nation’s most visible drama played out with an intensity not seen before or since.
The history of the Battle of Gettysburg says that the Union won. But the heritage of the battle belongs to the south.
Perhaps not so much today as the cloying grip of mass media has blurred the sectionalism so much responsible for that long ago conflict. But it’s also true that many southerners alive today are just one or two degrees of separation from that time in their history. After all, the last Civil War soldier lived until 1954. Many a southern grandfather can tell stories of long ago Fourth of July’s with some of those same boys that trudged up the ridge at Gettysburg, grown old and bent but still proud, marching in parades behind that most distinctive of American symbols.
Distinctive and yes, hurtful. For many Americans, the Confederate Battle Flag represents a hateful system that held human beings as chattel slaves. For them, there is no heritage only history; a shameful chronicle of rape, of whippings, of oppression that colors our politics and culture down to this very day.
The modern battle over the displaying and even the meaning of the Confederate Battle Flag has aroused emotions not seen since the darkest days of the struggle for civil rights in the 1960’s. The story of the people and emotions behind this struggle is told in a new book by John M. Coski “The Confederate Battle Flag : America’s Most Embattled Emblem .” Coski is library director for the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia.
In his excellent review of the book for The Weekly Standard, Edwin M. Yoder relates an anecdote about C. Vann Woodward, generally recognized as the greatest of all southern historians and the subject of the book’s dedication that reveals why southerners to this day are just a little bit different than the rest of us:
During the McCarthyist inquisition of the 1950s, he was once asked to certify that neither he nor his relatives had ever advocated the violent overthrow of the government of the United States. He was obliged to note that some of his ancestors had fought for the Confederacy and had contemplated exactly such mischief. Wit can defuse passionate differences.
Indeed, that’s usually the case. But in the matter of the Confederate Battle Flag those differences are too profound, too emotional to lend itself to anything but all out war.
Coski gives some post civil war history of the battle flag and in the process, destroys some cherished myths of its detractors:
It is not true, for instance, that we owe its negative symbolism to the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, Coski insists, the Kluxers made greater display of the Stars and Stripes, at least down into the KKK revival of the 1920s, when its ragtag and bobtail knights first seized on the Rebel banner as an emblem of racial and religious bigotry.All along, such guardians as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans deplored this abuse. In 1948, when the hustings were loud with revivified Confederate rhetoric, and Dixiecrat rallies tended to be festooned with battle flags, the UDC pointedly condemned the flag’s use in “any political movement.”
Instead, the author points to the “flag fad” of the 1950’s when football fans and others used the emblem as a symbol of southern pride and school spirit leading one Atlanta editor to complain it had become “confetti in careless hands.”
Then came the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s and the battle flag took on a whole new meaning – that of southern resistance to both federal encroachment on states’ rights and the struggle to maintain Jim Crow segregation. In one way or another, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi incorporated the battle flag into their dissent. And that’s what has aroused the modern argument over the meaning and symbolism of the flag:
What has lately intensified the battle over the battle flag has been the struggle in four traditionalist southern states that had incorporated the battle flag in their state banners (Mississippi and Georgia), or flown it over their capitols (South Carolina and Alabama).Mississippi had superimposed the battle flag on its state banner as far back as 1894. That gesture may have been connected with the so-called “redemption” of the state from federal control and black suffrage. But it obviously could have had nothing to do with the prolonged fight over school integration that prompted Georgia, in 1956, to make the battle flag part of its state flag as an explicit gesture of defiance.
Alabama Governor George Wallace famously flew the battle flag over the state capitol when Bobby Kennedy came down to discuss desegregating the University of Alabama. And South Carolina takes a perverse sort of pride in being the first state to secede from the Union following Lincoln’s election hence the flag has taken on iconic status as a symbol of the history of the state’s leadership.
This is what the NAACP and other opponents of the battle flag point to when demanding its eradication as a symbol of southern glory. But is that what the argument is really about? Coski doesn’t think so:
These latter-day battles, in any event, underscore one of Coski’s principal themes—namely, that flag flaps are actually surrogate conflicts over the meaning of the history allegedly symbolized, and in particular that of the Confederacy and the Civil War. This truism would seem to require no emphasis, except that the “history” invoked by the warriors for and against the battle flag is often of a quality so inferior as to make so-called “law office history” seem real.One comes away from The Confederate Battle Flag with two signal reactions. One is that the warring parties need a cram course in semiology, the better to grasp the mundane truth that responses to signs and symbols vary with the beholder. I personally would enjoy dispatching to my remedial cram school some of the more volatile warriors—notably former senators Carol Moseley Braun and Jesse Helms, who conducted an emotional quarrel on the floor of the Senate in 1993 when Senator Moseley Braun persuaded her colleagues to deny the poor old UDC (United Daughters of the Confederacy) a continued courtesy patent on its flag logo.
Does this mean we’re still essentially fighting the Civil War? In a large way, yes. When Coski talks about “law office history” he’s speaking of the broad brush approach to history most people take when talking about the Civil War. The North fought for “freedom for the slaves” while the South fought to keep their “peculiar institution. In fact, the war was about neither and both. Most of the Northern boys (with the exception of a few New England regiments where abolitionism was strongest) would have been shocked to discover they were fighting to free the slaves. As an example, when Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, several Northern units deserted vowing not to fight to free the black man.
Similarly, according to James McPherson nearly 95% of Lee’s army that fought at Gettysburg did not own a single slave.
Why all the shouting then? It comes down to perception and, in the end, an empathy with those who have suffered:
We hardly need to be reminded that we Americans squander much time, words, and emotion on phantom battles over vaguely defined symbolic issues, while avoiding dispassionate study of the past. I do agree with my old friend, the witty Chapel Hill sociologist John Shelton Reed, who usefully suggests that white southerners ought to learn from St. John Calhoun that his famous theory of the “concurrent majority” requires due consideration of minority views; that is, some consideration of the sense of black southerners that this flag is a symbol of servitude and oppression.
Personally, I can understand the symbolic power of the Battle Flag in that it remains to this day a potent talisman and touchstone of southern pride and patriotism. But in the clash of history versus heritage, the sheer ugliness associated with the chronicle of slavery must win out and the battle flag must be relegated to the dusty attics and dank cellars of southern homes perhaps to see the light of day again when its symbolism does not cause so much pain and anguish.
3:19 pm
Awesome post!
12:22 am
A most thoughtful and fairminded piece.
8:55 pm
re: the confederate battle flag, I see that you trot out the oft-repeated white southern dodge: that is to proclaim that that many conferate soldiers did not own slaves. Well, that is interesting, but that does not answer the question of what these soldiers thought of slavery and more importantly, the question of what their political leaders (the people who usually determine war aims) thought of slavery. The leaders were clearly pro-slavery and a might “touchy” about the issue as they fled the Union rather quickly when a mildly anti-slavery president named Lincoln was elected. And you mention the great Princeton historian James McPherson, while leaving out McPherson’s books on the letters of soldiers and the point he has repeatedly made: that the Confederate soliders were so pro-slavery that the question would not have even occurred to them. Enslavement and subjugation of African Americans was, so to say, part of the natural order to Confdederate soldiers.
Finally, this argument (that the average Confederate soldier owned no slaves and was therefore anti-slavery—a complete non-sequitur) is sort of like saying that that the young men and women who served in Persian Gulf War I owned no oil and so therefore the campaign to expunge Saddam Hussein from Kuwait could not have possibly had anything to do with protecting the flow of oil to the West. Or to make the point another way, it’s like saying that because I don’t currently own a house, I am anti-homeownership. Please give this tired old moral and historical dodge the quiet internment that it deserves.
9:14 pm
First of all, I support consigning the battle flag to oblivion. I’m sorry you either didn’t read or misunderstood that point.
Second, your point that Southerners supported slavery proves…what? Most northerners supported slavery as well and were, if anything, more casually obscene about their racism than their southern brothers.
To say that Lincoln was “mildly anti salvery” is ridiculous. If the south hadn’t seceded, he wouldn’t have touched the atrocity nor would he have said much about it. His only stipulation was the prevention of the spread of slavery into places like New Mexico where it wouldn’t have prospered anyway.
While there’s no doubt Southern soldiers were pro slavery,does this make their sacrifice or service any less a part of our American heritage than Northern soldiers who were also pro-slavery? I can understand completely why the battle flag should be consigned to the ash heap. But why put the bravery and courage of the southern soldiers there as well?
2:01 am
Submitted for Your Approval
First off… any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here, and here. Die spambots, die! And now… here are all the links submitted by members of the Watcher’s Council for this week’s vote. Council li…
8:40 am
Hey there superhawk, good post. You make the Malcolm X argument, the hard line stance that white northerners and southerners were both criminals when it came to their views and treatment of the black man and that the stars and stripes is as offensive as the confederate battle flag.
I think you miss my point, though. And I acknowledge that some northerners were pro-slavery and nearly all were racist. But I’d be careful at equating any type of casual, nasty racism of the north with a systemic of enslavement. (Clearly the Northern states were racist—the state of new york for example removed blacks from the franchise in 1860. Frederick Douglass was livid at the time, could not believe it). But again, I think you’re performing the white southern dodge. Wars and war aims are not determined by the soldier on the field. (It doesn’t matter what my 21-year-old neighbor/soldier thinks about the war in Iraq. It’s George W. Bush who determines the war aims and goals. Wars and war aims are determined by the leaders and political officials who send those soldiers into the field. It frankly does not matter what the individual German soldier thought about Hitler or the Jews. The cause was evil. The soldiers were simply soldiers. It does not really matter what the WW II American vets thought about Nazism; what matters is what Franklin Roosevelt thought and said and what his war aims were. And so here we are: the Confederate’s aims, in state resolution after resolution, were to protect, defend and maintain enslavement of African Americans. That was the aim and goal. Post-bellum, after they lose, their leaders come up with all sorts of “better” reasons for the war, but it was that one: protecting enslavement. And the leadership and its generals were quite clear on that.
Now, you dismiss Lincoln, who was a member of an increasingly anti-slavery party called the Republican Party. There were hardline Republicans and softer Republicans. The Republican Party was not anti-slavery as in they came to power on a platform of going to war to end it. No, they were not. But the Republicans were engaged in a fierce battle to limit the spread of slavery in the territories and many were strongly against the Fugitive Slaw Law etc … Yes, many Republicans wanted to curtail and limit the power of the South. Again, notice: it doesn’t matter what the soldier on the street thought. So no, Lincoln did not seek a war against the south on the grounds of slavery, but he had clearly voiced strong anti-slavery sentiments. That’s not debatable, and his and his party’s anti-slavery stance, timid though they were (look up the battles in the territories if you don’t believe me on this) simply sent the southerners in a panic.
So here’s the difference between states that seceded and states that remained in the Union. The political leaders of pro-slavery states like Maryland were willing to stay in the Union to resolve differences—and they were later willing to have the system of enslavement ended for compensation. The leaders of states of the Confederacy ran from the Union at the first hint of anti-slavery sentiment.
One group remained loyal to the Union. One did not.
And yes, I would eventually like to honor the Confederate soldiers, but first, I want white southerners to come clean about the aims of the war the Confederate soldier served in. One must go along with the other.
9:26 am
I will concede a couple of your points.
First, you make an excellent distinction between being pro slavery and actually taking part in the atrocity. It’s a subtle yet important difference.
Second, the ante bellum Republican party was indeed composed of soft and hard anti slavery men. Lincoln made it pretty clear prior to his innauguration in that famous letter that if he could save the union without touching slavery, he would. In the sense that he was adamantly opposed to the spread of slavery, we can call him anti-slavery.
Suppose however he had been able to limp along like Buchanan had for four years, steering clear of controversy while keeping his mouth shut about slavery and turning the other way while a few southerners migrated to the territories with slaves? If you love history, you probably like counterfactuals so I’ll give you a “what if” question.
What if Lincoln hadn’t tried to resupply Sumter and in fact had ordered the fort abandoned? Some were uging him to do so making the argument that the secessionists would be overwhelmed in the next state elections if Lincoln did nothing to provoke a southern response.
There is the possibility that indeed the hot heads would have been defeated and those seceded states coaxed back into the union.If that happened, I dare say it would have saved the union but probably destroyed the Republican party. Even so, Lincoln’s overarching goal of keeping the country together would have been achieved.
So much for “what if”...but my point is that Lincoln could very well have turned out like Buchanan; a weak sister whose administration would have done precious little to end slavery.
One more word on “heritage” and the southern soldier…The letters and diaries of the time make it clear that this was a “People’s War” (Page Smith). While we can blame the attitudes and beliefs of political leaders who as you say panicked when Lincoln was elected, never before or since has a war been fought where the politics of the common man played such a large role.
9:31 am
137th Carnival of the Vanities
EDITOR’S PICKS
Ever wonder how much money goes out of your pocket and into the clutches of the government at the gas pump? Ironman at Political Calculations has the tool to find out.
Dave at Logical Meme writes about re-reading Madison’s Federa…
9:31 am
Two more short points:
I think it unfair to compare southern soldiers to the nazis…not because both ideologies where evil but because the southerners were, after all, Americans and not part of a different country. Isn’t that why we fought the war in the first place?
Second: I think Kentuckians and Missourians would give you an argument about remaining in the union voluntarily. I think the presence of tens of thousands of federal troops in those two states may have had something to do with that.
And didn’t Lincoln bemoan the opposition to compensation in border states in 1864 while the 13th amendment was being debated in Congress?
10:05 am
137th CotV // Welcome
Welcome to the 137th edition of The Carnival of the Vanities!
This week’s CotV is hosted by Fresh Politics, a student-run political blog based out of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
School’s out – I finished finals yesterday… ...
3:39 am
The Council Has Spoken!
First off… any spambots reading this should immediately go here, here, here, and here. Die spambots, die! And now… the winning entries in the Watcher’s Council vote for this week are Hostages: Time for America to Act …
1:20 pm
In my experience most of these Southerners do not attach racial overtones to the flag. Rather, it is simply a symbol of Southern pride. Personally, I’m for removing the flag from State Capitols etc., but the thought of removing the flag from Confederate Soldier memorials, or abolishing it altogether completely unacceptable.
Why the Southern Pride? I think some of it was due to carpet bagging, and the devastation throughout the South caused by the Civil War. These caused the people and places of the Civil War to take on mythic proportions, and ingrained them into Southern Culture. More recently I think some of this pride is a reaction to pop-culture’s portrayal of the average southerner. The white southerner seems to be one of the few groups of people it is entirely acceptable to make fun of. These cultural attacks contribute to a ‘circle the wagons’ mentality. Attacks on the Confederate flag add to the perception that Southern culture is under attack, and causes the flag’s supporters to dig their heels in even further.
6:01 pm
As a proud southron I am tired of the calumny that is spread by Black Natioanlists who cant conceal there hatred of whites in general. Not a month goes b htat some yankke media tye does not refer to us as gap toothed hillbillys,white trash,inbred morons etc. Now Racists such as al s Sharpton refer to the battle flag as An American Swastika. Damn we she a ton of southern blood fighting the Nazis and the axis.
This was a letter I sent when Gettysburg College was having the” lynching of the Confederate Flag”,of course the President never answered,that would have required moral courage, commodity rarely used by College Presidents. It expresses what many think of the assault on the south. Now you might be surprised to hear I do not favor the flag on government buildings save those that in some way are war memorials. However all over the South and even in the west we face a constant stream of vandalism and hatred. My parents were proud dixiecrats but I will be damned if I will votre a or support pepole who want to destroy the graves adn monuments of my ancestors.
I am saddened and dismayed by the choice of your College to host this
> art exhibit by John Sims, that denigrates a symbol that represents to
> many of us the ultimate sacrifice of our ancestors for their beliefs
> and way of life.Yet a short walk from where this exhibit will be held
> thousands lay sleeping who gave in Lincoln’s words the last full
> measure of their devotion. Among those sacred dead I have ancestors
> who fell on both sides. My great-grandfather’s first cousin William
> was mortally wounded on July the first and was returned to Virginia
> where he died. Following him in death was my great uncle also named
> William was killed within eyesight of my great-grandfather at the
> Battle of second Winchester. None of my family were slave owners and
> in fact they did not approve of slavery, my great great grandfather
> having been an indentured servant himself from Scotland who suffered
> the lash and did not forget it. Most of the members of my family
> stayed out of the war until Virginia was invaded and Fredericksburg
> despoiled by Union Troops. It then became not a war of principles
> only,but a war of survival against an aggressor who was percieved as having had no regard for
> civilians, and felt his right to destroy and loot their property was
> God given
>
>
>
> These are the facts that caused my family to join the Confederate
> army. If the bloodshed of war was not enough the burning of the
> Shenandoah Valley by Sheridan’s troops led to the death of several
> children in our family due to starvation and disease. That is why I
> find this exhibit offensive not only because of the exhibit itself but
> because of its location. I would assume that Gettysburg College has
> an educational mission and it somehow this exhibit falls within that
> mission. I would like to know how, certainly the reproductions of
> flags in different colors and a mock lynching of one, would not
> require any more artistic expertise than a good middle school art
> student could exhibit and is about as profound and original as one
> would expect from a child.
>
> The artist obviously has a political agenda, one only needs to look
> at his other works in which he displays Israeli flags, Palestinian
> flags, under an exhibit called Amerika Uber Alles. Mr Sims is a
> quintessential black nationalist, with all the prerequisite
> anti-Semitism, anti European bias that is common to them. Now if this
> exhibit were held in Harlem, Chicago, New York or any other place
> other than the final resting place of brave men I would have no
> quarrel with it. I am a big first amendment man,but not here not
> here.
> Sims “Art” is but one of a long litany of “political art’ mere
> political cartoons dressed up with oil paints, fabric or bronze and
> presented as some sort of meaningful message. All of these efforts
> are nothing more meaningful and enduring than a candle in
> a maelstrom. . When I was in graduate
> school I remember a fellow in the art department who painted a picture
> of the American flag and then created a miniature Molotov cocktail and
> blew the whole thing up. This is the same sort of puerile nauseating
> narcissism That one would expect from the 1960s.
>
> Of course you also have included a lecture by someone from an
> African-American studies department that bastion of Afrocentrism
> where ancient grievances are cultivated like grapes in Bordeaux.
> For these folks their Holy Grail is the slavery experience they clutch
> it to their bosom, as well as the image of the image of a demonic absolute pure
> evil that was the South. Without this icon they would be forced to
> deal with the problems of contemporary black society, and the criminal
> subculture of the ghetto. Not a day goes by the some poor young black
> man or woman is not murdered at the hands of another.
> The killer does not fly the Southern Cross, (he battle flag of
> Northern Virginia,) his flag is a bandanna or piece of sports attire
> that is blue, red or green. This abomination has been
> going on for decades and the NAACP and its race warriors fear
> the issue, totally paralyzed, unable to speak out .
> Instead they’re busy trying to remove the Confederate flag from
> some park or building in the Old South. And for what intelligent
> reason would the College participate in this nonsense? This is not a
> political statement or an educational discussion and it certainly
> is not art,it is merely ultra liberal triumphalism,
> Merely an attempt to denigrate the memory of our ancestors and to defile
> their sacrifice within shadow of that suffering that was Gettysburg
, This is what this is really about, not education nor Art it
> it does not qualify. as such.
>
> There is no more art or truth in this exhibit then there was in Nazi demonic
> Rockwell like representations’ of Blond Ubermenschen, and depictions
of the hated Juden as rat like The soldiers that died and suffered at Gettysburg are not
> the cartoon Simon Legrees Mr. Sims,and the
> reparationists and African American Studies groups would lead you to
> believe. These were real live human beings 90 percent of which did
> not own slaves, and if there records and letters are to be believed
> were not fighting for slavery at all, but for other states and their
> homes. Professor McPherson’s book Why They Fought illustrates that
> clearly. If Mr Sims had chosen to protest the use of the Confederate
> flag as a symbol of racism, and held his exhibit in say Selma or
> Montgomery I could not argue with him, for I to much more than he
> despise the use of that flag by Racial lunatics.
>
> However the venue he is chosen at Gettysburg is not appropriate it
> dishonors both the soldiers of the North and South, its dishonors the
> sacrifice of our ancestors.
> One of the things you won’t hear and arguments about the
> Confederate flag and the confederacy is the fact that the
> grandfathers’ of those Confederate soldiers were the Southern founders
> of our nation Jefferson, Washington, Patrick Henry. Furthermore their
> children and grandchildren have shed their blood on every American
> battlefield from Iwo Jima to todays Iraq. To the highest ranking
> Generals in World War Two that were killed in combat were Nathan
> Bedford Forrest the third, and Lieutenant-General Simon Bolivar
> Buckner, the namesakes of their famous Confederate grandfather and
> father. The most decorated man in Marine Corps history with five Navy
> Crosses Lewis B. Chesty Puller, the grandson of a Virginia officer, a
> man who led our armored divisions to victory in Europe General George
> S. Patton grandson of a Virginia patriot and cavalry officer.
.If you allow this exhibit to go on the desecrate the memory of every
> Southern boy who sacrificed his life for your freedom. Indeed my father and
his brothers shed their blood and tears on the Beaches of Europe,and in the Pacific oh how they held that flag dear ,the flag of their grandfather.The bare foot bedraggled Sergeant who fought many battles, was paroled at Appomattox, and starved at Fort Delaware .A man who fought so gallantly with the Bloody 27th the Stonewall Brigade. Who saw his children die of malnutrition his beloved brother and cousin fall at gettysburg and second Winchester,. All for his beloved Virginia.
>
> Let Mr. Sims carry his campaign of hatred of Southern Whites, and black
> nationalism where the winds are not haunted by memories of
the sighs of those slain,North and South.
Where the trees and valleys have not hugged the mortal
> forms of young men in their final moment, looking for God and crying
> for their mothers and sweethearts.Where the dew of the morning is not a glistening tear
of youth crushed and hope exhausted. Weigh this Ms. President against the
> advantage and merit of an†art “without grace or mastery, whose temporality
is as perishable as seasonal couture.
Do not add mix the tears of those who hold this place sacred with the the blood of
our grandfathers,. I beseech you do not open again the wound of so long ago now scarred over,to flow a new with hatred and discord.
For their memory the gallant men of Virginia and Alabama, the brave lads or Wisconsin and Maine, is our sacred trust, their sacrifice, our burden forever, their courage and glory our birthright, the birthright of the whole American People. Our eternal custodianship is their flags,
all those pennants that fly from the ramparts and trenches of eternity
and the memory of all who fell Blue or Grey on those July days so long ago..
>
6:04 pm
excuse the typos gentleman I sent it (ie ther for thier,Nationalist etc,accidently before I edited it.
Peace
6:54 am
very best idea make rules time!