Stripes of Hatred, Stripes of Freedom

I live in Tennessee, a state with a significant population that traditionally identifies heavily with the culture of the southern United States. For instance, along a stretch of Interstate 65 in Nashville there is a terrifying statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s surrounded by a bunch of Confederate flags, and is generally an eyesore. I’ll not comment on the statue further, which I think most agree is tacky and ugly in itself. Rather, I want to discuss the issues surrounding the display of the Flag of the Confederate States of America¹, and the culture that displays and tends to support displaying it.

For those unfamiliar, a bit of history. The Confederate Flag was first flown in 1861, about a month before Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter. It started out as the “Stars and Bars” – a design incorporating three vertical red and white stripes and a blue field with a ring of stars. The famous design incorporating the blue X design with the stars on a red background didn’t appear until after the Civil War had begun, in 1863. This design was very popular, and was used on the second and third flags, and many Confederate battle flags, naval jacks, and of course, the infamous “Confederate flag”. This term is a bit of a misnomer for a design that never represented the Confederate States, but nevertheless, the term has stuck.

There exists among people who choose to display the Confederate flag a curious cognitive disconnect between the history of the colors they fly and their generally stated reasons for displaying the flag. But the inescapable fact is that symbols are powerful things – the Swastika, the Christian Cross, the flag of one’s nation – and choosing to display a symbol almost always links you, in some way, to the history of that symbol. And the history of the Confederate flag ties it, inextricably, to a past of brutal and bloody war, opposition to civil rights for people of different skin colors, and most infamously, slavery.

I have a friend, Anna² who struck a pedestrian while driving a few years ago. The woman she hit was walking in a haphazard fashion alongside a dark country road at night, and a toxicology report indicated that she was mentally incapacitated due to drug use – hence her erratic walking. My friend didn’t realize at first that she had hit a person – she thought it was a deer, and drove for a few miles until she stopped to go back and check. The woman had, unfortunately, died from the impact.

This hasn’t stopped Anna’s friends and family from loving her, hasn’t prevented others from realizing what she happened was a terrible accident. But they don’t try to lessen the impact of this woman’s death by insisting that this woman’s family not forget about the mitigating circumstances – the pedestrian was a transient who was strung out on drugs, walking alone in the middle of a dark stretch of road at night.

Because a person died. And today, that woman’s family still mourns for her loss. I don’t blame them, and neither does Anna. Neither she nor her family would ever build a shrine to that night that would remind that family of the loss they still bitterly feel.

But this is exactly what Confederate sympathizers do when they fly the Confederate flag. Nostalgic as they are about some romanticized version of The South, they ignore the fact that the Confederate flag symbolizes not only a society economically dependent on forced slavery and servitude, but is the symbol an era of national strife unparalleled by anything else in the history of the United States. 620,000 soldiers on both sides died during that wretched war, along with an unknown number of civilians.

And despite strenuous objections to the contrary, the Civil War was really all about slavery.

The crippling legacy of slavery as one of the primary factors leading to the war is not a fact that can be wished away. Those desiring to honor the Confederacy should consider what Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens described as a nation whose “corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man,”.

People who tend to identify with Confederate culture like to point out that the majority of Southern whites didn’t own slaves, a fact that is completely irrelevant. The creation of the “Slave Republic” wasn’t formed by farmers, it was formed by the less numerous planters who rightly feared the end of free labor when moderately-abolitionist president Lincoln was elected to office. The entire economy of the South depended on plantation slavery, and the stratified society of the South emphasized the superiority of whites over blacks. Elaborate “salve codes” and “slave patrols” continually affirmed that black slaves had no right to be treated as human beings.

Further, the South was dependent on the North for a variety of services – loans, manufactured goods, and as the North became ever-more intolerant of the institution of slavery, white Southerners felt increasingly cut off. Not only politically, with the rise of abolitionism and the increasing view that slavery was inherently immoral, but also physically – they were cut off from the agriculturally-rich regions of the northwest United States. The North launched an industrial revolution that brought urbanization and increased education – coal, water power, and iron industries were primarily based in the Northern parts of the United States. The vast majority of immigrants settled in the North, and generally viewed slavery in an unfavorable light.

Say what you want about state’s rights and economic issues. The cause underlying all this was the fact that the South was based on slave labor, and the North wasn’t, and it led to the attempted secession of several Southern states, most notably South Carolina. Their reasons are spelled out in brutal honesty in their Declarations of Secession:

Georgia:

“For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery. They have endeavored to weaken our security, to disturb our domestic peace and tranquility, and persistently refused to comply with their express constitutional obligations to us in reference to that property […]”

South Carolina:

“But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution.”

Not about slavery, indeed.

Those who strain themselves by performing elaborate mental gymnastics to explain away the role of slavery in the Civil War are doing themselves and others a terrible disservice. Members of Morgan’s Confederate Brigade declared in 1862 that “any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks … is either a fool or a liar,”. Confederate President Jefferson Davis said a “persistent and organized system of the hostile measures against the rights of the owners of Slaves in the Southern states” prompted the attack on Fort Sumter. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens stated that the assumption of “equality between the races” was an error, and that the “immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution” was that the North questioned the obvious need for black people to be brutally subjugated and the obvious rightness of slavery.

Pride in one’s region is a fine thing. I’m proud to be from Iowa, as agrarian and flat as it is. I understand why people would be proud to be from the Southern United States – they make delicious sweet tea, are overbearingly hospitable, and live in an area with some beautiful and majestic geography. (Compared to, say, Iowa.) I’m certain most of the people who choose to display the Confederate flag are not racist in the slightest – they see it as a symbol that represents the region, an attitude of good-natured rebelliousness and political freedom, not as a symbol that represents the war and slavery in particular.

But it does. It represents a failed secession. It represents a violent and terrible time in our nation’s history. It represents a failed nation that made its living on the lashes, blood, and tears of others – and fought bitterly to maintain that way of life. The states’ rights issue is nothing but a facade to cover their desire to maintain the status quo in the face of obvious moral and legal obligation. Former Confederate soldiers founded the Ku Klux Klan, which unleashed decades of racially-motivated murder and intimidation tactics on blacks living in the south – from the end of Reconstruction through 20th-century Jim Crow, ghosts of which still exist today. The Confederate flag was heavily incorporated into the flag of Georgia in 1956, during a time when calls for desegregation and civil rights were forcing changes on a society with entrenched racism – a move that makes it extremely difficult to distance the use of the Confederate design from Jim Crow and segregation.

That flag may forever represent for some a nostalgic memory of the past, the reminiscence of ancestors long dead who fought to defend their homeland, their brothers and sisters and parents and children, and who will always remain heroes. But the baggage that the Confederate flag carries cannot be denied, especially when flying it publicly. At best, displaying the flag shows ignorance of the meaning behind the symbols, and perhaps a misguided attempt to hold onto a false notion about the reasons for the war. Those who display it are choosing to be ignorant about the pain and lingering wounds caused by the institution of slavery and the war, and it is intellectually dishonest to claim otherwise.

This is our national flag. It’s not any state government’s job to define, deploy, or defend the Confederate flag. Citizens have every right to display the flag on their private property. But it kinda makes you a dick.

Exit, stage left.
Sparks

^{1: Throughout this post, I refer to the “Confederate flag”, because it’s easier to type. I know it’s technically inaccurate.
2: Not her real name.}