Commentary on the Confederate Battle Flag
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| It is often said in the South today that "the War Between the States was fought for states' rights, not slavery." This is commonly heard in the context of controversy surrounding the Confederate flag. Indeed, the popularity of the Confederate battle flag remains strong throughout the South, and its symbolic meaning varies. To many people it represents a respectable part of Southern heritage: an honorable struggle for political independence during which 260,000 Confederate soldiers died in vain. To some folks it is a symbol of disaffection with the contemporary federal government (especially taxes). It is often merely an innocent sign of youthful rebelliousness against convention and authority. The grim reality is that to many people, including both neo-Confederates and African-Americans, it is also regarded as a symbol of white supremacy. The latter perception is based largely on the fact that the Confederacy was indeed founded upon the supposed virtues of Southern whites enslaving blacks. This was reinforced a century later, in a sordid way, by the rabid displays of the flag by segregationists during the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s (still evident at modern Klan rallies). In this course we take no position on the question of whether or not the Confederate flag is too "politically incorrect" and offensive (to many people) to be publicly displayed. Our interest in the controversy is simply to provide historical perspective. The more fundamental issue, we believe, is the debate about states' rights versus slavery as the cause of secession and the war. Let us back up to the early 17th century, when some of the first Virginia colonists decided to use servile labor imported for the purpose of growing profitable cash crops such as tobacco. Eventually the peculiar institution of negro slavery became the foundation of the Old Dominion’s socioeconomic way of life. For over a century, many famous Virginians, from Thomas Jefferson to Robert E. Lee, decried the baneful effects of slavery but did nothing to hasten its demise. Most white Virginians grew to accept the "peculiar institution" of slavery as not only a socioeconomic necessity but a virtuous way of life. From our perspective in the 21st century it is hard not to condemn this because it offends our contemporary sensibilities, and slavery certainly was an abomination, but history is not so much about judging the sins of the past as it is about understanding why things happened as they did, in order to give meaning to our own lives. Slavery steadily grew more widespread and controversial through the first half of the 19th century. By 1860 Virginia had 490,856 black slaves and 52,128 slaveholders, more of both than any other state. While slaveholders comprised less than 5 percent of the state's free population, which totaled 1,105,453 people in 1860, most white Virginians shared two deeply held beliefs: first, slavery was both necessary and proper, and second, the fragile social order that rested upon slavery was endangered by the constant threat of slave insurrection, and increasingly by Northern abolitionists. (So paranoid were the leading slaveholding interests that mailing abolitionist literature and publicly advocating emancipation were proscribed throughout the South.) Their defensiveness turned to panic following John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. The election of a Republican President and Congress in 1860, because of the party’s antislavery platform, was enough to spark the chain reaction of secession that led to a war between the North and South. South Carolina, the state with the largest percentage of slaves, where barely 9 percent of the population owned the majority (57 percent) as chattel, leaped first. The other slave states quickly fell in line like dominoes. Virginia’s departure from the Union followed shortly after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter and President Abraham Lincoln’s call for militia to suppress the rebellion (or crush the South’s assertion of state sovereignty and independence, depending on one’s point of view). There is little room for disagreement about this much of Virginia history, but reasonable people certainly can disagree about why the war was fought and who or what was to blame for the terrible death and destruction that ultimately led to the rapid demise of slavery in America. The argument that it was either fought for slavery or states’ rights, but not both, to be blunt, is a foolish historical construct contradicted by the facts. The two explanations are not mutually exclusive, and actually both are correct. Simply put, it was the right to own slaves that was contested, first in the political arena and then on the battlefield. No other states’ right was seriously at stake. Yes, there was the questionable right of secession that was also contested, but slavery was at the core of the secessionist impulse, and secession caused the war. Most soldiers who fought for the North or the South were neither for nor against slavery, per se, but that is beside the point. They were fighting because of slavery, the number-one issue that divided the nation. The irony of contemporary efforts to distance the Lost Cause and symbols of the Confederacy (principally the Confederate battle flag) from the abomination of slavery, is that it would never have occurred to the founding fathers of the Confederacy to attempt such a stretch. Frankly, they were quite clear, adamant, and proud about the fact that their attempt to separate and form a more perfect union was founded upon what they believed to be a fundamental truth: that whites were meant to enslave blacks. To respect and honor the soldiers who fought for the Confederacy, and to display the Confederate flag, does not necessarily reflect an endorsement of this belief. But it is not only false but foolish to pretend that secession and the war had nothing to do with slavery until Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation. Likewise, efforts by neo-Confederates to characterize Lincoln as a racist and tyrant, and to misrepresent Ulysses Grant as a slaveholder because his wife Julia inherited a few house servants from her father, are silly diversions, red herrings, that cannot change the fact that the Old South, and the Confederacy, rested upon a crumbling foundation of slavery. The Confederate flag today means different things to different people in part because the war meant different things to different people in the 1860s. Unlike other wars in our nation's history, the "enemy" was a fellow American, sometimes a neighbor or even a brother. They were all Americans, doing their patriotic duty as they saw it. We should honor all of the three million men who fought in the tragic war between the North and the South (620,000 of whom died), regardless of what flag they followed into battle. Yanks and Rebs alike, most volunteered and endured unimaginable hardships, even though they gave relatively little thought to the grand political and social implications of it all. (Sometimes after dark, they would sneak across the picket lines and swap coffee for tobacco, occasionally play a game of cards, and then go back to killing in the morning.) In the end, those who survived the ordeal exchanged salutes, put down their arms, and went home. We should follow their example, lay down our verbal weapons, and bury the animosity between Northerners and Southerners. Too much blood was spilled, too many lives were wasted, to forget the lesson of the war: that despite our differences, Americans can live together under one flag, as one indivisible nation, with liberty and justice for all. David C. Hanson |
