The indelibly tainted battle flag came down in South Carolina, but in context, other Confederate monuments can help teach history for all Americans
In June of 1865, Confederate Gen. Joseph Shelby and about a thousand of his cavalrymen rode into Mexico and exile rather than remain in a conquered South. As they forded the Rio Grande, they stopped and sank their faded banners midstream in an act of symbolic defiance.
Decades later, in the era of Jim Crow and racist attempts to deny black citizens their civil rights, that emblem rose anew, and it has refused to be submerged—until now. Today, the Confederate battle flag may be going down again, perhaps for good, but it is worth considering what we allow to sink with it.
On Friday morning at 10 a.m., a vestige of a sad epoch faded when that flag was finally taken down from a flagpole in front of the South Carolina State House. The banner was not destroyed but taken to a museum, to rest alongside other vestiges of the state’s dramatic past. Meanwhile, some country-music stars are backing away from the flag, and House Speaker John Boehner, a Republican, said Thursday that he personally didn’t believe Confederate flags should be on display in federal cemeteries and parks. The debate continues in Mississippi, the only remaining Southern state whose flag incorporates the design of this Confederate banner. It too may be destined for a museum.
This is an old debate electrified by the June 17 massacre of nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., a mass shooting that authorities call a racially motivated hate crime. In fact, what is popularly known as “the Confederate flag” never flew over Confederate capitols or public buildings, where different banners reigned. Rather, this emblem brought down on Friday was the Confederate “battle flag,” designed to be carried at the head of a regiment and used as its rallying point in battle, where the flag’s blue St. Andrew’s cross on a field of brilliant red might stand out through the smoke of battle. As such, it primarily stood for a unit’s pride in its valor in action, though all of the Confederacy’s symbols naturally carried an intrinsic affirmation of its foundational tenets, including the perpetuation of slavery. After the Union victory in 1865, those battle flags not surrendered, buried, thrown into rivers or cut up as souvenirs went home to quiet repose in closets, attics and, later, museums.
There they remained for decades, undisturbed and in the main undisturbing despite the unhappy meaning still attached to them, their image even protected by veterans’ groups from inappropriate political or commercial use. But that all ended in the 1940s, when opponents of the emerging civil-rights movement raised the old banner for a new battle.
