RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Right Way to Remember the Confederacy By William C. Davis

Posted By Ruth King on July 13th, 2015

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-right-way-to-remember-the-confederacy-1436568855?mod=trending_now_3

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.

Soon, former Confederate states incorporated it into their state flags, and militant white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan began deploying it as a symbol of resistance to integration and voting rights. The worst proponents of white supremacy displayed that emblem while committing unspeakable violence against African-Americans and white supporters of civil rights. They still do: Witness Charleston.

Symbols matter. They say at a glimpse what words cannot, encapsulating beliefs and aspirations, prejudices and fears. Having no intrinsic value, they take meaning from the way we use them, changing over time along with our actions. The most obvious example is the ancient “gammadion,” which in early Eastern cultures meant “god,” “good luck,” “eternity” and other benign conjurations. We know it today as the swastika, and a quarter-century of usage by the Nazis forever poisoned it in Western culture.

Whatever the flag meant from 1865 to 1940, the flag’s misuse by a white minority of outspokenly bigoted and often violent people has indelibly shifted that meaning. It is now remembered around the world with images of defiant governors standing in schoolhouse doors, with the snapping dogs of Birmingham, with police barricades to keep black youths out of classrooms, with beatings and lynchings in the night, with churches set ablaze, with fear, intimidation, hatred and the constant reminder that the descendants of slaves were not welcome in their own country.

The argument that the battle flag is displayed only as a symbol of pride in Southern heritage loses force when one recalls that while Florida, Alabama and Mississippi added elements of the banner to their flags around the turn of the last century, Georgia incorporated the battle emblem into its state flag only in 1956, and South Carolina began flying the battle flag over its state house as late as 1961. Both were unequivocal declarations of defiance to desegregation and the civil-rights movement.

Defenders of the battle flag often further assert that Southern secession and the resultant Civil War had little or nothing to do with slavery, arguing that only a tiny fraction of people in the seceding states—usually cited as 3% to 6%—actually owned slaves. Thus, they say, the flag’s opponents are wrong to condemn it is a symbol of slavery and oppression.

But somebody owned the 3.5 million slaves in the Confederate states in 1861. In fact, census records reveal that 31% of all Confederate households held one or more slaves. The same records show that on farms large enough to avail themselves of slave labor, as many as 70% of planters owned their workers. Such ownership defined wealth and social status, regional culture and economic survival. The prospect of abolishing slavery threatened to upend the slave states’ societies and economies. Abraham Lincoln won the presidency in 1860 at the head of a Republican Party committed to halting slavery’s spread. If slavery was contained, its death was inevitable.

My fellow white Southerners today need feel no shame in confronting the motivations of our ancestors. The Confederates were men and women of their era; we can only judge them legitimately in that context. Otherwise, we could reject virtually all of human history on one currently unacceptable ground or another. As with symbols, standards, norms and mores change over the ages. We could be shocked indeed were we to live long enough to see how Americans 150 years from now might judge us by the measures of their time.

Moreover, defending the battle flag with appeals to pride in ancestry and heritage evades the issue, deliberately and unsubtly. Black and white Americans today do not reject this emblem primarily because of what happened in the 1860s. They object because of what the flag has come to symbolize in the U.S. and around the world in our own lifetimes.

Many Southerners take legitimate pride in the heroism and sacrifice their ancestors displayed under that banner, but to millions of Americans today, black and white, it means not heritage but hate. To their credit, in times past, some Confederate heritage groups sought to protect the flag from just this sort of metamorphosis, but that battle has been lost every bit as much as the Confederates’ war.

When we remember that common tax revenues support every expense connected with flying that flag or with displaying Confederate emblems on federal, state or municipal property, we confront the cruel irony of African-American taxpayers being forced to subsidize constant reminders of past and present injustices. Whatever private individuals and groups choose to do on their persons and their private property—and as Americans, they must be allowed their freedom of expression—the battle flag should disappear from display on public property and retire to museums where it can resume its place as an honored relic.

That inevitably raises a question. Our landscape is peppered with monuments, parks, counties, towns, streets and private businesses named for Confederate leaders—not to mention the myriad road signs and markers commemorating the Confederate story. Are all of these to be purged? Where do we stop?

Should we take it for granted that the highway that runs near the Pentagon is named for Confederate President Jefferson Davis? Or consider Statuary Hall in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., which allows every state to honor two native luminaries with statues in this national pantheon. Nine Confederate generals and statesmen stand there, including President Davis of Mississippi, Vice President Alexander Stephens of Georgia and the greatest Southern icon of all, Virginia’s Gen. Robert E. Lee. How can we leave them on their pedestals when all bear the taint of being slave-owners or defenders of slavery, not to mention their subsequent varying degrees of opposition to full civil rights for freedmen?

Lee presents an especially interesting case. He towers over all other Confederate leaders in myth and memory, and there are more statues and monuments to him today than to any other figure of the Civil War era except Lincoln.

Lee understood symbols. After the war, he opposed efforts to place monuments on the Confederacy’s battlefields. In 1869, he counseled that Southerners ought to “obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.” If he were alive now and remained true to that conviction—as he always did—Lee would probably stand with those calling for taking the battle flag out of its tarnished place in the public forum and returning it to the museum.

All of which demands that we ask: Can we ever separate the memory of the Confederate experience from the memory of slavery? Is there any positive legacy to be drawn from the Confederacy? Can we admire Confederate leaders, even the all-but-deified Lee, without tacitly endorsing their cause? Ultimately, can we make the Confederacy worth remembering for the descendants of the slaves and those following generations of freedmen whom the whole nation betrayed by ignoring their new rights and liberties for a century?

Perhaps we can—but not through the current Southern fallacy that hundreds of thousands of free and enslaved blacks fought for the South. Such an exercise can come only by directly and honestly addressing the Confederacy and the war it fought, and owning up to the ways they are remembered—both of which are vital to understanding America’s course since 1860. To that end, the Confederacy’s monuments and symbols can be vital learning tools if placed in context. They must be preserved, not expunged. They must be understood, not whitewashed.

African-Americans today are understandably outraged by calls to keep the battle flag flying. The “Southern heritage” that most of them recall stands only for repression and humiliation. Still, there are lessons in the Confederate experience, hard to see though they may be.

The shibboleth that “state rights” caused secession is a suit of clothes desperately lacking an emperor. Only slavery (and its surrounding economic and political issues) had the power to propel white Southerners to disunion and, ultimately, war. Ironically, by taking a course that led to a war that they lost, the Confederates themselves launched the juggernaut that led to emancipation. To understand how freedom and justice came, why it was delayed for a century after the Civil War and why today so much mistrust and misunderstanding persists between black and white Americans, the vital starting point remains the Confederacy.

ENLARGE

Navy Lt. William Edmund Newsome looks up at a bronze statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall on June 24. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Should African-Americans even care about the individual “heroes” of the Confederacy? It might help to know that some of them were black too, including men like the enslaved Charleston steamer pilot Robert Smalls, who boldly stole a Confederate steamboat on May 13, 1862, and took his family and the families of his crew past the cannons ringing Charleston’s harbor to reach freedom with the blockading Union fleet. More interesting might be those brave Southern black men and women who carried on a clandestine opposition during the war to help the Union. And many might be surprised to learn of the tens of thousands of white Southerners who opposed both slavery and the Confederacy. After the war, a few leaders even accepted the new U.S. order and espoused full citizenship for freedmen. Without preserving the Confederate story, we risk losing the memories of all those other genuine heroes.

In the end, Americans cannot afford to forget the Confederacy. It is a good thing that the Confederacy failed—not least because a permanently divided America would have had neither the strength nor the worldliness to confront the next century’s totalitarian menaces. But the Confederate experience also teaches lessons about Americans themselves—about how they have reacted in crisis, about matters beyond just bravery and sacrifice that constitute the bedrock of our national being.

The Confederacy was almost as deeply riven with dissent as the U.S. is today, and yet it stopped short of draconian restrictions on free speech (at least for the whites it considered full citizens). By their own lights, its leaders overwhelmingly remained committed to constitutional authority and elected civil government—even in the last year of the war, when the military situation grew so desperate that some prominent leaders called for the unconstitutional overthrow of President Davis and the installation of Lee as military dictator.

To the end, the Confederates’ leaders believed in democracy as they conceived it. In the last months of the war, some of their civil and military leaders, briefly including Lee himself, worked to bring about a negotiated peace with the North that would have ended slavery and the Confederacy in return for guarantees of continued government in the Southern states by the consent of the white population. The Confederates were seen at the time as traitors by the North, and they are seen as racists down to the present day, but in the main, they sincerely believed that they were holding true to the guiding principles of democracy.

To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, America has ever been a laboratory for that democracy. The Confederacy is its most notable failed experiment. The debate over the relation of the states to the federal government had been present since independence. The idea that secession was an alternative if conflicts over sovereignty couldn’t be resolved arose often enough that it was likely to be tried eventually, and so the Confederates tried. They failed. But good scientists don’t erase their laboratory failures; they learn from them.

Even today, separatist voices rail against the federal government, call for radical localism and sometimes embrace secession as a solution to parochial issues. The Confederate experience is there to remind them that going it alone means losing vastly more than there is to gain.

American democracy is ever-changing, a constantly evolving work in progress. We shall be fortunate if it remains ever thus, but we need to remember our entire past in all its dimensions to inform the process and keep it alive. Ossification is the first step on the road to extinction for great ideas.

Dr. Davis is a former executive director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech. He is the author of many books on the Civil War and Southern history, including “Crucible of Command: Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee—The War They Fought, the Peace They Forged.”

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