← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · confederate_commando
Thread ID: 17558 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2005-03-29
2005-03-29 04:23 | User Profile
[COLOR=Red]What did the Confederacy stand for? Coski quotes liberally from many ex-Confederates who had no doubts. The renowned partisan Col. John S. Mosby wrote in 1894: "I've always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I've never heard of any other cause than slavery." Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens proclaimed in his famous "cornerstone" speech that his new government rested on the "great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition." As Coski concludes, these men and many others "had no difficulty conceding what their descendants go to enormous lengths to deny: that the raison d'etre of the Confederacy was the defense of slavery." [/COLOR]
Writer takes clear-eyed look at battle flag's past and present Monday, March 28, 2005 When I was around 10, my buddies and I took a Confederate battle flag and nailed it to a long wooden slat. With high hearts we carried it through all our imaginary Civil War battles, waving it over our heads and planting it proudly on hated Yankees' positions. To this day, in addition to pleasant memories of childhood play, the battle flag evokes pride and respect for the bravery of my ancestors who served and suffered beneath its distinctive folds.
But the battle flag symbolizes quite different things to other people. This was no more graphically illustrated to me than the time almost a decade ago when I ferried a black friend's young daughter to her softball game. When we stopped at a local intersection, one of those jacked-up pickup trucks pulled alongside us with a thuggish-looking young man at the wheel. Its powerful engine throbbed, and earsplitting, angry rock music poured out of its open windows. From a metal pole behind the cab, a large Confederate battle flag snapped in the breeze. My 10-year-old friend visibly shrunk into her seat. "What's the matter?" I asked. "That man might hurt me," was her wide-eyed response.
There at that intersection, three divergent interpretations of the battle flag's meaning were simultaneously and vividly impressed upon me. For myself, I was not a little irritated at the youth's lowbrow misuse of an icon of Southern heritage. For him, it seemed clear that the flag was a symbol of defiance, belligerence and perhaps racism. But for the black child at my side, it was unequivocally a threat, a menacing talisman borne by someone who might do her harm.
Such varied perceptions are at the very heart of the recent struggles over the battle flag in localities across the nation -- the Alabama and South Carolina state capitols, a Chicago public school, a Richmond, Va., park and a small Kentucky town among a thousand other places. "Heritage, not hate," proclaim groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans. "Tool of the Ku Klux Klan and racist groups," counters the NAACP.
The many meanings of the flag are examined in an excellent new book, "The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem" (Harvard, $29.95), in which historian John M. Coski clearly and dispassionately lays out the long, controversial history of that familiar piece of cloth. Coski is the director of the library at Rich mond's Museum of the Confederacy and knows his history backwards and forwards. He is admirably temperate on what is an extremely volatile subject. "My reaction to the debates is amazement at others' strongly held and strongly expressed opinions," he writes. But he takes every argument seriously, examining each one's strengths and weaknesses.
Many politicians and citizens get exasperated by the flag flaps, loudly declaring them to be an irrelevant distraction from more pressing and meaningful matters. Coski rightly disagrees: "The battle over the battle flag represents one of the most intensive and extensive ongoing public dialogues about U.S. history. The debate over the proper place of the Confederate battle flag in American life is an important means by which citizens engage with the meaning of the Civil War and its legacies." In other words, almost 150 years after the guns stopped killing, the smoke from our country's greatest conflagration has not yet lifted.
Coski begins the book with a thorough study of how the battle flag was born amid the Civil War's carnage and confusion. And he goes right to the question that angrily divides so many: What did the Confederacy stand for? Coski quotes liberally from many ex-Confederates who had no doubts. The renowned partisan Col. John S. Mosby wrote in 1894: "I've always understood that we went to war on account of the thing we quarreled with the North about. I've never heard of any other cause than slavery." Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens proclaimed in his famous "cornerstone" speech that his new government rested on the "great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition." As Coski concludes, these men and many others "had no difficulty conceding what their descendants go to enormous lengths to deny: that the raison d'etre of the Confederacy was the defense of slavery."
But not all Southern men under arms owned slaves, and most of their letters and diaries available to historians express no opinion at all about slavery. Rather, they claimed to be fighting for their beloved homes and families, protecting them from invasion. In the postwar years, even the Northern public agreed that these men had displayed a singular valor that all Americans could salute. In 1882, a Confederate veteran neatly expressed the pride he and his comrades felt when they saw the battle flag. It did not represent the Confederacy, he declared, but the Confederate soldier: "As such it should not share in the condemnation which our cause received, or suffer from its downfall. The whole world can unite in a chorus of praise to the gallantry of the men who followed where this banner led."
That sentiment lay at the root of a great national compromise over the battle flag that obtained until the middle of the 20th century. For most ordinary white Southerners, the battle flag was a symbol of pride and place. Black Southerners, with no voice or political power, were not consulted on the matter. Northerners, if they thought about it at all, considered it yet another of Dixie's many harmless quirks.
All that changed during the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s. Black people attempting to vote, Freedom Riders, and civil rights marchers found themselves confronted by violent men and women waving the Confederate battle flag. Coski points out, "Civil Rights leaders came to view the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of racism because they encountered it in situations in which white people intended it as a symbol of racism." As one Georgia politician succinctly put it, "The Confederate flag means segregation." Black people and the nation at large got the message, and to this day, for millions, that is what the battle flag represents, not the courage of long-deceased soldiers.
Coski details dozens of recent flag flaps, including the one over the Mobile city seal several years ago. While he recognizes the flag's importance as a legitimate historical artifact, he takes Southern heritage groups to task for defending it no matter what the circumstances. Displays that an earlier generation would have considered irreverent, inappropriate or trivial, such as on a motorcycle helmet or T-shirt, have been turned into Confederate tolerance litmus tests. But the even-handed author also chastises those zealots who would banish the battle flag from any public display: "Flag critics must (for practical as well as ethical reasons) become more willing to distinguish between a Ku Klux Klan rally and a Memorial Day parade."
One thing is certain, as much as many might wish otherwise, the controversy will not fade anytime soon. In the end, the Confederate battle flag symbolizes all these things -- pride, courage, sacrifice, hope, heritage, defiance, revolution, hatred, intimidation and bigotry. To paraphrase Melville in "Moby Dick": Wonder ye then at the fiery debate?
John Sledge edits the Mobile Register's Books page. He may be reached at the Register, P.O. Box 2488, Mobile, AL 36652.
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