The Confederate Flag Debate in Florida: When Civil War "Heritage" Collides with Civil War History

The continuing disputes over the meaning of the Confederate flag (often called "flag flaps") which have most recently sprung up in Florida, highlight the fact that the Civil War remains in the American consciousness in a very real way. Recently, artist John Sims, as part of an art exhibit called "AfroProvocations," hung a display of a Confederate flag hung by a noose in a Florida art museum. Predictably, this exhibit has led to protest by members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) and other "Southern Heritage" groups. Somewhat melodramatically labeled "cultural genocide" against the South by these activists, Sims's stark, clever, and brilliantly negative portrayal of the most lasting symbol of the Confederacy has once again brought to the fore one of the silliest of debates: the cause of the American Civil War.

Arguments over the meaning of the Confederate Battle ultimately boil down to arguments about why the Civil War was fought. Clearly, since the armies of the Confederacy carried the flag popularly known as the "Stars and Bars", the meaning of the War is of paramount importance in the flag debates. Simplistically, the war started because 11 southern states seceded from the Union and attempted to form their own republic, (the Confederate States of America, lasting from 1861 to 1865) and the remaining states in the Union refused to let them do so. The real question is why the states comprising the Confederacy chose to secede, a decision that most Americans, north and south, expected would bring about a war.

In reality, there is not much of a debate among the historical community-both northern and southern-about whether or not slavery was a central cause of Southern secession. The almost universal opinion, supported by mountains of documentary evidence, is that the protection of slavery was the main reason for the creation of the Confederacy. Popular writers and the general public who behave as if that issue is in doubt are doing so in the face of overwhelming evidence. They are guilty of that oft- repeated sin of giving equal credence to different opinions, regardless of fact. Just like "debate" shows that pull stunts like pitting a renowned climatologist against a lumberjack to argue about the effects of deforestation, popular writing frequently classifies historians' insistence on the importance of slavery in the Civil War as an "opinion" no different from the Confederate apologists.

This is especially maddening because the white Southerners who advocated secession in 1860 came straight out and said that they did so to preserve slavery as an economic and social way of life. Confederate leaders said that the U.S. Constitution was too vague about the slavery, and wanted to create a government that was explicit in its protection of slavery. Despite apologists' claims that the protection of "States' Rights" was the paramount object of the revolution of 1860-1861, the new Confederate Constitution specifically denied member states the right to ban slavery in their borders. Translation: states rights were important, but preservation of slavery was more important.

In light of the facts, the real question becomes why so many people today are claiming that the southern states seceded to protect "States' Rights" or their "way of life." There are several reasons, some reaching back to 1865, when the final guns of war were falling silent. White southerners had suffered immensely during the war, with large swaths of the former Confederacy lying in ruins, and roughly a quarter of all military age males dead from the fighting. Having lost, they had a collective need to justify such terrible sacrifice. Even in the ex-Confederacy, telling the grandchildren that their homeland was destroyed during a struggle to preserve slavery was hardly a satisfying option. So very quickly, white southerners began to convince themselves that the South had fought only for States' Rights. The leaders of the defunct Confederacy, who had only a few years before trumpeted the benefit they were doing western civilization by protecting slavery, abruptly changed their tune, writing lengthy books claiming that the war had been fought over legal, constitutional disputes only. The literature in this field endorses what historians refer to as the "Lost Cause myth," This school of writing glorifies the Confederacy as a nation of heroes fighting for equality and liberty, clinging to deeply held racist and sectionalist assumptions, and amounts to feel-good history for Southern whites. What will surprise the modern reader is that by 1890, most Northerners had jumped on the Lost Cause bandwagon. Why?

There were two reasons. First of all, most northern whites before the Civil War shared the fundamentally racist views toward blacks expressed by their southern brethren, albeit with growing distaste for slavery. But just because northern whites were against slavery didn't mean they were for black equality. The majority of them (with some noble exceptions) would no sooner have wanted their children marrying and living among the freed slaves as neighbors than the ex-Rebels. The North also wanted to get the seceded states back into the Union and prevent further violent. Victory in the Civil War would have been fruitless had yet more violence continued. The sooner the South accepted the abolition of slavery and the supremacy of the new, slavery-free constitution, the better.

Allowing the white South to retain its "honor" by legitimizing its fight for independence, along with not protecting the civil rights of blacks in the former Confederacy, the North was able to achieve its goal of reunion. The ever-present racism among much of the Northern white public meant that when Southern whites ushered in the era of Jim Crow segregation in the 1870s, most Northerners didn't complain. Indeed, many Northern states engaged in various forms of segregation themselves from 1877 until the Civil Rights years.

However, the defenders of Confederate "honor" were never able to completely silence the voices of African Americans and their white allies, North and South. When racism gradually fell out of scholarly vogue beginning in the 1950s, mainstream (white) historians rediscovered the mountains of documentary evidence of what really happened, and have since fought an uphill battle against popular "knowledge" of the Civil War era, which is often brimming with Lost Cause falsehoods. Thanks to this, I've had well-educated people tell me with straight faces that Robert E. Lee was an abolitionist. Historically accurate rebuttal to this moonlight and magnolia fantasy is branded as merely "opinion." Other self-appointed sages repeat the cliché that "the winners write the history books."

If that overused phrase is true, then let me ask you this: if the North dictated the history books, then why is Robert E. Lee regarded as an American hero, and Thaddeus Stevens an asterisk in the history textbooks?

Thaddeus Stevens? Come on, you know him! He's the famous member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania who was an abolitionist before it was cool to be one, and devoted his entire life to helping end slavery and extend civil rights to all groups. Thaddeus Stevens! He was one of the guys who, after the Civil War ended, advocated actually giving land to freed slaves from their former owners' estates, besides making them equal citizens and teaching them to read. He chose to be buried in the only cemetery he could find that wasn't segregated. Ring a bell? Anyone?

Ok, fine. But you do know about Robert E. Lee. He was Confederacy's most brilliant general during the Civil War. And if you're a Civil War "buff," or just a white person from the southern half of the country, then you probably think he's awesome. You probably didn't know this, but Robert E. Lee owned slaves, thought slavery was "the best" situation for blacks, and blamed folks like Thaddeus Stevens for starting the war and "creating" racial tension in the happy, slaveholding South. (Don't believe me? Read his letters!) Oh yeah, Lee also ordered his army to fight on long after he thought the Confederacy could win the war, sentencing thousands of his men to die for what he believed was a lost cause.

Who, I ask, is remembered with more fondness today?

Still, Southern partisans insist American history is biased against the Confederacy. Oops, I mean, "the South." Never mind that saying "the South" lost the Civil War implies that the 4 million slaves --over 40% of the people living in the 11 seceded states-wanted the Confederacy to prevail. And that all of the men from the seceded states who refused to serve in the Confederate Army, or even donned Union blue, were somehow not "real" Southerners.

A fundamental insecurity has always formed an undertone of Confederate apologia. Its partisans spend so much time trying to distract you from the proverbial elephant shackled to the living room floor that they lose sight of the big picture. They point out that there were a handful of blacks in the South who owned slaves, that there were slave states in the Union, that Lincoln was a racist, that several thousand blacks fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War, that the first of the original 13 colonies to legalize slavery was Massachusetts, and so on. This is all true, but misses the point. Again, real historians don't' deny any of these facts. But they also don't deny that big ugly truth of 4 million slaves in the Confederate states and how, in the end, it was America's inability to agree on what to make of that fact that led to a bloody Civil War. Confederate apologists, while scrutinizing everything negative about the North and positive about the South with a fine tooth comb, completely lose perspective on what the war meant for Americans.

I am not arguing that the Confederacy should be forgotten, or that all the monuments be taken down, or that the soldiers who died for it be smeared as evil, which they were not. By and large, the soldiers of the Confederacy believed they were fighting to defend their homes from an invading army. That the Rebels were also, in practice, defending a country based upon white supremacy and black servitude must also be acknowledged. History is rarely clean, but neither is modern day life. Both should be dealt with in a way that accepts that without getting bogged down in excessive denial or pessimism.

My mother, like other sensible people, is baffled by the Southern partisans who seem to dwell so much in the past. "How long did the Confederacy last?" she asked me.

"Four years," I answered.

She paused, and then my mother said one of the wisest things on the subject I have heard for a long time.

"All these people are dwelling on four years? Didn't anything else happen in the South?"

And of course, she's right.

It can be argued that since about half, perhaps more, of the people living in the South in 1861 wished for Confederate defeat, that "the South" didn't lose the war after all, even if the Confederacy-certainly the dominant political incarnation of the South at the time-did.

Ultimately, one of the worst crimes of memory being committed by the "Southern Heritage" groups today is that instead of finding good things to defend about the South, like its cooking, hospitality, Faulkner novels, and genuinely rural heritage. Instead, they feel the need to defend the ugly side-the slaveholding, Confederate side. Every region of this country has its ugly side of history, and coming clean about America's faults as a nation historically does not automatically translate into the falsehood that everything America-or a region of it-did was bad. But denial won't fix it. And neither will bothering historians and artists like John Sims.

Southern partisans will undoubtedly brand my interpretation of events-which is little more than a summary of the broad consensus of historians-as merely feel-good history for Northerners. This is unfair. No serious historian would make the claim that the Civil War was a case of a noble North battling an evil, whip cracking South. Northern racism was a constant reality. Ironically, at Abraham Lincoln's first inauguration in March 1861, no blacks were in the audience because they weren't allowed in that part of the capitol. And the deadliest race riot in American history happened not in the South, but in New York City in 1863, when an angry white mob protesting the draft vented their frustration on the city's black community, perceived as the cause of the war. But the fact remains that for a variety of reasons, there was an increasingly vocal anti-slavery movement in the North, and during the 1860s, Northern voters consistently voted for the antislavery Republicans, giving their tacit approval of the passage of the 13th and 14th Amendments (banning slavery and giving black men the vote) as well as several other pieces of civil rights legislation. It remains a historical fact that in 1860, most Southerners were far more committed to the institution of slavery than most Northerners, and were prepared to secede to protect it.

But to the diehards, this isn't about history; it's about heritage, which is more like a religion, making up in devotion what it lacks in solid evidence. And to the Confederate wannabees reading these lines, I have a special message. 142 years ago this past April 9th at a place called Appomattox Court House, Lee surrendered to Grant, effectively ending the Civil War. I wish all of you "heritage" groups out there a very happy anniversary.

Losers.