Although I’ve been distracted, and continue to distract others with the social politics that have been surrounding our country in the past week, I think it is time that I sat down and put much thought into an objective approach as to why this flag issue is worthy of re-examination.
I was born in California, the son of a mother who can be interpreted as a peace hippy. I grew up in Mississippi, the son of a proud southern man who had the hobby of digging up civil war relics with a metal detector. I grew up sharing a room with my older brother, who proudly waved the Stars and Stripes right next to the Confederate Battle Flag that had popularized during their reign of terror. and even after he left and joined the Army, I kept it in the room more as a memento of him, but also out of my own ignorance of the historical connotations behind it. You can say I grew up with the concept of the southern pride thing I’ve been seeing around posted on Facebook, denying the fact that the Confederate States of America fought to preserve the institution of slavery. I went to a Vicksburg High School, the home city of the famous Siege of Vicksburg that ended on the same day as Gettysburg, July 4 1863. My High School did a good job at repressing the Civil War and Reconstruction Periods, as our US History Class didn’t even examine any history before 1878. It wasn’t until I went to college before I learned anything regarding the most important history of the 19th century. As a kid, all I knew the civil war as the War of Northern Aggression and the victors wrote the history. I would say that this approach always made me skeptical of what I was learning, but the proof was too hard to deny that I was just an ignorant kid who didn’t know any better. Many people would argue that I was being indoctrinated, but that is always the response to people who can’t come up with an intelligent counter-argument to substantiate their own beliefs.
Let me start off by saying that the United States (the Union) isn’t exempt from any scrutiny. The evolving animosity between Free states and slave states is one of the big reasons that the war happened in the first place. The western expansion is the single largest factor in the split between Republicans and Southern Dixiecrats. Any southern migration to the west brought upon much animosity with the Northerners who also moved to the west. They competed for annexation for Statehood, while Republicans vied to not allow Slave States outnumber Free State, which sometimes resulted in armed conflict between the two. Many of our founding fathers, most notably Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, saw slavery as a stain on the country but as a necessary evil. They considered that slavery is a problem that would inevitably end, and that is why the Federalists were so adamant to restrict its expansion, and to ensure that slave states did not have more political power than Free states.
The slave trade was restricted in 1808, and slavery in the north was virtually gone by 1840. There were many exceptions as to why Slaves still resided in the north. Many southerners owned slaves and travelled north to other owned residencies could bring their slaves without fear that they could be somehow liberated by entering the jurisdiction of Free states. They were allowed and protected lawfully by the Supreme Court case the “Dred Scott Decision” which upheld the Fugitive Slave Act.
In 1821, there were an equal amount of Free States and Slave States. By 1861, there were 5 more free states than slave states. This is where my argument comes in that the Civil War was mostly political strife that resonated in DC for the past 40 years. The Southern democrats faced the reality that their political power had reached its peak when the last slave state was annexed in 1845. New Republican Congressmen were outnumbering the democratic counterparts under the assumption that the institution of slavery would soon face the inevitable end that our most influential founding fathers had predicted.
When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1861, he was adamant that he had no intention on restricting slavery where it had already existed, but also noted that the expansion of slavery is no longer. This is the precipice that made it perfectly clear their dying voice in Washington brought upon the civil war. The Confederate States of America needed the institution of Slavery to be centrally protected that not only preserved it and but also allowed its expansion. 5 States had drafted and passed a Declaration of Causes that lists the grievances the south had against their northern counterparts, slavery was a cited reason in 4/5 states, and Virginia didn’t cite any specific reason to its secession.
“The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
-Alexander Stephens- VP of the CSA (Cornerstone Speech- March 21, 1861)
After the South’s defeat of the War, it immediately brought up an era known as the Reconstruction. This was a federal initiative meant to empower newly freedman to earn capital to build wealth of an entire race of people that literally had nothing. Many social institutions were established to prevent their ability to become social equals, IE Sharecropping. There are institutions of racism such as the KKK who fought to control the behavior of African Americans, to live in fear of their lives, which carried the flag in question today as a banner of their racial supremacy. This lasted for a century, where they lived in a segregated Jim Crowe society that supported the radical notion of “Separate but Equal.” These laws were protected by the entire southern region while the Federal Equal Protection Clause established in the 14th amendment was suppressed until the Civil Rights movement until 1961, markedly the beginning of the Civil Rights movement. The 100 year centennial of the civil war was nearly also the 100 year celebration of the KKK, the institution created to preserve the racial supremacy of white people (ironic eh?). It wasn’t until 1965 that the federal government passed legislation aimed at enforcing rights they should have had the entire time.
This entire argument is clear, why would you want to associate yourself with a symbol of hatred and racial bigotry that was established at the dawn of the civil war. A war initiated by the south that made it abundantly clear that those who actually prompted this war (rich slave owners) were willing to send their fellow southerners (mostly non-slave owners) to kill their northern brothers to preserve the institution of slavery. This isn’t a southern heritage to be proud of.
“Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas (of the constitution) ; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
-Alexander Stephens- VP of the CSA (Cornerstone Speech- March 21, 1861)
Now I’m not going to sit here and tell people they cannot be ignorant and wave this flag of bigotry and hatred. I will allow the ignorant to be ignorant; it is their constitutional right to willfully blind their eyes of the truth. I will not allow State Governments to fly the Stars and Bars only because of the fact that it is an endorsement of this historical revisionism, and if not intentional an endorsement of ignorance.
(Photo: MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/Getty Images)