Once upon a time, a bunch of racist assholes decided to commit treason against the United States to protect their right to own certain kind of people as property. These jackasses formed the Confederate States of America, and rallied under this flag:
"The Stars and Bars", the first flag of the Confederate States of America.
However, this flag proved to be a hindrance in battle, as it looked too much like the real American flag—you know, the patriots fighting for this country unlike the Southern traitors. But even worse, Southerners considered it too similar to the American flag—a
symbol of abolition—as this editorial in the Savannah Morning News made explicitly clear:
[The southern Congress and press object to the first flag] on account of its resemblance to that of the abolition despotism against which we are fighting.
So then they adopted the second flag, which was all about the whiteness of the white-dominated white South!
Second flag of the Confederate States of America
As its designer waxed
poetic:
As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race ; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.
Another newspaper wrote
in praise of the new design:
Bagby characterized the flag motif as the “Southern Cross” – the constellation, not a religious symbol – and hailed it for pointing “the destiny of the Southern master and his African slave” southward to “the banks of the Amazon,” a reference to the desire among many Southerners to expand Confederate territory into Latin America.
Alas, too many decided all that white, while a great symbol of their Whitey White McWhiterson, looked too much like the symbol of surrender—the white flag. So they decided to add a red bar (because it was the opposite of "Yankee Blue") and called it a day:
The third flag of the Confederate States of America, "The Blood Stained Banner"
And then those fuckfaces lost the war. Unfortunately, 150 years later, we're still dealing with their bullshit legacy.