Recently, the continued usage of the Confederate flag on the uniforms of Alabama state troopers prompted a bit of a deeper dive into the use of the flag across different public institutions in Alabama. Long story short, although Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley did issue an order to remove the flags flying at the state capitol, it persists in his own office’s flag and in the official coat of arms of Alabama, which is replicated on the patches that troopers wear. Also, the state flag itself is derivative of another flag of the Confederacy used by an Alabama regiment.
This got me to thinking about life in the South (I am a North Carolinian and my I actually passed this guy's house on the bus to high school) and how the symbols of the Confederacy and the mythology of the Lost Cause become so embedded in life that they’re almost impossible to remove because, as in Alabama’s case, even the replacements are oftentimes part of the same legacy. Just how deep does the rabbit hole go?
First things first, there’s the Big Daddy. The red and blue monstrosity that we refer to most often as the Confederate Flag, the one that until very recently waved over several courthouses and state buildings in the South. In actuality, it is but one of many flags of the Confederacy (the Civil War was sort of similar to wars of antiquity in that many different factions had their own standards and flags—remember that the Confederacy viewed itself as what the name indicates: a collection of sovereign states with their own regalia and flags). Also, the flag that flew over the South Carolina Capitol was kind of a bastard. The original flag is supposed to be square (flag shape is a very big deal among flag enthusiasts).
The original square flag, with its blue diagonal cross and stars, was proposed as the first flag of the Confederacy, but was later relegated to battle flag status of the Army of Northern Virginia after the voting body in 1861 decided that they wanted a flag more like the current flag of the United States. That flag, the “Stars and Bars,” flew until 1863, at which point it had a symbolically relevant 13 stars that represented a (largely tenuous) hold that the Confederacy had over that many states. It kind of looks like the Austrian flag, which inspired Prussian artist Nicola Marschall, who also designed some other Confederate symbols.
The Confederates became fed up with that flag because it looked too much like the United States flag, so they then adopted variants of flags that contained the square battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia from 1863 on. That battle flag was designed by former Mayor of Charleston and super gung-ho secessionist and slavery advocate William Porcher Miles. It was but one of many battle flags, state flags, and regiment flags that colored Southern battlefields.
Okay, so the South lost, but they didn’t like really lose in the current way we think of scorched-Earth regime change and occupation today. Although the Union installed Reconstruction governments and Freedmen’s Bureaus backed by the Union Army in the South, largely to facilitate the mass infusion of free blacks into society, many of the leaders of the Confederacy were just absorbed back into the elite ranks of society. Most leaders of the Confederacy received a full pardon from President Andrew Johnson and many, like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, continued on in the public eye. These figures and the mythologies that sprang up around them were central to the “Lost Cause,” the mythologizing of white supremacist ideals and resentment against the North that has since shaped much of Southern life.
There were two main eras in which the Lost Cause manifested in Southern life, and both of these are also connected to virulent racism, the Ku Klux Klan, and Confederate iconography. The Klan and paramilitary groups engaged in a campaign of lynchings and violence against both black populations and Union-backed Reconstruction governments, which eventually led to the end of Reconstruction in 1877. The embrace of Confederate symbols went into overdrive in the post-Reconstruction South, and this was reflected in state flags. The post-Reconstruction flags of Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, and Alabama were all built around Confederate flags or iconography, and the seals of Alabama and Texas contain Confederate flags. The first flag of North Carolina originated in the Confederacy, and the current flag was designed on it.
Post-Reconstruction Lost Cause mythology also penetrated other aspects of Southern symbolism. Many state colleges and universities in the South have histories of Confederate symbolism in team names and mascots. The Louisiana State Tigers gained their nickname from a Louisiana Confederate regiment. Several other teams across the football powerhouse Southeastern Conference and the basketball power Atlantic Coast Conference adopted Confederate mascots, traditions, and symbols in that first wave of Lost Cause sentiment. Football in the South, and its status as a modern kind of wargame, have almost become inseparable from the mythologizing of the Confederate legacy advanced in post-Reconstruction time.
The second wave of the Lost Cause came about around the same time as the second wave of the Klan and the Civil Rights Movement (surprise!). The segregationist Dixiecrat party re-popularized the use of the Battle Flag and called on Lost Cause symbols to animate its racist aims. Over the next twenty years, the rest of the South followed suit. Georgia added the battle flag to its official flag in 1956, South Carolina raised the modified battle flag at the Capitol in 1961 and the University of Mississippi famously raised the flag in its defiance against integration. The Klan began using the flag as a symbol of racist hate during this time period as well. This time period is pretty much where the current status of the flag as a symbol of hatred came about.
This history shows just how hard it is to confront the Confederate legacy in the South and how deeply rooted the Lost Cause is in many Southern Institutions. The history also casts some doubt on the efficacy of taking down battle flags even as a symbolic gesture, as other flags and symbols adopted for the same reasons permeate Southern culture.
This isn’t to say that the South is particularly racist or to ignore the role that other regions play daily in inequality, but this history stands as a strong rebuttal against the claim that the Confederate flag represents anything but racism and resistance to black participation in society. The phrase “heritage, not hate” gained traction in protests against removing the flag from state capitols, but the fact here is that the heritage in question is one of hate. The flag was revived twice and only enters the public memory as a symbol of resistance to integration by black people into society.
The Lost Cause itself has enjoyed the greatest relevance when the position of Southern whites as the sole brokers of power was most in danger. What marks these symbols is that they are almost entirely linked to defiance of black people being free. Even the “rebel spirit,” claimed as a non-racial cavalier independence, has most of its roots in rebelling against federal orders to grant black people rights. But removing the flag is only a start of the kind of examination that whole generations of people steeped in the Lost Cause have to do.