I both despise and enjoy being dragged into arguments about the damned flag. For about 48 hours, anyway. I've reached full saturation of crazy, and I'm not even there for the fight this time around. Last time, I was enrolled in HIS 370 - Mississippi History - at USM, and watching it play out every day on campus, at home, and on really ugly talk radio. This time, I'm watching the argument on Facebook.
I think, and this is saying something, that I prefer Mississippi talk radio.
I've been called an idiot, a traitor, a "goddamned Yankee" (kinda proud of the last two) and have enjoyed a wide assortment of other invectives since beginning to share a collection of primary documents related to secession. People, for some reason, tell me I need to go take a history class. And when I tell them I have taken several - most in Mississippi - they don't have much more to say.
Today, I had someone pull out two of my favorites: "you don't have any right, because you don't live in the south," and the "if we get rid of the confederate flag, we have to get rid of the US flag because of our policies concerning Indigenous people".
I intended to reply thusly:
I’m glad we agree that our nation does a spectacular job of not following “all men are created equal”. Federal complicity in the genocide of Indigenous populations is a different problem, of scope and permanence, than individual states’ adherence to the symbols of confederate traitors, and unlike many, I refuse to conflate the two – or to chase after your straw man any more than I already have. In fact, aside from your tone, I agree with your comments, particularly about removing Jackson from our currency. As a historian, and as someone who’s worked to improve access to healthful foods in indigenous communities, I can quote the same histories (and a few more, I’d wager) and statistics.
Also, no. I don’t actually think a formal resolution passed by Congress only a handful of years ago “solved” anything. [I'd shared the federal resolution admitting wrongdoing in a previous comment.] As I said, I do think, though, that formal admission of guilt by any government is an important and symbolic event. Symbols are valuable in our culture – this very argument over the flag proves that.
What I’d hope is that more people could learn a wider history of our nation – northern complicity and benefit from slavery, and then from convict lease. All told, more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from cotton produced by the million-odd slaves -- 6 percent of the total US population. By 1850, according to recent scholarship, American slaves were worth $1.3 billion, one-fifth of the nation's wealth. Economic benefit from convict lease is a little more difficult to tease out, but one small example goes like this. My home state of Mississippi (the only state in the union, it’s worth remembering, with the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia in its canton corner) offers a good example. In 1873, about 10% of total state revenue came from convict leasing. By 1899, that number was over 80%. In 1876, a man whose great grand nephews and nieces I went to school with wrote a letter home to his wife on letterhead bearing the Mississippi state flag – the state with its Army of Northern Virginia battle flag in the canton corner. This man was building a railroad – the road that’d end up essentially making my hometown, and he’d stopped by to lobby his good friends in the legislature regarding the new pig law. In this letter, he explained that while he’d heard that work was going slowly, it seemed that the legislature would soon pass a law making it much easier to get cheap labor. The law, which redefined the theft of any property over $10 quadrupled the state’s prison population and made it possible for him to lease black prisoners (and they were almost exclusively black, as judges often kept white transgressors out of jail, or at least out of camps) for a ‘fate worse than slavery’. “If one dies, we get another,” said Jones Hamilton, who’d been awarded the sole state contract for lease in Mississippi – the state with the old ANV flag echoed in its canton corner.
When my Dad was born, in 1945, he grew up not too far from Sam Bowers’ house in Laurel. Mr. Bowers, you may know, was the Grand Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and he died in jail a few years back for murdering three civil rights workers 51 years ago this week, and a fourth in 1966. Mr. Bowers, of course, was one of the many who used the unadorned flag of the Army of Northern Virginia to rally under as he directed murders all across the state, and committed a few of his own. Back then, it should be remembered, you didn’t see concerned white Mississippians demanding that Klansmen not use their “flag that’s a perfect symbol of opposing government tyranny” for extrajudicial lynching or cross burning.
Speaking of cross burning, I’ll offer one more anecdote about why I, as a Mississippian, stand firmly in the camp of getting rid of any echoes of the confederate flag. In 1980, the year I was born, the woman who’d become my first grade teacher was hired at the school where my mother taught. Mrs. Cooper was black – the first black teacher at the school. The week after she started, a cross was burned in her yard, and a stars and bars was planted through the back windshield of her husband’s car. So, you see, I've lived with the flag for a long time, and in a far less dangerous or offensive way than my black friends back home.
The flag was conceived to represent a country founded by traitors as they made war in defense of an economic system and way of life founded on the ownership of other human beings. Within years of the war’s end, my home state codified black disfranchisement and complete segregation in all public accommodations and services. They elected governors like Johnson and Bilbo, and judges like Thomas Brady, and all acted with hundreds of others to deny the benefits of citizenship to black Mississippians for a century while sitting under that damned secesh rag. So – to return to my original comment: maybe we could try teaching the truth about our history and avoid publicly embracing, at state and taxpayer expense, other symbols that stood from their inception for the preservation and expansion of slavery. The flag stood for a hell of a lot more than slavery, and it’s flown too long over my home. Get rid of it.
I ended up not using that, because I have a standing agreement with myself that after someone says "the civil war wasn't about slavery," I don't participate. It's like a little gift I give myself. I share this comment and depart:
Actually, it was all about slavery. It's mentioned and defended in every founding document, and it was the primary topic for every secession commissioner. The Confederacy's leaders and fighting men, from Jefferson Davis on down to the lowliest private, all knew that. Why have we fooled ourselves into believing otherwise?
GA Representative (and later CSA VP and GA reconstruction era Governor) Alexander Stevens' "Cornerstone Speech" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/...
U.S. VP John C Calhoun's "Slavery is a Positive Good Speech" http://caho-test.cc.columbia.edu/...
The Constitution of the CSA: http://caho-test.cc.columbia.edu/...
The Complete Text of Mississippi's Secession Convention - http://docsouth.unc.edu/...
Speech of Secession Commissioner S.F. Hale of Alabama to Gov. Magoffin of Kentucky encouraging secession to avoid racial equality and the “lust of half-civilized Africans.” http://www.civilwarcauses.org/...
Correspondence between AL Gov. A.B. Moore and his secession commissioner to Delaware: http://www.civilwarcauses.org/...
Chandra Manning's "What this Cruel War Was Over," a longitudinal exploration of the letters written by soldiers (union and confed) in which they state explicitly and without any hesitation that they fought because of slavery.https://muse.jhu.edu/...
Read those. You can find many more, if you look carefully for reputable sources. Read carefully what secession's promoters described as their own motivation, and tell me again that the War of the Rebellion was about a state's right to decline membership in the Union, or an over-reaching executive, or anything OTHER than slavery.
It felt kinda lousy not being able to use the other comment, though I did have a nice gin and tonic while I wrote it. I decided to share it here instead, so it wouldn't go to waste.
Cheers to my kosfriends.