With the ongoing debate over the use of Confederate flags in the United States, and the levels of passion and the depth of personal involvement it engenders, perhaps it is time for a non-American to weigh in with some thoughts. The Confederate States of America is misrepresented in much of modern discourse, but not in the way many people think.
These days, a debate is taking place in the United States of America. A debate that should have ended a hundred and fifty years ago, but which for some inexplicable reason is still front and centre of modern, American life. It's the debate over whether to remove the socalled "Confederate Flag" from public buildings in many of the states that were formerly in rebellion during the American Civil War. As a historian, having spent years on the history of the American Civil War, I feel it is necessary to point out a few hard facts that simply are not up for debate or discussion, yet are still debated and discussed for all manner of crackpot reasons.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, slavery was the most contentious issue in the United States. Scandals such as the Amistad case, where a slaveship was taken over by its human cargo in a failed attempt to sail back to Africa, ultimately resulting in the ship being taken into American custody in New York (a non-slaveholding state, or a socalled “Free State”), polarized the country. So did the now-infamous Dredd Scott-case, in which the United States Supreme Court declared that a black man had no rights a white man was bound to respect and that a slave was not a person, but an object. The book “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, arguably one of the least well-written bestsellers of all times, nevertheless presented such a horrific image of slavery in the South that it helped raise awareness (although the story of President Lincoln telling Harriet Beecher Stowe “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war” is apocryphal).
The tremendous physical and emotional destruction of humanity that was illustrated through men and women smuggled north via the Underground Railroad (a system set up by abolitionists to help escaped slaves get out of the South and into Free States in the North or even to Canada) caused horror among many who saw it. Today, many photos survive of slaves displaying whipping-scars, broken and badly set bones and the likes.
And of course, even before the Civil War broke out, blood was spilled in numerous places over this issue, nowhere more famous than in “Bloody Kansas”, which saw a precursor to the Civil War play out, with significant loss of life on both sides of the fighting. Perhaps most importantly, the Kansas issue ended up paving the way for Lincoln’s election. President James Buchanan, one of the least competent men to ever hold the office, was a democrat … at the time the reactionary, deeply conservative party in US politics … who strongly supported the rights of slave-owners. So strongly, in fact, that he supported the so-called “Lecompton Constitution”, a document written by pro-slavery members of the Kansas legislature, to be approved as the state’s new constitution. Subsequently, Kansas was to be admitted into the Union as a slave state. However, when this document was brought up in the United States Senate (not the Kansas legislature, but the Federal government) by President Buchanan, it turned into his worst nightmare.
The Lecompton Constitution had been passed in Kansas, only because of intensive voter fraud, and because almost the every Free State-voter in Kansas boycotted the referendum. It was one of the ugliest examples in American history of rigging an election, and it was so badly done that only the willfully blind refused to see it. But as mentioned, President Buchanan strongly supported the Lecompton Constitution. His endorsement was wholehearted and deep felt. He did, in fact, put his entire political capital into supporting the passing of the document, but a counter-proposal, the Leavenworth Constitution, was written instead and a new referendum was called in Kansas. The Lecompton Constitution was not only defeated … it was absolutely crushed by the voters. President Buchanan saw his entire political clout evaporate before his eyes, and to make matters worse, his own party had been split down the middle, between Northern democrats who were largely anti-slavery and who sided with the smaller, Republican party (at the time the progressive party in American politics) in opposition, whereas the Southern democrats stood for the continuation of slavery.
When the next election came up, this split within the Democratic Party hadn’t even begun to heal, and consequently, two distinct presidential candidates ran on the Democratic ticket, splitting the vote. One was a Northern, anti-slavery candidate, and the other was a Southern, pro-slavery one. To further muddle the picture, the now long-defunct “Constitutional Union”-party ran their own candidate as well. Opposite these, a comparatively unknown Kentucky-born, Illinois-based lawyer named Abraham Lincoln was elected as the candidate for the Republican Party. Lincoln was extremely eloquent and his speeches, printed in newspapers across the country, swayed the voters.
In the end, as we know, Lincoln won the election.
He did so despite not even appearing on the ballot in several Southern states. He garnered just 39.7 percent of the popular vote, but won 18 states and 180 electoral votes.
It was enough.
The Republican party, staunchly anti-slavery in essence, was by far the smaller party in Congress, but the division within the Democratic Party allowed them to win on the 6th of November 1860. Soon after, Southern states began to secede from the Union. It started in South Carolina on the 20th of December 1860, and was followed by Mississippi on the 9th of January 1861, then Florida on the 10th, Alabama on the 11th, Georgia on the 19th, Louisiana on the 26th, Texas on February 1st, Virginia on April 17th, Arkansas on May 6th, North Carolina on the 20th, and Tennessee on the 8th of June. Later on, West Virginia, ironically enough, chose to secede from already-seceded Virginia, in order to return to the Union, which the Virginians complained loudly about and called unlawful, but that’s a different story.
Other states, such as Maryland, came close to seceding but finally chose to stay within the Union as that most obscure of existences: a Slave State within a Union eventually, from the 1st of January 1863 and the Emancipation Proclamation, fighting to abolish slavery. Kentucky was so badly split that both the North and the South said it was part of their group of states. Kentucky regiments fought for both sides, the Union and the Confederacy, but that in itself wasn’t too uncommon and other states saw the same thing occur.
The war had strictly speaking begun when the South Carolina militia had opened fire on Fort Sumter on the 26th of December 1860, but it didn’t explode into what was to become the bloodiest single conflict in American history until the 21st of June, 1861 at the First Battle of Bull Run near Manassas Junction. This wasn’t because of lethargy on either side, but because neither the Confederacy nor the Union had a standing army capable of carrying out a major offensive, and soldiers first had to be called up, trained and equipped. From then on, the war would rage until exactly four years and one day later, with the last shot being fired on the 22nd of June 1865. At that time, at least 625,000 men lay dead in the fields. Some estimates go as high as 750,000 or even 840,000 dead.
No one knows for sure, even to this day, but because of the horrible, open wound that this war still represents in the eyes of many Americans, the lower estimates are typically used. It was a horrific tragedy. A monumental display of human savagery and insanity that we today cannot truly comprehend. Men were killed in ways no sane person would want to consider, even more died from disease in camps and in the filth-ridden hovels that passed as field-hospitals. And yes, it saw incredible feats of courage on both sides of the conflict. I’m not going to get into the details of individual battles here, because that’s not what this piece is about.
It’s about the politics of the Civil War, and the meaning of the so-called “Confederate Flag”.
And I’m going to return to that now. The world-famous … many would say infamous … flag that most people today associate with the Confederacy was, in fact, not the official Confederate flag.
The official Confederate flag changed several times over the course of the war, but the one most people today know, often referred to as the Stars and Bars (this is incidentally also incorrect since that was the name of three of the official Confederate flags used throughout the war, but not the one in question here), with a red background, a blue St. Andrew’s Cross and thirteen stars, was in fact the battle standard of the Army of Northern Virginia. The army famously led by Robert E. Lee for a significant part of the war (although he was by no means its only commander).
It was, in short, the flag flown before an army out to ensure the continued enslavement of people based solely on their skin-colour. Not, as modern day revisionists and Confederate apologists would have you believe, to preserve the right of self-determination for each state in rebellion, except when that self-determination dealt with slavery. After the war was fought to its bloody conclusion, many former Confederates, both high ranking commanders, common soldiers and even politicians, could not accept their defeat.
Despite that inability, it had been a complete defeat. A total one, an absolutely overwhelming, crushing, devastating defeat. The South was left in ruins. General Sherman, one of the most hard-nosed fighting men in American history had marched his entire army through Georgia, then South Carolina, then North Carolina, leaving an eighty mile wide stretch of land so devastated the only fitting term to describe it is “scorched earth”. The armies of the Confederacy were utterly destroyed in the field. They were whittled down to a few thousand men, facing tens of thousands in all theatres of war. They had no ammunition, no uniforms, no shoes, no supplies of any kind. They didn’t even have food. The reason why Robert E. Lee was finally cornered and forced to surrender at Appomatox was that he had been forced to allow his men to forage for food in the surrounding landscape, which slowed his progress down enough that the much, much larger force of General Grant could catch up and cut off all hope of escape.
There was nothing left.
Rarely in the field of human conflict has one side been so comprehensively and totally defeated as the Confederacy was in the American Civil War.
But it was too bitter a defeat for many rebels to stomach. Some men chose to fight on as outlaws … Jesse James and his gang were such men, having fought in the company of the infamous “Bloody” Bill Anderson during the war, and having taken part in the Centralia Massacre, where unarmed Union soldiers were gunned down and their corpses mutilated in unspeakable ways. Jesse James was an out-and-out racist, coming from a family of like-minded racists who wanted to reinstitute the institution of slavery, and he made no bones or beef about it throughout his life, and despite that, he’s still seen as an American folk-hero for some reason. The man was a murderer, a war-criminal and a pro-slavery outlaw.
And yet … people think he was somehow the “good guy”.
It beggars the modern imagination.
As the years went on, a post-bellum myth began to grow. The myth of the so-called “Lost Cause”. This argument stated, that the Civil War had in fact never been fought over the issue of slavery, but simply over the rights of individual states to determine their own political agenda, thereby making each individual state in the Union more powerful than the federal government, which would have been relegated to a purely advisory role. That the United States consisted of sovereign, individual states that each trumped the Federal government on every level.
Tellingly, the United States was referred to in the plural before the Civil War, but in the singular post-bellum. It went from “the United States are” to “the United States is”. A small change, perhaps, but it signaled an enormous change in the political landscape. Not decentralized with state assemblies, but with the centralized, Federal government in Washington D.C.
The “Lost Cause”-myth was a lie.
It remains a lie to this date. Nowadays, the United States is still divided … I often refer to it half-jokingly, half-seriously, as the Divided States of America. It is a nation divided internally on political, racial and economic grounds. It’s divided over religion, gun-ownership, education, treatment of minorities and the right of sick people to receive medical attention. Just to name a few. In fact, more things seem to divide the United States, when observed from the outside, than what unites it. The contentious issue of Confederate flags, most notably the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, is just the latest such argument, but it is must be addressed, even by an outsider such as me, because the continuation and propagation of the “Lost Cause”-mythology, this idealized image of the old South, the Confederacy, as a place of beauty and harmony, of high culture and civility that was brutally crushed by an evil, outside force, is simply a lie.
I can best illustrate how I feel about this, by mentioning a probably apocryphal situation from the war itself. After the famous battle of Gettysburg, the Confederate army was in full retreat. According to the story, which as I mentioned probably never really took place, President Lincoln is said to have been all over his commander, General Meade, to get him to pursue the fleeing rebels vigorously, to destroy them in detail. General Meade then allegedly argued that his forces in the Army of the Potomac was also badly mauled and “in no fit state to invade foreign soil”, to which Lincoln in sheer exasperation is supposed to have said “When will these generals learn, that it’s not foreign soil and that they are not invading?”
The idea that the Confederacy was ever a legitimate nation, and that it was ever in the right, is a lie.
The Confederate States of America was not recognized as a legitimate state by the superpowers of its day and age.
It was considered a rebellious faction within the United States, and while ongoing talks took place throughout much of the war for England and France to recognize the Confederacy, contrary to popular belief, there was never the slightest chance of it happening. Southern sentiment, that England HAD to recognize the Confederacy to get access to cotton, is a fallacy. The worker’s of the milltowns in Northern England strongly supported the Union cause, even though it meant they were in danger of losing their jobs, and in any event, England found a way to resolve the problem, by importing cotton from India. This continued post-bellum when they learned they could do so at a fraction of the cost they had to pay for Confederate cotton. It was so cheap for the British to move cotton from India to England, that they could do so, weave cloth of it, sew this cloth into garments, send it BACK to India and still sell it at roughly half the price of cotton products produced in India.
Confederate cotton was, in fact, not king. It wasn’t even a prince. By 1861, it was more like a pauper, and to make matters even worse for the Confederates, England had been the world’s foremost proponent of universal abolition since the days of William Wilberforce earlier in the century, and the Royal Navy was on an ongoing, world-wide anti-slavery mission. There was simply no chance that the British government would recognize a nation that was formed on the basis of the institution of slavery. It just wouldn’t have happened.
And France, under the rule of Emperor Napoleon III, may have wanted to stick it to England by recognizing the Confederacy, but in a nation still high on the ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, despite having reformed the Empire, acknowledging the validity of a slave-holding nation was simply not going to fly. Napoleon might as well have put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger himself. Only his half-arsed attempt at invading Mexico was meant to somehow lead to support for the Confederacy, but internal French politics made this a doomed endeavour from the beginning. It wasn’t going to happen. While the French upper classes felt some form of kinship with the upper classes in the Confederacy, there were powerful political forces within France who supported the Union as well, and a number of French officers took military commissions in the Union army.
Again, the “Lost Cause”-myth is lying about this.
But most importantly, the “Lost Cause”-myth lies about the actual cause of the war, as mentioned earlier.
It lies about the war being fought only for the right of self-determination.
Politician after politician, including the Vice President of the Confederacy and numerous high profile senators and governors from all the implicated states, vehemently and openly argued that the war was a matter of preserving the rights of white people to keep black people in bondage and slavery. They did so routinely over the course of the war. They did so before the first shots were fired. They did so, in fact, before secession was even effectuated. Jefferson Davis, the only president the Confederacy ever had, stood up in Congress before the election of Lincoln and said that if a Republican was ever elected, the South would secede, because slavery had to be preserved. But because he did not mention slavery in his inauguration speech (the vice president did in his, however, but that’s conveniently “forgotten” by the “Lost Causers”), the “Lost Cause”-myth tries to argue that the war was never a matter of slavery.
It is true only insofar as the war WAS in fact fought over States Rights, but the right the rebel states specifically wanted to preserve, was the right to own other human beings as chattel. It is also an oft-quoted part of the myth, that the Confederate constitution actually specifically banned the import of slaves, something which wasn’t even mentioned in the Constitution of the United States (the fourteenth amendment had not yet been passed).
However hard it may be for many to believe, this is true.
However, there was no need to import slaves. More than four million of them lived in the Confederacy already, and the South was entirely self-supporting in terms of renewing the slave population through the process of slaves having children. One in three people in the Confederacy was a slave at the outbreak of hostilities. There was no need to import more. But this too is used as a part of the myth, to show that the Confederacy was in fact not about slavery but only about rights of self-determination.
Again, this is a lie.
And so we get to the present day. Because of hurt feelings in the South, because of the “Lost Cause”-myth and because of the general American adulation of anything or anyone wearing a uniform … a cultural trait which honestly confounds and bewilders most non-Americans … the Confederate soldiers and leaders are considered heroes to this day. Great men who fought valiantly for a “Lost Cause”.
But it is a lie.
They were traitors to their nation.
There is no other term that applies. I realize that they felt differently, and that for example Robert E. Lee felt saddened by the rebellion, while at the same time feeling that Virginia was his "country" and that he couldn't take up arms against it. But Virginia was not an independent country, nor was any other state. I find it difficult to believe that highly educated men like the Confederate leaders generally were, did not know the difference between a confederation of independent nations and a federation of states. The issue of "states rights" did not make each state an independent, autonomous nation. States rights simply gave each state a certain level of autonomy on certain, specific issues.
Today, we'd call that kind of thing "home rule" and it is still in use in various parts of the world. It gives certain areas or territories, such as Greenland, which is formally a part of Denmark, the right to self-determination on certain internal affairs, although they are still subject to being overruled by the parliaments of the "mother country".
The same thing went for the rebel states in 1861. They could make decisions on internal affairs, subject to being overruled by the federal government. This included the issue of slavery. While ostensibly an internal affair, a federal emancipation of the slaves would have overruled the legislation of the individual states. This was not only known to the state assemblies in the rebel states, but it was precisely the reason why they seceded. They made this very, very clear when they did so.
Ergo, they acknowledged that states rights were superceded by federal legislation. It was never, as later Confederate apologists would have us believe, a matter of the federal government overreaching. The precise and exact reason why the rebel states seceded was because they knew they were subordinate to the federal government, and they wouldn't accept it.
That makes their act of secession treason by definition. And it makes the act of taking up arms against the federal government treasonous as well, on a personal level, for each and every man who did so, regardless of how "noble" or high profile he might otherwise have been. Anyone who took up arms in revolt against a lawfully elected government, because they didn’t like the political implications of that election, was in the wrong. They attempted to break away and form a nation of their own based on one of the most evil institutions in the history of mankind. They treated people who didn’t look like them as cattle, in the most literal sense of the expression, and they initiated a war by opening fire on the armed forces of the lawful government of the United States both at Fort Sumter and at Bull Run.
It was not, as the “Lost Causers” would have you believe, “the War of Northern Aggression”.
The Confederacy fired first.
The first shot was allegedly fired at Fort Sumter by one of the most virulent racists in the south, a slaveholder named Edmund Ruffin, and the battle of Bull Run started, because the Confederates were gathering near Manassass junction, within easy striking distance of Washington D.C. itself. Modern day Confederate sympathisers would have us all believe that this was a purely defensive strategy, but P.G.T. Beauregard, commanding the Confederate forces, was not a defensively minded man and after the battle was won, Jefferson Davis urged him to follow up and destroy the Union army to end the war and take Washington. Beauregard could not accomplish this simply because his own army was almost as disorganized in victory as the beaten Union forces were in defeat.
With these two engagements (and a few relatively minor skirmishes in between), the Civil War began.
It would be fought between a government bent on preserving the Union and later on freeing the slaves in the South (and subsequently all slaves) on one hand, and on the other, a rebel government equally bent on forming their own nation based on the principles laid out by Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens in his infamous "Cornerstone Speech":
"Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; 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."
The bottom line is that secession was an act of treason, and nowhere else in the world is a treasonous regime celebrated as heroes a hundred and fifty years after their defeat. Nowhere else is the lie propagated that a regime founded on the continued and absolute degradation of millions of people, was somehow a noble and righteous one.
Bravery does not excuse evil.
I do not contest the almost superhuman courage of the Confederate soldiers, nor that of the Union soldiers, which was just as impressive. To do so would be to argue against the historical record. They were men who marched up to a distance of fifty meters from their enemies, in closed ranks, facing rifled muskets easily capable of hitting them at three hundred or even four hundred meters in the hands of a good shot, only to fire volley after volley at each other. They were men who faced down shrapnel and round shot from smoothbore cannon, blowing men to so many pieces that many of them were never found after every battle (the "missing" count was always very high for each Civil War battle, and many of them were missing simply because they were so physically destroyed they could not be identified or even located).
So yes, I absolutely agree that Confederate soldiers were brave men. But I do not applaud them. I do not look up to them. I do not think they are worthy of praise. I do not think they should have schools, streets and public spaces named after them. I do not think there should be statues of them in front of state-houses. I think they should be relegated to the history books and to museums, where they can be read about and seen as the traitors they were, and where their cause can be shown for the insufferable evil that it represented.
And consequently, I do not acknowledge, even for one brief moment, the legitimacy of their nation, the goodness of their cause or the inherent positive symbolism of any of their flags.
The Confederate flags, whichever one we’re talking about, are all symbols of human degradation and of slavery. They are symbols of racial hatred, not of noble, free-spirited men and women simply asking for what was legitimately their right.
Their right was not, as the Declaration of Independence states, an inalienable one. It was highly alienable.
The right they wanted preserved was, as said so many times already, strictly the right to own other human beings as property.
In short, the battle flag of the Army of the Northern Virginia is arguably one of the prettiest flags ever designed. It looks amazing, striking and bold, and it should never, for any reason, be flown in a public space in the United States, except perhaps as part of a re-enactment show, and even then, it should be packed away immediately afterwards.
It has no place in civilized society.
It has no place in a modern, democratic state where equal rights is in any way held as a virtue.
It needs to go.
As does the entire debate over whether or not it should stay.
Thank you.