The Forever Argument

The Mississippi state flag incorporates the Confederate
"Stars & Bars"

 At this writing South Carolina has officially removed the Confederate flag from its state house grounds. Mississippi remains the last state to officially display the Confederate flag, as it is designed into its current state flag (shown above).

"The past is never dead. It's not even past.” --William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

The issue of the Confederate flag is attached to the hip of the reason the American Civil War was fought in the first place. If the war was fought over slavery, it follows the flag represents the powers that hoped to secure slavery indefinitely. If otherwise, then the flag might reasonably be construed as representing something more benign.

It is hard to fathom at this late date, 154 years after the start of hostilities between North and South, that we still argue this case. But here we are, trapped in some exasperating version of the film “Groundhog Day,” doomed to present the same lecture again and again to a seemingly implacable audience, unable to acknowledge the uncomfortable truths of its (now) distant past. 

Perhaps, you say, there will always be cranks, deniers, et cetera. Is this really a mainstream issue? Emma Brown writing in the Washington Post several days ago discussed the new social studies texts for Texas’s public schools. (Texas centralizes textbook selection and thus has an inordinate influence on how such texts are written). According to Brown, school children will be taught that the causes of the Civil War are “sectionalism, states’ rights, and slavery,” with “slavery” intentionally in the third slot. 

Patricia Hardy, a member of the Texas Board of Education when this textbook was approved in 2010, commented at the time, “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.” 

I must assume Ms. Hardy believes that with slavery hypothetically off the table in 1860, the South would still have seceded. Or that the two halves of the nation would have fought a war over something as hazy as states’ rights and sectionalism. And for what it’s worth, I had to look up “sectionalism.”

Company E, 4th U.S. Colored troops, November 17, 1865

By war's end African-American troops numbered some 178,000, comprising 10% of the Union Army. Most were former slaves, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. If Ms. Hardy could travel back in time and talk with the African-American soldiers of Company E (pictured above), does she really believe they would say anything other than they fought for their freedom and the freedom of other African-Americans still in slavery?

Several southern states, including Texas, issued "Declarations of Causes," specifically intended to clarify their reasons for seceding from the Union. Here is a pertinent paragraph from Texas's (but I encourage everyone to read the whole thing):

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.

Hmmm...That seems pretty clear.

Ms. Hardy and other Southern apologists would have us imagine a strange asymmetry, wherein the North fought for one reason, and the South for something quite different, leading inevitably to a recognition by the warring parties that it was all just a big misunderstanding. Well, that didn't happen.

 

In truth, it all seems preposterous, if not downright laughable. States’ rights and sectionalism existed as fighting issues only insofar as they related to the national argument over slavery. It was never about state’s rights in the abstract, it was always states’ rights regarding the laws governing slave ownership.

In his June 23rd speech to the South Carolina Senate, Paul Thurmond essentially asserts this, but even he, scion of the Old South, felt compelled to add an “in part,” 

“I will never understand how anyone could fight a civil war based, in part, on the desire to continue the practice of slavery”

Perhaps Thurmond needed this gratuitous qualification not to lose the support of some key South Carolina legislators for the upcoming fight over the flag. If so, and only if so, I’ll grant him a pass.

The war was about slavery. Abraham Lincoln was under no illusion as to why he was prosecuting a war that took the lives of 620,000 fighting men (more recent estimates go as high as 850,000). 

Here are two excerpts from Lincoln’s 2^nd Inaugural Address. The first excerpt succinctly lays out the political division between North and South at the start of hostilities in 1861. The second expresses Lincoln’s state of mind at the war’s end (37 days before the South surrendered) when he had come to believe the war was God’s penance for the sin of slavery.

“One-eighth of the whole population (of the United States) were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it…”

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”

Lincoln notably makes no reference to anything other than slavery. Without slavery there was no war. The Confederate flag, no matter how any individual regards it today, is inextricably bound up and tainted by slavery. The taint can’t be washed away or covered up. It will always be there. And, thus, as has been recommended by many across the political spectrum, it needs to be removed from our public places.