With support from the University of Richmond
History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Source: The Atlantic
Roundup

Hauling Down the Confederate Flag

by Davis S. Reynolds
Davis S. Reynolds is a distinguished professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has written or edited 15 books on American history and literature, including Lincoln's Selected Writings.

Related Links

With the Charleston church massacre a memory and the Confederate flag discussion verging on a media circus, there’s now a push to move on to supposedly more important issues, such as poverty and the criminal justice system.

But, as the activist Bree Newsome reminded us recently when she forcibly took down the flag in Columbia, South Carolina, removing the Confederate flag is not a mere distraction. It is, instead, something to be thought about deeply, a provocation that could lead to a fundamental change in cultural attitudes on many issues.

Defenders of displaying the Confederate flag point to history and tradition. But American history records that the defense of that flag has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans and has made life miserable for many others. Its defenders understand the stakes; they have fought, and even killed, those who have tried to take it down.

On March 5, 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, the earliest version of the Confederate flag—with three bars and a circle of nine stars—first flew over the state house in Montgomery, Alabama, then the Confederate capital. Why was it raised that day? Because on the previous day, March 4, Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated as president of the United States. Everyone knew that Lincoln loathed slavery. Although he had tried in his inaugural address to stave off war by saying that he would not interfere with slavery where it existed, the South saw him as a wicked abolitionist who would do away with slavery. The flag was meant as a slap in the face for him and all other antislavery Northerners. For the South, Lincoln’s attitude was irrational, unchristian, and in conflict with ethnic science. The Georgia politician Alexander H. Stephens, who as the Confederate vice president helped choose the original Southern flag from over 120 proposed designs, declared that the Confederacy was founded on “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.”

This view was accepted by nearly all Confederates, including the Virginian Minor Lincoln, a distant kinsman of the president who used stationery emblazoned with the Confederate flag to warn Lincoln that “you will get whipped out of your boots” and the Northern troops “will get the spots knocked out of them.” Lincoln’s discomfiture with the Confederate flag was especially intense because one was visible from the White House. It waved in the distance across the Potomac, atop a hotel in Alexandria, Virginia. The flag’s presence was a galling reminder that Washington, D.C., was under the threat of invasion by the Confederates, who boasted that their flag would soon fly over the White House. ...

Read entire article at The Atlantic