THE CONFEDERACY DID NOT REPRESENT LIBERTY
Does anyone else find it odd that the latest U.S. mass-killing rampage somehow morphed almost immediately into a controversy over a flag? Even the pushbutton liberal machine for promoting gun control, which usually kicks into gear very quickly after events like the nine murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, S.C., briefly got distracted this time before eventually finding its feet.
America is in an unusually race-sensitive mode right now, even by its own standards, and one is inclined to suspect that the so-called “Confederate flag” took over the discussion largely because of the recent Civil War consciousness-raising by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is the big star amongst black American intellectuals at the moment. Coates has been, as much out of curiosity as anything — there is no non-clichéd way to say this — forcing a nation to confront its deep past in unfamiliar ways.
The U.S. Civil War is the definitive piece of unfinished historical business, and the recurring cultural presence of the Confederate flag is a pretty good indicator of that. It is still pretty strange for a flag debate to arise from a mass murder. The killer who shot up a church meeting was attached to that flag, but, like many solitary Internet race theorists who hanker to become men of action, he would have worn, and did wear, any emblem that was capable of making anti-racists uncomfortable. If the Confederate flag is driven out of sight in American society tomorrow, the real-life trolls will come up with something else, a subtler, more adaptable visual code, the next day.
Maybe that’s precisely what’s needed. Innocent people signalling attachment to the American South as their home, as a set of harmless folkways, could have their own symbol — and the reactionary white supremacists could have a different one. Alas, history generally does not untangle so easily.
What we call the Confederate flag was never the official flag of the Confederate States of America, although the last such flag was quartered with the familiar “Stars and Bars” — and that’s a misnomer, too, more properly applied to a totally different flag. There is no accepted right name at all for the thing recognized today as the “Confederate flag.” You should not really believe the fake pedants who refer to it as the “battle flag of Northern Virginia,” although it was that. If you look at Confederate regimental flags in museum collections, you will find that the “Confederate flag” was increasingly in use toward the end of the rebellion by units in all seceding states.
The thing on the roof of the Duke boys’ car would almost certainly have become the official Confederate flag, if the Confederacy had lasted long enough to settle on one. But it did disappear from popular culture for some decades, and only began to reappear during what might be called U.S. Civil War II — the period from the “Dixiecrat” presidential campaign of 1948 to the legislative triumph of civil rights circa 1970.
In that sense, the “Confederate flag” really is an uncomplicated symbol of racial hatred — a consciously designed provocation, though used unconsciously, no doubt, by Lynyrd Skynyrd fans and others. Why, for example, should the flag of the Confederacy be flying on the grounds of the South Carolina legislature, as it was before a daring young lady shimmied up the flagpole on Saturday and pulled it down?
South Carolina has its own flag — quite a nice one, with a palmetto tree on it. The palmetto flag even has Civil War roots, for South Carolinians who might, giving them maximum benefit of the doubt, just want to honour the martial virtue of their forefathers without giving offence. The chief difference would seem to be that, unlike the Confederate flag, the official South Carolina flag was never used nationally to rally modern segregationists against civil rights.
The lack of an alternative pan-Southern emblem for potentially innocent use is a problem — and not an easily solvable one. (It is not a coincidence that the Confederate flag was so visible on the Dukes of Hazzard show — a pop-culture soup of generic Southern-ness rooted in nothing, fraught with clashing accents and mountains next door to swamps.) Some black Americans fly Confederate flags, and knowingly accept the cognitive dissonance, for lack of a better way to signal allegiance to the South that they love.
Yet hostility to the Confederate flag seems, to me, quite proper. I am in a sort of revisionist camp with Coates and others when it comes to the totalitarian nature of the Confederacy. You cannot, as the northern radicals came to understand earliest and most clearly, have a republic that is free in all respects except for a smidgen of slaveholding.
The cotton states were demanding that northern authorities suppress abolitionist literature and assemblies 30 years before the war, to say nothing of the Fugitive Slave Act. Slavery, already unmentionable by its name in the 1789 federal constitution, soon became impossible to discuss at all within the deliberative organs of the republic. And when war came, because the North refused to continue living by lies, the Confederacy quickly adopted Soviet-style internal passports, papers-please policing and scrutiny of the mails for dangerous slave-agitating ideas.
White Southerners — even racist ones! — ought to view the victory of the Union as a narrow escape from illiberal horrors we now largely associate with the 20th century. The Confederacy was Stalinism avant la garde. But try putting that on a bumper sticker.
You cannot have a republic that is free in all respects except for a smidgen of slaveholding