Talking About History & Symbols: Why are people offended by the Confederate battle flag?

Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia.

On Quora, member Cody Pafford asks:

Why are people offended by the Confederate battle flag?

My reply:

Because the 11 states that formed the Confederate States of America from March 1861 to April of 1865 rebelled against the Union to defend the odious institution of slavery.

As a result of this dark stain on the American psyche, and because Southern apologists have tried mightily to whitewash history by claiming the Civil War was fought over the more innocuous principle of “States’ Rights,” the Stars and Bars - which was originally the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, but was later incorporated into the last two national flags of the entire Confederacy - represents the side that started the bloodiest war in American history.

Most people who know the history of the Civil War and the design history behind American flags will say - accurately - that this is not the national flag of the Confederate States of America. However, this is the banner that is displayed the most by Southerners, Confederate apologists in the entire Union, and especially white supremacists.

Now, you asked Why are people offended by the Confederate battle flag?

Well, the answer is simple: It’s the American equivalent of Nazi Germany’s hakenkruz (swastika) flag, which is currently forbidden to display in public in present-day Germany.

One of the many flags of the Greater German Reich

Southern apologists, even those who were born in Midwestern states such as Ohio or other parts of the nation that make up the traditional North, will tell you till they are in blue in the face that the Confederate battle flag is not about hate, but represents “Southern heritage.”

Don’t believe them.

You see, even though the former Confederate states were readmitted into the Union during the traumatic era known as Reconstruction, the South has had a tough time reconciling its status as the loser of a rebellion that ended up killing 600,000 Americans and costing millions of dollars in damages to infrastructure and private property. Quite simply, the South is the only region of the United States that has suffered the trauma of utter and total military defeat, including occupation by forces that many contemporary Southerners considered being a hostile, even foreign, host of armed troops. (Watch 1939’s Gone With the Wind, which is based on a novel by a Southern writer whose relatives still had living memories of the Civil War and its ruinous aftermath and tell me that it’s not a romanticized portrayal of the South’s Lost Cause mythology.)

Also, there is the inconvenient fact that Southerners did not start displaying the Confederate flag or begin raising statues of Confederate generals or monuments to Confederate soldiers until Federal troops were withdrawn from most of the South at the end of Reconstruction (roughly, between 1877 and 1890). By then, many people in both the North and the South, eager to try and forget the past, began to whitewash the reasons for the start of the war and allowed the myth that the South seceded from the Union over the noble-sounding cause of “preserving States’ Rights.” Southern schools - which were racially segregated - taught several generations of schoolchildren that the Civil War was an honorable if ultimately unsuccessful bid for Southern independence and blissfully downplayed the issue of slavery. (In fact, Southerners used to refer to the Civil War unironically as the “War of Northern Aggression,” which is patently false. The South, after all, started the war politically when 11 states left the Union; it caused it militarily by firing the first shots at Ft.Sumter in Charleston, SC.)

The resurgence of Confederate iconography and the spread of Lost Cause/States’ Rights mythology after 1877 coincided with Southern white society’s virulent and violent reassertion of the old racial status quo in the former Confederacy. Blacks, which during the Reconstruction era had acquired the right to vote and even had seats in the state legislatures and representation in Congress, were subjected to legal and social suppression under the so-called Jim Crow laws. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and other conditions were put in place so that blacks could not vote in Southern states. Schools were segregated by race, and black schoolchildren often had inferior facilities and shoddy instruction, a deliberate move on the part of white Southerners to keep the “Negroes” poor, disenfranchised, and unable to compete for jobs with their white neighbors.

The use of the Confederate flag - and the simultaneous mushrooming of Confederate monuments - flared up several times after Reconstruction. The first period of Southern revanchism began in the late 1870s and peaked in the 1920s. The second revival of Southern nostalgia for the Confederacy began in the late 1940s and peaked in the late 1960s as an atavistic response to the Civil Rights movement. In a wave of racially-motivated hysteria and anger over integration of public schools and the passing of civil rights legislation in Congress, several Southern states redesigned their state flags to incorporate elements of the Confederate flag to their own. Among these states were Georgia, Arkansas, and Mississippi.

The apologists will tell you that the Stars and Bars represent “Southern Heritage.”

They will also say that “States’ Rights” is a concept that is not related to slavery or racial discrimination.

Don’t listen to them. Southern “heritage” is all about keeping the illusion that the Confederacy was a noble and righteous cause.

The Confederate States of America was not a noble or righteous nation. It was intended to preserve the rights of its citizens (whites, of course) to own other human beings (blacks) for profit.

And that, my friend, is why the Confederate flag bothers so many of us.