Battle flag’s meaning extends beyond the honoring of Southern soldiers

On Thursday, on the way to the DMV to have my tags updated, I drove past the Marvel Carriage Museum in Georgetown.

In the back of the property stands the Delaware Confederate Monument, a joint project of the Georgetown Historical Society and the Delaware Grays, Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp #2068.

Over the monument fly the Delaware state flag and the Confederate battle flag, which has become the subject of a nationwide controversy.

Displaying the flag is often said to be a way of honoring the Confederate war dead and Southern culture in general. Nothing more.

It would seem hard to find fault with those sentiments, but unfortunately the Confederate flag carries as much baggage as the Nazi swastika. It cannot be considered wholly separate from the cause with which it was - and is - associated.

And the Cause has not been forgotten.

The Delaware Grays website includes the Salute to the Confederate Flag: “I salute the Confederate Flag with affection, reverence and undying devotion to the Cause for which it stands.”

The group’s national website also makes clear the Cause has not been forgotten. It says, “The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution.”

Noble-sounding sentiments, but there’s no need to use vague terms such as “liberty” and “freedom.” Our ancestors recorded their thoughts in public documents.

Here’s an American from Illinois writing near the end of the war: “These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this was somehow the cause of the war.”

That’s Abraham Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural Address. In 1865, Lincoln saw the cause of the war as so obvious and widely understood that he could state it plainly without fear of contradiction.

But he was a Northerner, and perhaps didn’t fully understand the war from the Southern point of view.

Fortunately, we don’t have to speculate. We have documents from Southerners who, just as plainly, tell us why they fought.

In his famous “Cornerstone Address” from March 1861, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said the “proper status of the negro in our form of civilization” was the “immediate cause of that late rupture and present revolution.”

The “present revolution” he referred to was what we call seccession and the Civil War.

Of the new Confederate government, he said, “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 the natural and normal condition.”

It’s obvious that both the Union president and the Confederate vice president were on the same page.

But we have more than the statements of these two individuals, however elevated they were. We have the official declarations written and issued by assemblies and conventions in Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia.

With their litanies of grievances, they read much like the original Declaration of Independence. In each one, slavery is the key issue, which is something of an understatement.

The Mississippi declaration, for example, reads, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery - the greatest material interest in the world.

“Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce on the earth.”

“These products,” it continues, “have become the necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”

In the eyes of the Mississippi plantation owners, slavery was central not only to the economic, political and social fabric of the South, but to civilization itself.

The citizens of Texas were also forthright in their reasoning. Their declaration says “… 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.”

It would be hard to craft clearer statements about the South’s justification for going to war. The Sons of Confederate Veterans may be correct in saying that Southerners fought to preserve freedom, but it was the freedom to enslave others and profit from their labor.

Some people, I realize, will disagree with my assessment, but your argument is not with me. Your argument is with your ancestors. I respect them enough to believe what they said.

Not that Southerners didn’t speak of states’ rights.

Which is understandable. Proclaiming the right to deny the freedom of others in the name of liberty is tortuous at best, if not absurd.

Also, talking about states’ rights steers attention away from the realities of human bondage.

Here’s a look at what life was like for slaves on the killing fields of Carolina rice plantations, courtesy of the Chicora Foundation, a heritage preservation consulting group based in Columbia, S.C.

A foundation article quotes a contemporary writer as saying that the slaves were “ankle and even mid-leg deep in water which floats an oozy mud, and exposed all the while to a burning sun which makes the very air they breathe hotter than the human blood; these poor wretches are then in a furnace of stinking putrid effluvia: a more horrible employment can hardly be imagined.” (Original spelling corrected.)

The article continues, “Malaria and enteric diseases killed off the low country slaves at rates which are today almost unbelievable.”

On cotton plantations, the article says, one in three slave children failed to reach age 16. On rice plantations, nearly two-thirds died before age 16.

Not all slaves were literally worked to death, but even under the most “benevolent” masters, a slave was treated well only to the extent that he was willing to submit to the will of the master.

Those that did not submit were subject to the whip, which could result in death.

Slaves who were whipped and beaten to death by their masters created a legal problem, which Virginia solved by passing the slave codes of 1705.

It reads, “If any slave resist his master … correcting such slave, and shall happen to be killed in such correction … the master shall be free of all punishment … as if such accident never happened.” (My italics.)

Masters, of course, were free to satisfy more than their blood lust. They also had complete control over the bodies of their female slaves, a situation that manifested itself not in legislation, but biracial children.

History books don’t spend much time dwelling on this subject, but the famous diary of Mary Boykin Chesnut of South Carolina reveals how commonly masters took advantage of their female slaves.

Chesnut writes, “The Mulattos one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children & every lady tells you who is father of all the Mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own, she seems to think drop from the clouds.”

When I first read this entry, many years ago, I was astonished that plantation wives could be so willfully blind to the behavior of their husbands.

But in many ways our society continues to turn a blind eye to horror of slavery and its long, long aftermath, which, yes, includes the murder of nine men and women in a South Carolina church.

That is the legacy of the Confederate battle flag, a fact that may not be fully appreciated by people of goodwill who intend only to honor the admittedly brave soldiers who fought for the South.

But while private citizens, such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Georgetown, have every right to fly the flag, they should, at the least, understand the reasons why others, myself included, find the flag an offensive symbol of an ugly and brutal past.


Don Flood is a former newspaper editor living near Lewes. He can be reached at floodpolitics@gmail.com.