Now that the presidential campaign is speeding along with all the joyful noise and unpredictability of a woodchipper, it seems unlikely we will encounter any more surprises as unsettling as the great Confederate flag controversy. The crux of the argument, of course, concerns whether the flag should continue to fly over the South Carolina capital as a testament to the courage of Confederate soldiers during the Civil War, and Southern “heritage”—or whether it should be removed, as the symbol of a racist and treasonable insurrection.
The fight seemed to all but poleaxe the two leading Republican contenders—in the way that only irresolvable local issues can flummox national politicians. Governor George W. Bush resolutely, steadfastly refused to express an opinion on the subject, invoking the principle of states’ rights (a principle that seems to fade away with the morning dew when a state starts making noises about, say, legalizing marijuana, or gay marriage.) Meanwhile, the flag issue all but derailed Senator John McCain’s straight-talk express, leaving the former war hero to pronounce himself firmly on both sides.
As is so often happens when real leadership is absent, the flag controversy has continued to fester. It has, at least, had the happy side effect of recreating the old civil rights-era coalition of African-Americans and white businessmen—one of modern America’s more effective agents for change. At the same time, it has only led the flag’s defenders to dig in their heels—and to resort to some shameful distortions of our history.
One of the worst offenders has been a publication edited by a Senator McCain advisers, Richard Quinn. The journal in question is the Southern Partisan Quarterly Review which—in between defending slavery, vilifying Abraham Lincoln and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and bashing gays—has picked up the old saw that the entire Civil War was not fought over slavery but over states’ rights, and the preservation of the “Southern way of life.”
There is in itself a long heritage of writers and scholars defending “traditional” Southern life—not all of it dishonorable. And the reasons over why the Civil War came to pass will probably be debated for as long as our nation endures. Just a few years ago, an animated, Indian-American shopkeeper on “The Simpsons” was spouting the old Marxist line that the war was fought primarily for economic reasons. Yet I would submit that the real reasons behind the war lie as much in what W.J. Cash called the mind of the South, as in anything to do with economics or states’ rights. That is to say, the Civil War was fought over slavery. And it was not fought over some abstract defense of Southern rights, so much as it was over the South’s frustration that it could not convince the rest of the United States to acquiesce in its “peculiar institution”—an institution that it always suspected in its own heart was at least untenable, if not immoral.
The proof of this lies in the very denial, defensiveness, and projection now permeating the “heritage” argument—just as it invariably seeped into all arguments in defense of slavery, and of the Jim Crow system that replaced it. It was more than coincidence, for instance, that the stars and bars first began to fly above Southern capitols in the mid-1960s. The supposed reason was the centennial commemoration of the Civil War—but the real point was to send a message to the growing civil rights movement.
Any objective reading of the mountains of speeches, letters, diaries, newspaper articles and editorials written by the South’s leaders prior to the Civil War reveals the same, ferocious denial. As the secession crisis neared its climax, they turned out more and more pamphlets defending slavery as an institution that benefited blacks and whites alike; one crucial to the South’s “higher” civilization, and endorsed by the Bible, the Constitution, and all science and nature.
Gone was the old attitude of Washington, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers from the region that slavery was an unfortunate legacy, an embarrassing holdover from colonial days that should be allowed to die a natural death. Instead, many of the South’s firebrands even clamored for the resumption of the Atlantic slave trade—as a means of driving down the cost of human flesh, and giving every Southern white man a chance to obtain the plantation owner’s way of life.
Such is the implacable logic of injustice. The more disagreeable slavery became to white Americans, the more harsh and odious became the methods necessary to preserve it.
By the time of the Civil War, whites expressing abolitionist sentiments in the South were routinely punished with floggings and jail terms. Meanwhile, in the North, many whites who cared little about slavery itself were alarmed by the gangs of armed bounty hunters that the Fugitive Slave Act allowed to rampage at will through their towns and cities, abducting both runaway slaves and legally freed blacks. They were offended when pro-slave majorities in Congress installed a “gag order” against even debating the issue of slavery in the District of Columbia—or when a South Carolina congressman beat a Massachusetts senator unconscious on the floor of the Senate. They wondered what had happened to their own local sovereignty when the Supreme Court made it illegal to ban slavery in federal territories; or when Missouri “border ruffians” poured into Kansas in 1854, launching a reign of terror and installing a state constitution that made simply criticizing slavery a crime.
And yet, the legal right of Southerners to own slaves was never seriously threatened before the Civil War. Even after the Republican victory in the 1860 elections, abolitionists remained a decided minority in the North. Lincoln made it clear again and again, in the months between his election and his inauguration, that his first priority was to preserve the Union. He made his famous insistence—”If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”—in August of 1862, after the Civil War had already been raging for nearly a year-and-a-half.
Southerners did fear Northern abolitionist conspiracies—and it seemed as if their worst nightmares had come true when it was learned that John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 was backed by a group of prominent Bostonians known as “the Secret Six.” Yet the collective shiver that ran through Dixie in the wake of Brown’s raid was more the product of deliberate political fear-mongering than any objective concern. Brown’s raid, after all, was ineffectual, was condemned in much of the North, and was quickly suppressed by federal troops.
In fact, many of the South’s leaders—particularly those in the congressional delegation and state government of South Carolina—were badly disappointed when Brown’s foray into Harper’s Ferry did not immediately lead to secession. By December of 1859 they were actively weaving their own plot to sunder the Union. Their conspiracy centered around a book: The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, by one Hinton Rowan Helper. Helper was, ironically, both a North Carolinian and a ferocious racist, whose argument against slavery was based on the claim that it hurt the South’s small white farmers. Helper’s book was vociferously denounced throughout the South—and endorsed by 68 congressmen from the fledgling Republican party, including Ohio’s John Sherman.
Sherman would soon claim that he had endorsed the book without actually knowing what it said. This may well have been true. Throughout his long and successful career in the House and Senate, Sherman seems to have often been gloriously unaware of what was done in his name, including such major pieces of legislation as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Sherman Silver Act. Or he may have simply been trying to withdraw his endorsement because, thanks to a Democratic party split, he had a chance to be elected Speaker of the House.
The South’s congressional delegations made it plain that they would try to block the ascension of any man who had endorsed The Impending Crisis. William Porcher Miles, a pro-secession congressman from Charleston, announced that South Carolina’s legislature should go one further, and pass legislation that would force its representatives to resign from the House, should Sherman be elected Speaker. Yet as Steven A. Channing traces in his prize-winning Crisis of Fear, Secession in South Carolina, Miles was playing an even deeper game. Correspondence between the congressman and South Carolina’s governor, William Gist, discloses that Miles and others considered seizing control of the House chamber if Sherman were chosen, and “ejecting the speaker elect by force.”
Governor Gist replied that he preferred “a bloodless revolution,” or at least one that “should begin in sudden heat & with good provocation rather than a deliberate determination to perform an act of violence which might prejudice us in the eyes of the world.”
These qualms aside, Gist made it clear that he would support whatever Miles chose to do: “If however, you upon consideration decide to make the issue of fire in Washington, write or telegraph me, & I will have a Regiment in or near Washington in the shortest possible time.”
Here is an opportunity for the alternative historians—a Civil War that begins with a coup on the floor of the House, backed by a regiment of South Carolina militia rushed to the capital. As it happened, the plot fizzled when Sherman failed to win election. Instead, South Carolina’s leading politicians set themselves to wrecking the Democratic party—something they succeeded in doing the following year at its national convention, conveniently held in Charleston. The result was the election of Lincoln, secession, and the most terrible war in America’s history—a war that would end with John Sherman’s brother, William Tecumseh, burning his way through South Carolina.
So much for claims of outraged states’ rights. Yet the question remains: Why were so many leading Southerners so eager to wreck the Union and risk a war that was always at best a desperate gamble? Some did believe that slavery would eventually be snuffed out if the North’s population and wealth continued to outstrip the South’s. Others were honestly repelled—just as the Southern “agrarians” of the 1930s would be—by what they saw as the vulgarity and the hypocritical wage-slavery of Northern, industrial culture.
Yet the awful effects of a slave society must have been obvious to any intelligent Southerner who chose to see. As in any cruel and authoritarian system, slavery was nearly as degrading to the oppressors as it was to the oppressed. To get some idea of just how bizarre a society slavery had created, one need only read Mary Chesnut’s revulsion at living on her father-in-law’s South Carolina plantation—surrounded by slaves who were her husband’s half-brothers and -sisters.
Even before the Civil War the South was the poorest section of the country, riven by violence and disease. Public institutions of all sorts, including schools, were almost nonexistent. There was little industrialization—something that would make a telling difference in the war. The effect of slavery on the land itself was readily apparent, as the cotton economy, supported by cheap labor, encouraged the wasteful exploitation of the soil.
The South’s leaders could not all have failed to see what slavery was doing to all their people. They simply could not see how to do without it. They thought, instead, that they could switch flags to compensate for their lack of vision—and ended up leading hundreds of thousands of brave young men to their deaths.
Is this flag, then, an appropriate memorial to the South’s heritage? A real leader might make the argument that the South’s Civil War dead are already well-commemorated by the white, stone monuments in every Southern town, or by the thousands of re-enactors who trace their every step and battle.
A real leader might argue that if South Carolina is really not satisfied with the Stars and Stripes or with its own, beautiful, blue palmetto flag, so redolent of the Revolution, that it should perhaps design a new flag. A flag that would honor the rest—and the proudest—part of the South’s heritage. That is to say, a flag that would honor all of those Southerners, black and white, who took part in another war, a different kind of war. One with blessedly fewer casualties but one that nonetheless brought a greater triumph, the rarest kind of triumph, which is to say a victory over the crimes and hatreds of the past. A flag that need be only the simplest of ensigns, carrying upon it and thereby affirming the words of the Rev. King from the depths of Birmingham jail: “One day the South will recognize its real heroes…One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, and thus carrying our whole nation back to great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.”
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