This is an essay I wrote for my College English class.
Not only is the Civil War not over, it may not have been won by the North. If you look at Germany, Japan and to a lesser extent Italy, countries that the United States as part of the Allied Forces fought in WWII, today we see no lingering public resentments on the national level from that gruesome and tragic war that involved so many people and cost so many lives (notwithstanding any individual or personal grievances). There are indeed many monuments and testaments in Europe and Asia to what happened in the 1940s. But those societies hold no forlorn hope for what might have been if the Nazi regime, Japanese military or Italian fascists had won. Yes, there are pockets of Neo-Nazis, for example. But, as an exception to the rule, those groups prove the point and operate outside of the law of the modern societies of these nations. Consequently, you will not see tiny Nazi flags incorporated into the local government flags or seals anywhere in Germany, Bavaria, Austria, Hungary, Poland or France, etc. While some recent political leaders have been clearly fascist in their leanings and rhetoric, nothing like the blind support given the Nazi regime and its objectives is in evidence today. It’s safe to say that the former Axis nations have severed the ties to their tragic histories and have strived to move forward and redefine themselves as peaceful contributors to the modern world’s development.
And yet, in the United States of America, we have nine states that have representations of the “Stars and Bars” in their official flags or seals and countless other appearances on license plates and other state- and privately-generated merchandise. Otherwise known as the Confederate flag, the Stars and Bars represented the group of southern states that seceded from the Union, the North, and waged the Civil War that took place between 1861 and 1865. Like any flag, the Stars and Bars represents many things. Most importantly, it represents the core values for which the Confederacy stood.
On face value, the Confederacy and its secessionist movement stood for the most democratic of principles, the right of a people to govern themselves as they see fit. As Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s only president, repeatedly said, “All we ask is to be let alone.” However, the economic and social motivations of the Confederacy were not so altruistic or for the greater good as they pretended. For years the South had benefited from a cotton-based economy that paid nothing for its enslaved workforce and so had an unfair economic advantage in the marketplace. Its wealthy plantation owners certainly did not share the wealth with the poor farmers and laborers, the majority of white southerners who did most of the fighting and dying in the war. Instead, the social structure of the South was just a facsimile of the English aristocratic system that segregated nobles from commoners, royalty from peasantry, that went further int an apartheid system. The American colonists literally fought the British to escape that caste system and its inherent oppressions. Yet eighty-five years later, southerners were struggling to keep that discriminatory concept alive, even though abolition was not a movement promoted by a small minority of voters and politicians and even England had abolished slavery all the way back in 1772. The southern gentleman and the southern belle were barely related to their poor white fellow citizens, so their unity was very limited in scope. The desire to be “let alone” was less a desire for sovereignty and more a desire to avoid accountability. The distinction may be subtle, but it’s critical. Their cause was not the democratic ideal they would have us believe.
If the embedding of class stratification in this country is not clear, consider what professor Diana Kendall points out in her essay on how popular media shapes the way Americans view class distinctions, “Framing Class, Vicarious Living, and Conspicuous Consumption.” “Media executives do not particularly care if the general public criticizes the content of popular culture as long as audiences do not begin to question the superstructure of media ownership and the benefits these corporations derive from corporate-friendly public policies,” (Rereading America, 345). The market forces and structures that keep the media corporations in place also prevent any real change from occurring in how the public views itself and its place in the class hierarchy. The media “elite” are part of the haves and the consumers are part of the have-nots and therefore these companies have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are. Kendall shows how not only is the power structure in America still imbalanced, the average American apparently is duped into unquestioningly supporting that inequality.
For African-Americans, the Confederate flag is a constant reminder of government-sanctioned slavery and racial discrimination and more than just a sensitive, liberal issue of political correctness. Commemorative Confederate veterans groups may argue in the courts the use of the Stars and Bars in public spaces is not meant as an advocacy of slavery or treason; it’s just a way to honor past sacrifices during the Civil War. But the same argument could be made for flags bearing the Nazi swastika and yet those would be rightly laughed out of court. Despite the fact that there were southerners who knew that slavery was a dying and embarrassing institution, the South was fighting to defend their right to make their own decisions; in this case, the right to make bad decisions (let alone that African-Americans were denied this same right). So the Confederate flag really stands for a mindset that subjected millions of people to a brutally demeaning existence that too often ended in murder.
Wars, particularly civil wars, are bloody, messy events that completely transform nations and usually in unforeseen and unavoidable ways. What was thought to be a short conflict stretched into an excruciating four-year-long war, killing over 1.5 million Americans. Armies and warfare are not precise surgical instruments. They are blunt and traumatic tools for destruction that governments use to force a resolution, hopefully, when all diplomatic and levelheaded measures have failed to resolve a conflict. The aftermath of a war is not necessarily determined by the combat itself, at least not directly. How a peace is brought to be also greatly determines the result. Sadly, despite the fact that the North prevailed, thanks to the ruthless efforts of General Ulysses S. Grant and others, shortly after the end of the Civil War, the southern malcontent John Wilkes Booth assassinated president Lincoln.
Abraham Lincoln’s assassination ruined any possibility for the period after the war that came to be known as Reconstruction, to be the compassionate rebuilding of the South that it should have been. Even halfway through the Civil War, Lincoln had begun to give much thought to healing the wounds of the country in the post-war period to come, knowing it to be a necessity. But without his guidance and incredible compassion, Reconstruction became a humiliatingly corrupt decade or two during which southerners were both mistreated as well as given unjust license to nullify the gains made by and for newly freed African-Americans. Despite the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, it would be another hundred years before the United States would see the end of Jim Crow laws that blatantly discriminated against African-Americans. Some still ridiculously insist that government affirmative action laws amount to reverse racism.
This humiliation led to the glorification of the South as a romantic, tragic and misunderstood victim. Since then, our popular media has depicted the “former Confederate” as a heroic figure. Many western films feature a former Confederate as the misunderstood outlaw, a maverick who bucks an evil system. John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS has John Wayne portraying a violent and angry ex-Confederate soldier and the tragic hero of that film. In Clint Eastwood’s THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES Eastwood plays the titular character who joins a Confederate-leaning band of raiders to avenge his family who has been massacred by Union forces. The most glamorous and fawning example would have to be the film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. Dixie is held in high regard, with little thought given to what that means. The gentility of the God-fearing Christian southerners is taken as a matter of course. But few of these notions were true or valid. In contrast, neither Germany nor Japan was humiliated in the same way as the South was (Japan’s cultural humiliation more about national dishonor and not inflicted upon them by the allied countries). As Secretary of State George Marshall said in an address on June 5, 1947 regarding the plan named after him, intended as the rebuilding of war-torn Europe, “Our policy is not directed against any country, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos.” That focus prevented the creation of a mythical victim status of the defeated Nazis of Germany or the Fascists in Japan and Italy or those who fought for that side (some people nevertheless see it this way).
Perhaps for this reason few people seem to realize that the political strife we’re dealing with in the 21st Century is directly related to the argument that was never totally settled and definitely not healed in the 19th Century. Despite Lincoln’s publication of his Amnesty and Reconstruction proclamation, that sought to open the way for the seceded states to rejoin the Union easily and quickly, Jefferson Davis asked the Confederate Congress, “Have we not been apprised by that despot that we can only expect his gracious pardon by emancipating all our slaves, swearing obedience to him and his proclamation, and becoming in point of fact the slaves of our own Negroes?” To Davis, the notion that their slaves could be freed only meant that southerners would of course suffer subjugation and revenge as retaliation. Apparently live and let live never occurred to him, at least not as it related to African-Americans. So, even though the Civil War ended, the resistance to treating African-Americans as humans and equals continued and was fueled by irrational fear.
Recently, a news item appeared that was meant as comic relief, showing the funniest photographs from recent Townhall protests. One photograph shows a sarcastic individual in the midst of the actual protesters holding up a sign that reads, “We have NO IDEA what we’re talking about.” The sign also has arrows scrawled on it, pointing to the various protesters around him. This photo shows something that is very telling. On the far left margin of the photograph is what looks like a typical Anglo-American male who is not at risk of starving or want for nourishment, wearing a t-shirt with the “Stars and Bars” emblazoned across his chest. This man holds a sign that reads “Abolish Federal Government.” This man is the embodiment of the notion of “The South will rise again,” and he clearly seems to mean what his sign says, that he is against the federal system despite the fact that the Union supposedly prevailed in that war a hundred and forty-four years ago. What would motivate this man to articulate such a clearly dated notion if not the same irrational fear that prevailed before, during and after the Civil War, that accountability takes away liberty?
The myth that is at the heart of this issue is the idea that the South was not so much in error as it was greatly misunderstood and therefore the true victim. Concerned with its own profit and pleasure, the South perpetrated one of the worst crimes committed against a group of humans in world history right here in the United States of America. The question of whether the Stars and Bars is a quaint historic memento or a racist symbol is kept from being resolved by the notion of States’ Rights. That’s the legal fiction that motivated the southern states to secede from the Union in so-called democratic protest to protect their sovereignty. But that notion continues to persist in many ways, and it’s always used to slow down the progress of civil rights rather than promoting them. Same-sex marriage is an argument for protection of a civil right that is being allowed to be drawn out tortuously even though on a federal level we protect other civil rights as a matter of course. For example, this country has managed to make it the law of the land that we care enough about our disabled and our elderly to offer them the first few seats in all of our public transportation across the land. It is federal law that all restaurant employees do something as basic for the greater good as wash their hands after using the restroom. Why can’t we come to a similarly clear and simple consensus that all loving couples should have the legal protection of marriage or that healthcare should be every American’s right and not a luxury? Because we have an unacknowledged undercurrent of dissension and dissatisfaction that is fed by ignorance and irrational fear. That fear is really a refusal to accept civil accountability as part of our liberty. When everyone is in one boat, no one can decide not to row or bail water or hoist sails out of a sense of sovereignty or States’ Rights. Instead, what becomes apparent is that the Greater Good is also everyone’s individual good.
In his essay “What is Marriage?” Evan Wolfson cites how the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Turner v. Safley had to first define what marriage is before they could come to a decision. Their determination was that there are four attributes that make up marriage, which also had legal weight when viewed through the lens of the U.S. Constitution. But none of those attributes referred to the sex of the people wanting to get married. And yet, this country continues to deny gay people the 1,138 rights and protections that married couples enjoy. It is the concept of States’ Rights that is used as the loophole or the backdoor that allows such a basic human right to be kicked down the road and delayed. The same could be said about current efforts to reform healthcare in the U.S. Some legislators want to give the individual states the ability to opt in or opt out of whatever the new federal law will mandate, as if health were an option for people. Sadly, some of the most vociferous opponents of healthcare reform are the very same poor, white workers who need it the most.
The same issue that keeps the Stars and Bars firmly planted in our country’s popular culture is also keeping us from healing our many wounds and moving forward in a concerted way that cares for all Americans, not just those who think they’re right. The sooner we put this notion of States’ Rights to sleep the sooner we’ll be able to transcend the divisions that continue to plague our country and finally end the Civil War. Then we will have come one step closer to achieving the promise of this Great Experiment we call as the United States of America.
Works Cited
Kendall, Diana “Framing Class, Vicarious Living and Conspicuous Consumption.” Rereading America. 2007 Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, Bonnie Lisle, Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press
Wolfson, Evan “What is Marriage?” Rereading America. 2007 Gary Colombo, Robert Cullen, Bonnie Lisle, Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press
