In her apparent bid to become the standard-bearer of the Trump legacy, former SC governor and UN ambassador Nikki Haley has chosen a likely banner: the Confederate flag. In a widely-reported radio interview with Glenn Beck, she stood up for the flag as a symbol of "service, sacrifice, and heritage" that race murderer Dylann Roof had "hijacked." In the wake of backlash provoked by the interview, Haley wrote an op-ed column in the Washington Post to clarify her remarks, saying that they are consistent with what she has always said.
She is wrong. What she did not do in the Beck interview that she did do after the Charleston massacre was also to say that "for many others … the flag is a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past." This omission is a clear sign that she is staking her political future on the rose-colored-glasses view of the Confederate flag and leaving out the rest.
This view represents as much a hijacking as any. It willfully refuses to engage the subject of slavery. Rather, it trades in an incomplete rendering of history for the sake of a sentimental, modernist, anachronistic re-ordering of values: we prize the timeless battlefield valor of our Confederate ancestors, but must never discuss their beliefs regarding the enslavement of Africans.
The so-called "Confederate flag" is not alone in this. The star-spangled banner is not without its own problems that arise when reverence promotes ignorance. It should be the case in a country with "freedom of speech" encoded in its Constitution that an unvarnished, warts-and-all history is to be preferred to a perfectionist mythology that faints before cross-examination quicker than a Southern belle with the vapors. This is particularly true at a time when the future of the country depends on real -- not symbolic or superficial, but actual -- racial reconciliation.
It would be a step in the right direction if Southern "heritagists" stopped tiptoeing around the subject of race-based, African slavery and admitted that -- regardless of who was to blame for its beginnings and its spread, and regardless of the way in which its social and psychological impact continued to be felt after its abolition -- African slavery was the institution around which the Confederate States of America was formed.
By the national power invested in it, the assembly embodying the CSA endowed certain designs to be flown on flags in order to personify -- the word is not too strong -- the principles that bound the nation together and gave it meaning. The only way to understand the meaning of the Confederate flag is to understand the meaning of the Confederate States of America.
The CSA was not about grits and biscuits or whatever passes for "Southern heritage" these days. It was about the enslavement of African-Americans. No slavery, no CSA. States' rights? The most ardent advocates of states' rights before the 1860 election were the Northern states complaining about the federal Fugitive Slave Law. Where were the Southern states' rightists then? Advocating for vigorous federal enforcement, that's where.
The core meaning of the CSA -- the thing that brought it to life -- was one thing and one thing only: the enslavement of people with African ancestry. Following the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the perceived need for governmental protection of the institution is what drove the first wave of secession in the deep South. Yes, Lincoln's post-secession call for volunteers to enforce union pushed the upper South (and people like Robert E. Lee) over the edge. However, by that time the CSA was already there. Those johnny-reb-come-latelies signed on to defend a purpose that already existed: a nation founded on slavery.
It is bracing to read the full-throated defenses of slavery that resounded throughout the South in those days, and that tend to get covered up by today's Confederate apologists. For example: I recently read The Pride of the Confederate Artillery: The Washington Artillery in the Army of Tennessee by Nathaniel Cheairs Hughes, Jr., which I enjoyed for strictly private, genealogical reasons: one of the heroes of this battlefield history is my great-great grandfather's brother, Joseph A. Chalaron, who fought in every battle and campaign of the Confederate Army of Tennessee and who, though only a lieutenant, was its battlefield commander from Jonesboro until the end of the war.
It is in every way an admirable book of military history, yet when it comes to assigning a reason why these men went to war, it stumbles. Leading up to the unit's departure from its home city of New Orleans, "war fever" and "southern patriotism" are the only descriptors to be found, until finally, the day before they are entrained northward (destination: Shiloh), the unit gathers in the First Presbyterian Church to hear Dr. Benjamin Palmer, "a strong antislavery spokesman but a passionate secessionist," exhort them to return their obligation to Tennessee, which had rescued New Orleans during the "last war," and assure them that their cause was just, as it was "purely defensive."
Cheairs's footnotes don't clarify where he came up with the idea that Benjamin Palmer was a "strong antislavery spokesman." One of the South's most prominent preachers during the Civil War, Palmer -- a proud native of South Carolina who never seems to have tired of telling people that -- was apparently a lifelong believer in slavery, as the most recent biographical treatment of Palmer makes abundantly clear.
Cheairs is correct, however, as to Palmer's passion as a secessionist. Such was his passion that Palmer -- on the Thanksgiving after the election of Lincoln, and departing from his habitual reluctance to mix politics with his pastoral duties -- delivered a sermon that, widely printed and circulated throughout the South, served to promote the cause of secession by justifying it as a necessary step.
What was that justification? Every nation -- every people -- has a character, Palmer says in the sermon, and along with that character has received a trust providentially committed to it. The South is such a people, and its "providential trust" is "to conserve and perpetuate the institution of domestic slavery as now existing." [Emphasis his, not mine; maybe this was a cue to thump the pulpit.] in the face of the advent to power of a Northern party whose abolitionist spirit is "undeniably atheistic" and whose platform of restricting slavery to the Southern states "is as big as the belly of the Trojan horse which laid the city of Priam in ruins," it is only "self-preservation" for the Southern people to form "a union of the South in defence of her chartered rights." Palmer delivers a ringing challenge to his listeners: "What say you to this, to whom this great providential trust of conserving slavery is assigned? … [T]his is the historic moment when the fate of this institution hangs suspended in the balance. Decide either way, it is the moment of our destiny. … If the South bows before this throne, she accepts the decree of restriction and ultimate extinction."
Slavery, Palmer says, is who the South is: not only is the labor of a "tropical race" required to till the soil under a "tropical sun," but "the system is interwoven with our entire social fabric … it has fashioned our modes of life, and determined all our habits of thought and feeling, and moulded the very type of our civilization." As we today would say, the South was a slave culture. As for the slaves themselves, Palmer says, "we know that every attribute of their character fits them for dependence and servitude. By nature the most affectionate and loyal of all races beneath the sun, they are also the most helpless; and no calamity can befall them greater than the loss of that protection they enjoy under this patriarchal system." Freedom is something "they know not how to enjoy." All of this "binds upon us the providential duty of preserving the relation that we may save him from a doom worse than death."
In this sermon Palmer has laid out nothing less than the "one nation under God" of the Confederacy. What prevents us from seeing it? Our Southern ancestors were bullish on slavery not only as a positive good but as a sacred cause; they believed it to the very core of their being; and they fought under flags that exhorted them no less strongly than Palmer's rhetoric to defend a homeland providentially entrusted with the institution of slavery.
Widely reprinted in newspapers from Virginia to Texas and in pamphlet from throughout the country, the sermon's influence was such that, in the words of one contemporary, "it was found, after the delivery of his sermon, that the secession mania spread like fire in a prairie." After the war, curious Northerners visited New Orleans to see and hear "the big villain of the piece" hold forth in the very church where the "Thanksgiving Sermon" had been delivered.
It is puzzling to me that Hughes has chosen not to include any of this in his book about my ancestor's unit. Granted, his information about Palmer amounts to little more than a thumbnail sketch, but not only is it off the mark, it indulges in the familiar trope of self-defense that deflects from the underlying reality by masking it. What can one say? To cast my ancestor's cause in any light other than the actual one strikes me as disingenuous.
My ancestor shines forth in this book as a remarkably brave, valiant man who after the war devoted his life to securing the memory of his comrades, not only his fellows in the 5th co. of the Washington Artillery, but also In the Confederate Army as a whole. I am certain that he, residing as he does in the land of truth, would prefer that we understand him and his cause -- including its flag -- with unflinching and unapologetic honesty. I feel sure that he, as the honorable and dutiful person he manifestly was, would advise you not to fly the Confederate flag unless you make its cause your cause -- and that means the belief in an African race suited only for slavery.
It's possible, of course, that he would have advised against its use altogether, thus sharing Robert E. Lee's stance on the subject of remembrance. Lee's post-bellum attitude clearly disfavored monuments that would stoke regional antipathies. While supportive of efforts to provide for the interment of Confederate dead, he refused invitations to participate personally in any activities related to the late war, whether it be identification of war dead or education of war orphans. In a response to one such invitation (a "Gettysburg Identification Meeting") he wrote that the "wisest" course was "to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered."
His administration of what is now Washington & Lee University was a study in the avoidance of Confederate symbology. This particular "heritage" was ignored after his death, however, when replicas of Confederate battle flags were allowed to hang in the university's "Lee Chapel." A 2014 decision by then-university-president Kenneth Ruscio to remove the flags from the chapel proved (predictably?) controversial. Among those who supported Ruscio's decision was Robert E. Lee !V, who wrote to him that Lee himself would never have approved of their use in the first place: "His actions during his five years as president of Washington College made it clear that he had put that chapter of his life behind him. It is also clear that he tried to help others do the same." Lee IV further stated that Ruscio's "returning of the actual battle flags to the Lee Chapel Museum" was "the ideal way to care for and study these important artifacts."
Anyone who defies Lee's wishes and flies a replica of one of those flags doesn't get to decide what it means. That was taken care of in 1861. All his personal ambivalence on the subject of slavery and his late coming to the Confederate side underscore the desperate wrestling with conscience that lay behind his bitter but final decision to throw in his lot with the Confederate States of America, a nation explicitly and unequivocally conceived in African slavery.
My ancestor's artillery unit having been a musical one, it can be little doubted that among the songs they sang was God Save the South, the closest thing to a real national anthem for the CSA, although little known today. Its lyrics include a proud affiliation with the rebel status of George Washington, especially proud for a unit that bore his name. They also would have sung the verse that runs, "War to the hilt, theirs be the guilt/Who fetter the free man to ransom the slave."
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