Rebels Yell - Confederate flag controversy in South Carolina

National Review, Feb 21, 2000 by Dave Shiflett

WITH the South Carolina primary looming, our presidential candidates have been pressed to pass judgment on the Confederate flag, which flaps above the South Carolina statehouse whenever the wind bothers to blow through sleepy Columbia. In a time when national politics infuses every aspect of life, including the amount of water used to flush our toilets, this is no great surprise. Nor have the candidates' answers been.

The larger question is this: What do people who have a real interest in the issue think? Most South Carolinians, according to polls, say the flag should come down. Armstrong Williams reported recently that even his fellow South Carolinian Strom Thurmond believes the colors should be struck, though Thurmond has not made the statement publicly, perhaps fearing the controversy might put an early end to his political career.

The other day, a Yankee editor of this fine publication called to ask what I thought about the flag controversy. Though a blood-and-thunder descendant of Confederate soldiers, one of whom worked in Marse Robert (E. Lee)'s signal corps, I have taken no public position, at least until now. But because the editor is offering a few bucks (Federal), he can certainly be obliged.

The first point to make is that those of us who reside in or near the capital (meaning Richmond) don't much care what they fly above the South Carolina statehouse. That is a state, after all, which lay flat on its back for a good ravaging by the video-poker industry, which is the lowest form of wagering there is, cockfighting included. Before a court ruling removed the industry's legal sanction, there was real fear that the state flag was about to be embroidered with a poker machine, which it no doubt should have been.

More to the point, the South Carolina situation has very little to do with preserving southern heritage. If its somewhat undistinguished legislature had been doing business under the colors since 1862, instead of 1962, that would be another matter. Yet South Carolina employed the flag as a thumb in the eye of the civil-rights battalions, which is a bit too reminiscent of the fellows who unfurl the colors outside the state pen on execution night. (I believe, though don't know for sure, that this honor is generally withheld unless the condemned prisoner happens to be of African extraction.)

In other words, there is no sense of grace and decorum involved in South Carolina's use of the flag, and, as Marse Robert taught us, there is no substitute for grace and decorum.

This position, to be sure, will not be shared by some who wear their Confederate heritage on their sleeves. I speak not of the yahoo element that shows up outside the state pen, but of intelligent beings who insist that the Confederacy is wrongly characterized as having been primarily about slavery, when indeed only a small portion of southerners owned slaves. This rebel remnant promotes a vision of a Confederacy that was agrarian, spiritual, and wary of dynamic capitalism. These rebs reason that if the flag comes down over Columbia, their arch-enemies-the moral preeners-will have yet another quill for their battle caps and additional momentum for their ultimate goal of scrubbing the South clean of all rebel remembrance.

There is something to these fears. The preeners, who apparently believe the Union Army was organized as an instrument of enlightened racial thinking, are quick to compare the Confederacy to the Third Reich, Lee to Hitler, and grits to sauerkraut. Here in Richmond, a hotly disputed public mural of Marse Robert was recently firebombed-a hit that was no doubt a preener operation. The rebs fear the grand finale will be the annihilation of Monument Avenue, a scenario in which the statues of Confederate heroes are shipped to a remote museum, leaving the statue of tennis star Arthur Ashe as the lone victor in Richmond's war for permissible history.

That seems a stretch, though you never know. Not long ago the notion that Thomas Jefferson would be tagged for fathering children by Sally Hemings was considered highly unlikely, yet the tag has been indelibly made and we're starting to think of Tom as a fellow who could have taught Bill a thing or two about screwing the help (though Sally Hemings, to be sure, was hardly a volunteer). It would not be totally surprising if candidates entering the Virginia primary are asked if they believe Jefferson should be removed from America's pantheon of heroes. He, after all, not only owned slaves, but apparently created about a half-dozen new ones (though he eventually freed the Hemings family). Marse Robert can hardly be accused of such behavior.

Nonetheless, I doubt the preeners will succeed in removing Lee, Jackson, Stuart, et al., from their perches. And to give the preeners their due, there is definitely something to their charge that the flag is a rallying point for racists. Most of the people I know who defend the flag-and, in some cases, fly it-share Lincoln and Lee's racial attitudes, which held that blacks were a pace or two behind intellectually. Where the preeners are wrong is in insisting that racism is always a form of hatred. Thomas Jefferson was very much a racist, but who believes he hated Sally Hemings? The opposite was probably true.