Confederate Flag and Historical Revisionism

I have recently read with some sorrow the stories about the current controversy regarding the placement of a large Confederate flag in Hillsborough County. I have to believe that the people pushing this flag are at best insensitive and naive.

The Confederate flag is clearly a symbol for those states which attempted to secede from the Union over the issue of slavery. For those who would attempt to contest the cause of the secession, I refer them to South Carolina’s declaration when it became the first state to secede. That document repeatedly cites slavery and the actions of the northern states to limit or end slavery as the reason for its secession. The secession declaration of Texas does likewise, as does the Georgia declaration. The Mississippi declaration starts:

"In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course. Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery... There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."

Further, Alexander Hamilton Stevens, Vice President of the Confederate States, gave the "Cornerstone Speech", to that group which met to adopt a new constitution for the Confederacy. In it, he said "(African slavery) was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution." "Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition."

The 'Sons of the Confederacy' have been attempting to engage in historical revisionism, and they would have us believe that the Civil War was not about slavery. One spokesperson for the group denied that the Confederate flag was a “symbol of hate”. To be correct, the flag is the symbol of a society built on the hateful institution of slavery, of the war fought to maintain that hateful institution, and of the well-documented hateful and brutal treatment of the black American slaves by that society.

Most of us, and particularly African-Americans, rightly see that flag as a symbol of the institution of slavery, just as most of us rightly see the swastika as a symbol of the holocaust and the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people. To celebrate the Confederate flag as a glorification of southern society without acknowledging the foundation of that society on the suffering and death of millions of slaves of African descent is both dishonest and disingenuous.