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I wish author Shelby Foote was still alive today. He was the only person (I think) who could explain the articulate the Confederacy the best. He once said (paraphrasing) that "those who say the Civil War was only about slavery are just as wrong as those who say it was not about slavery...it was about a whole lot of things." Here is a 1991 interview I found and copied an excerpt about his feelings back then of the flag and the song Dixie: http://www.crisismagazine.com/1991/walking-easy-with-shelby-foote-a-civil-war-historians-thoughts-on-history-walker-percy-and-the-life-of-writing Confederate Remains This calls for some speculation. Today, things such as the Confederate battle flag and “Dixie” are being driven out of existence as obvious symbols of racist tension. What do you think is behind all of that? I think it’s really quite simple what’s behind it, and I can’t begin to tell you how much I regret it. The tragedy of the whole civil rights struggle is that the decent people of the South who wanted to solve the problem, but differed somewhat on how to solve it — when that struggle came along, the so-called decent people, to their great shame ever after, sat back, and said, “They are sending their riff-raff down here, let our riff-raff take care of them.” And that is the tragedy of the thing. They did not stand up, they did not say, “This is right, that is wrong.” They simply said, “Let the trash take care of the trash.” And you had all these dreadful things, including the murder of three civil rights workers down in Mississippi. You had everything happen as a result of decent people sitting back and letting the indecent people deal with the problem instead of dealing with it themselves. Now, I want to be fair about that. These decent people were not all that decent. They shared a lot of the beliefs of the Ku Klux Klan, although they would never be Klansmen and disapproved of the Klan; they also wanted to stop integration. And they wouldn’t want to stand up themselves and stop it, but they’d let these roughnecks handle the thing. Now, as for the Confederate battle flag and the song “Dixie” — the decent people did the same damn thing. They let these people take those symbols. And I can perfectly understand any black being greatly offended by the Confederate battle flag or even “Dixie,” both of which I love. But they have been claimed by these yahoos, they became their symbols, and we lost them. So I have great sympathy for blacks on this question. There’s a movement down here in Memphis to remove Bedford Forrest’s statue from Forrest Park, and not only the statue. Forrest and his wife are buried under that horse; some people want to dig their bones up and throw them out. I’ve got a good friend here, black lawyer, a Yale graduate — like Clarence Thomas — and he’s one of the leaders of this. I think Forrest is one of the finest men who ever lived, and I know he’s one of the great military leaders of all time. And I talked to my friend and said, “You don’t know a damn thing about Bedford Forrest. He was a fine man in many ways. You ought to know something about Forrest before you tear his statue down and dig up his bones.” He said, “I do know about Forrest. I know that he was a slave trader before the war, and was Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan after the war. And that’s all I need to know about him. I spent my youth walking past that park, seeing that man up on that horse, and knowing what he stood for. And now that I’m in a position to do something about it, I want to get him out of there, because I don’t want other black boys walking by looking at this as a symbol.” Well, he’s wrong about that. He’s wrong. I think that to remove Forrest from Forrest Park would be as if the women of France were indignant over the way Napoleon treated the ladies and wanted to remove his body from Les Invalides. I really don’t think that’s an exaggeration. I think this is just as serious, and I hope they’ll never be able to do it. But I do understand their taking offense at that flag, at that song, at that man on that bronze horse. We let them be captured by the wrong people. I hope we can reclaim them. Many of us would like to reclaim them, to use them, and when they do offend, to meet the offended compassionately and talk about what these symbols originally stood for. Well, you see, you’re getting on the way to correct it. The way to correct it is to get the truth across to people; tell them what Bedford Forrest was like, tell them what the Confederacy really stood for. For example, during the early days of the fulminations against the Supreme Court, all this riff-raff I’m talking about hated the Supreme Court — they wanted to impeach Earl Warren, they wanted to ignore the courts, all kinds of things. If they had any understanding of the Confederacy, they would realize how totally it was built on law, how law was admired enormously. It was the North that called the Constitution a pact with the devil and would burn it in public. The South worshipped the Constitution and the Supreme Court. And Jefferson Davis stayed in Washington after the secession of Mississippi not only to say farewell to the Senate. He stayed hoping that he’d be arrested so he could get his case on secession before the Supreme Court, and he was convinced he’d win the case. I think a lot of people who opposed him were convinced he’d win the case, particularly that Court, Chief Justice Taney’s Court. But the Confederacy believed above all things in law; they wanted to settle it by law. Now, these other people swapped sides on that. The blacks who were appealing to law for justice were doing exactly what the Confederates thought themselves to be doing, but they don’t know that — they think of the whole Confederacy as being anti-legal. After all, they’re seceding, they’re in rebellion, and so on. My whole point in this is that if we could get the truth across to people, then the Confederacy would be restored considerably to the dignity it had. Would this also be related to the point that the original Union, the one created after the Constitutional Convention, was a voluntary one? One with the right to secede? Absolutely. Not only was it a voluntary Union, it was a reluctant Union. They had a hell of a time getting those 13 groups together. And, believe me, I don’t think there was a one of the 13 that would have gotten in if it didn’t think it could get out if it didn’t like it. Now I also believe in the Great Compromise that followed the war, and one that many Southerners came to subscribe to — that it was probably best for all concerned that the Union didn’t divide. And the compromise on the other side was that the South fought bravely for a cause in which it believed. And I go with that. I think all Ameri cans go with it, really. But there’s this terrible misunderstanding of what the Confederacy’s purpose was. The South saw the Union going in directions they didn’t want to go. Slavery was not the only factor by a long shot. The Southern Agrarians later on talked a lot of foolishness, but they also had a basic conception that I agree with, that the country was changing in ways that the South didn’t want to see it change. And we can all regret a lot of things that have happened, not the least of them the rule of the robber barons as a direct result of the Civil War, which Southerners seemed to conceive was going to happen anyhow. That was one of the things they feared, and why they wanted to get out of the Union. They feared the Union was becoming big business-oriented. Not only did these fears come true, but they were accelerated by the war itself, which gave a terrific impetus to the very thing they thought they were fighting. Yet there’s also something powerful in the idea of the Union. Well, it too is a mystical thing. I think it’s very real, the notion that this was supposed to be a country from the Atlantic to the Pacific.