After attacks, many Southerners fly different flag

Until recently, if you saw a red, white and blue flag sticker on a Southern pickup truck, odds were good that it was a Confederate flag.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks, the once-prominent symbol beloved by both unreconstructed Southern partisans and Civil War buffs has been swamped in a wave of national unity.

American flags are popping up on cars, outside homes and businesses - and even on horse-drawn carriages in the city where the Civil War started.

In Charleston, unlike New York or California, the Stars and Stripes can often be seen displayed beside the controversial Confederate battle flag.

One local bumper sticker even has a message for Osama Bin Laden's terrorist network, "Terrorists: Your soul is the devil's and your butt's America's."

Another depicts both the U.S. and the Confederate battle flag and says "red-blooded American."

Area flag merchants say sales of Confederate flags have remained steady even as sales of U.S flags have increased.

"My American flag sales have increased 100-fold," Gary Shelton, president of 1abcstore.com in St. Simons, Ga., said. His Confederate flag sales are about the same.While it might strike some as inconsistent to fly the flag created by people who wanted to dissolve the United States next to the American flag during a time of national crisis, many in the region do not see it that way, says political science Professor Bill Moore of the College of Charleston.

"In general, I don't feel Southerners see it as inconsistent. You do have a few ultra-nationalists who would still like to secede from the Union. However, most of those who maintain a strong identity with the Confederate flag incorporate it into a historical context," he said.

In the Southerner's view, loyalty to the historical South is not necessarily incompatible with contemporary values as Americans, Moore said.

"Collectively, Southerners do tend to be stronger supporters of the military than their non-Southern counterparts and value a military career more," he said.

Also, because of limited immigration into the region and less exposure to different cultures, Southerners can be more parochial and suspicious of foreign populations than other Americans, and are thus more likely to support action on behalf of American interests abroad, he said.

Sen. Glenn McConnell is one of the brokers of the compromise that brought the Confederate flag down from the Statehouse dome to a monument on the Capitol grounds in 2000, and owns a Confederate memorabilia shop in North Charleston.

McConnell's sales of Confederate flags have continued and are unaffected by the terrorist attacks. He says he flies both an American flag and a Confederate flag and sees no inconsistency in his actions.

"We see it as a patriotic emblem of our ancestors, but the nation's moved on since then. We think our ancestors stood up for a Constitutional principle that was still considered an option back then - the issue of whether states can secede from the Union - and the issue was resolved on the battlefield. We had an unpleasant disagreement amongst ourselves, and it was settled. So now, if you punch at the United States, you've struck at all of us," he said.

Some Confederate flag supporters do embrace the flag as a separatist symbol. Before the attacks, neo-Confederate messages, like Southern independence, were said to be gaining traction, especially in the angry wake of several regional controversies. Debates about the removal of the flag from the South Carolina Statehouse, the changing of the Georgia state flag and a contentious vote on the Mississippi state flag riled Southern partisans and fans of Southern history alike.

In 1997, Michael Hill, president of the League of the South, wrote in one of his publications that "the American flag has, in fits and starts, come to stand for a corrupt central regime that increasingly visits upon its citizen-subjects expropriations that would have driven our ancestors to active resistance."

Hill said he considers himself an American, and he claims that Southerners are more American than people from other regions. He said the Confederate flag is the flag that truly represents states' rights and a Constitutional government.

On the other hand, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a group that also has been on the forefront in the battles over the public display of the Confederate flag, took a much different position.

After the attacks, the SCV's national commander-in-chief, Ed Deason, immediately issued a statement on behalf of its 30,000 members expressing sympathy and support of President Bush, Congress and the government and affirmed its intentions to "join all patriotic Americans."

That move is harmonious with the organization's mission, spokeswoman Lynda Moreau said.

"We were chartered over 100 years ago as a patriotic and benevolent organization. Our mission is to defend the good name of the Confederate soldier. The SCV does not advocate secession," she said.

Many of its current members are veterans who fought in the armed forces during wartime.

"They fought for this country, and they stand behind it. That doesn't mean they honor the Confederate flag any less. They honor both," she said.

The Rev. Joe Darby of the Morris Avenue Missionary Baptist Church in Charleston, who is first vice president of the state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, views the issue differently. The NAACP continues its efforts to boycott the state because of the location of the flag on the Statehouse grounds and will raise it, as well as other issues, again in the next legislative session.

To Darby, the Confederate flag is a symbol of disunity in a time when the nation's citizens should come together.

"We need to be unified at a time like this. While I don't think everyone who flies it (the battle flag) is a member of a hate group, I would not fly it. When I see it, I see a symbol of white, antebellum unity. That leaves me out of the picture," he said.

Darby acknowledges that there are South Carolinians who see no conflict in flying both flags.

"What do I think when I see both flags flying together? I guess I rejoice that we live in a country where people can hold strange views," he said.

Since the Civil War, major events such as the terrorist attacks have moved Southerners toward a stronger view of themselves as Americans first and Southerners second, even if they created some subconscious tugs between regional and national loyalties along the way, writes Charles Reagan Wilson in his 1980 book "Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920."

"The Spanish American War and World War II provided the perfect backdrop for Southern ministers to identify again with the values of the American nation," he writes.

"In 1917 the raising of Old Glory on Jefferson Davis Parkway in New Orleans became a symbolic event marking renewed patriotism. Ministers even wrote poems praising the flag, although acceptance of the prime symbol of national unity created a tension with continuing adoration for the equally potent Confederate battle flag," Wilson writes.

One Southern writer of the time, according to Wilson, suggested "that Southerners should still 'consecrate in our hearts our old battle flag of the Southern Cross'," but that it should be honored not as '"a political symbol, but as the consecrated emblem of a heroic epoch.'"

Until May, the Old South Carriage Company downtown displayed three flags, the United States flag, the state flag and the Confederate flag. However, the flags were stolen on Mother's Day weekend and have not yet been replaced, manager Kay Motley said. When they are replaced, one flag will still represent the Confederacy, but it will be another, less controversial flag, she said.

The company currently displays an American flag inside its barn and quickly put American flags on its carriages after the terrorist attacks.

"We're proud of our Southern heritage. Our company is named Old South, but we are patriotic enough to add American flags to our carriages at a time like this," Motley said.

By the way, if" Federal tariffs were generally lifted in response to Southern pressures and in favor of free trade" where did the $56 million come from?

I am still looking at some sources, but consider:

"The first paragraph of Georgia's [secession document]includes a long description of protective tariffs, and how these tariffs harmed the slaveholding states. However, the second paragraph concludes:

"...the country had put the principle of protection upon trial and condemned it. After having enjoyed protection to the extent of from 15 to 200 per cent. upon their entire business for above thirty years, the act of 1846 was passed. It avoided sudden change, but the principle was settled, and free trade, low duties, and economy in public expenditures was the verdict of the American people. The South and the Northwestern States sustained this policy. There was but small hope of its reversal; upon the direct issue, none at all."

So Georgia clearly consider the tariff question as settled in its favor.

I took a few minutes to read over the other three Declarations of Causes, and did not see any references to tariffs. However, I did not make a close reading of the texts, so it is possible I missed something.

All four documents make it clear that they were seceding because Lincoln had won a free and fair election and was about to become the President of the United States.

South Carolina, for example, wrote:

" ... A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction."

[snip]

"On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States. ..."

So, South Carolina seceded because Lincoln won the election of 1860.

Texas stated:

"In all the non-slave-holding States, ... the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, ... based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color-- a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. ..."

[snip of a list of the perceived wrongs inflicted upon Texas by the people of the North and their sectional party]

"And, finally, by the combined sectional vote of the seventeen non-slave- holding States, they have elected as president and vice-president of the whole confederacy two men whose chief claims to such high positions are their approval of these long continued wrongs, and their pledges to continue them to the final consummation of these schemes for the ruin of the slave- holding States."

So, Texas seceded because Lincoln won the election of 1860.

After listing the wrongs inflicted upon the South over slavery, Georgia stated:

"Such are the opinions and such are the practices of the Republican party, who have been called by their own votes to administer the Federal Government under the Constitution of the United States. We know their treachery; we know the shallow pretenses under which they daily disregard its plainest obligations. If we submit to them it will be our fault and not theirs. The people of Georgia have ever been willing to stand by this bargain, this contract; they have never sought to evade any of its obligations; they have never hitherto sought to establish any new government; they have struggled to maintain the ancient right of themselves and the human race through and by that Constitution. But they know the value of parchment rights in treacherous hands, and therefore they refuse to commit their own to the rulers whom the North offers us. ..."

That is, Georgia would not obey the lawful government of the United States because Lincoln would be its head.

And Mississippi, who opened with: "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world."

Closed with:

"It [hostility to slavery] has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood."

"Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England."

Ditto Mississippi.

I will note that Mississippi's analogy to the Revolution is false. The Founding Fathers wanted a voice in their government. They knew, of course, that having a voice does not guarantee that one's voice will be heeded. They understood that the corollary to having Representation is the obligation to abide by the decisions of a Representative government even when these decisions go against you. Evidently, the secessionists did not understand their obligation to obey the lawful government of the United States even when they disagreed with that government."

--From the ACW newsgroup.

The war was caused by slavery, not tariffs.

Walt

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