The Confederate Flag: A Short History

"Stainless," the last of the three official national flags of the Confederacy in its three and a half years of existence
“Stainless,” the second of three official national flags of the Confederacy in its three and a half years of sovereignty

Update June 20, 2015: This story from June 2008 is getting attention in light of the right-wing racist terror attack on the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston this week.

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The title of a story I wrote last week — World’s Largest Swastika, Um, Confederate Flag to Fly in Tampa — upset a few people.

Some are proud, lifelong Southerners, who took offense because, as they saw it, comparing the Confederate flag to a swastika was the same as saying Southerners are Nazis. To them, the Confederate flag represents the people of the South, just as the U.S. flag stands for the American people.

As I wrote last week, I used to see the Confederate flag in a more benign light, but my perspective has changed, and not just because I’ve been expatriated from the South for 24 years. My perspective has changed because, in my youth, I saw the flag as a symbol of Southern separateness, of regional pride. But that idealization has been eclipsed by the reality that, whatever the flag may have represented in the past, today it is nothing more than a symbol of hatred and oppression.

I have also become aware that the flag we think of as the Confederate flag is not what has been purported to be. In the Confederacy’s three-and-a-half years of sovereignty, it had three national flags, but today’s Confederate flag was not one of them. Today’s rebel flag is a 20th century adaptation of a battle flag that was square, not rectangular, for one thing.

Still, the Southerners’ visceral reaction to my comparison of the flag to the Nazi emblem prompted me to do a little digging on the history of the Confederate flag. Here’s what I found:

art-confederate-flags
From left: Stars and Bars (1861-1863), Stainless Banner (1863-1865) and Blood Stained Banner (1865)

Flag Facts

Not only was the so-called Confederate flag never the national flag of the Confederacy, it wasn’t even the Confederate battle flag. It was just one of 180 such flags that were used by various Southern regiments.

The diagonal cross is called a “saltire.” The one on the Confederate flag represents the Scottish Cross of St. Andrews.

It is not now, nor was it ever, correctly called the “Stars and Bars.” The Stars and Bars was, in fact, the first of the three national flags of the Confederacy.

The Stars and Bars, which flew over the Confederate capitol from 1861 to 1863, was purposefully designed to resemble the Stars and Stripes. Like the U.S. flag, it had horizontal stripes (or “bars”) with a field of blue in the upper left corner. On the blue field was a circle of seven stars that represented the seven states of the Confederacy. (Five more were added later.)

The similarity of the Stars and Bars to the Stars and Stripes led to unintended consequences:

[During] a battle at Bull Run, a group of Southern troops mistook the two flags and fired on their compatriots. Following the battle, General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard began advocating for a unique battle flag, one that had been designed by William Miles, the committee’s chairman.

Miles had taken a South Carolinian secession flag — featuring an upright blue cross, studded with 15 white stars, set against a red background alongside a palmetto tree and a crescent – and revamped it. First, he had stripped away the fussy ornamentation. Then, at the request of a Jewish acquaintance who objected to flag’s overt Christian symbolism, Miles had tilted the cross into the now familiar X. Mazel tav! Thus the Confederate battle flag was born.

Meanwhile, the second Confederate national flag — the “Stainless banner” — was also designed. Adopted in 1863, it featured a large white field with a small, version of the square battle flag in the upper left corner. The white field was meant to represent the purity of the Cause, but so many people saw it simply as a flag of truce that a third national flag was adopted in 1865, just a month before the Confederate Army surrendered. The third flag was identical to the Stainless Banner except that it had a red vertical stripe along the right edge.

One misconception I had was that the flag known as “Bonnie Blue” was the Confederate national flag. Many people remember it because, in Gone With the Wind, Scarlett and Rhett named their ill-fated child Bonnie Blue, in honor of the flag, which had a solid blue background with a single white star in the center. Its history predated the cause of the secession:

[It] was the flag of the short-lived Republic of West Florida. In September 1810, settlers in the Spanish territory of West Florida revolted against the Spanish government and proclaimed an independent republic. The Bonnie Blue Flag was raised at the Spanish fort in Baton Rouge on September 23, 1810. In December, West Florida was annexed by the United States and the republic ceased to exist, after a life of 74 days.

After the War

The Confederate battle flag would have probably been consigned to the ash heap of historical obscurity with the other 180 Confederate battle flags had the forces of federal occupation after the war not done the one thing that was certain to make Southerners worship it: They banned it.

Winston Churchill said, “History is written by the victors.” With “Gone With the Wind,” Southerners were given a rare opportunity to amend the historical record with a story sympathetic to the losers’ point of view.

During Reconstruction, as the South struggled under the yoke of Yankee oppression, the contraband Confederate battle flag became both a symbol of resistance to the occupation and a reminder of all that had been lost.

Most people outside the South have forgotten the tragic history of Reconstruction and the ensuing decades. The end of the war left the South doubly bankrupted. First, the cost of the campaign drained the Confederate treasury, then the emancipation of slaves wiped out what had been the region’s primary “capital” resource:

In 1805 there were just over 1 million slaves worth about $300 million; 55 years later there were 4 million slaves worth close to $3 billion. In the 11 states that eventually formed the Confederacy, four out of 10 people were slaves in 1860, and these people accounted for more than half the agricultural labor in those states. In the cotton regions the importance of slave labor was even greater. The value of capital invested in slaves roughly equaled the total value of all farmland and farm buildings in the South.

Unlike today, in that era, conquerors did little or nothing to help the people they vanquished, and very little assistance flowed into the region after the war. Instead, over the latter decades of the 19th century, incompetence, corruption and inattention by successive Republican administrations in Washington allowed poverty in the South to escalate. Vast areas of the South descended into what we would call today Third World conditions. It was a place no one wanted to visit, much less invest in, and Southerners were generally too poor to travel. The South turned inward and became isolated.

Poverty bred ignorance, which in turn allowed fear, hatred and bigotry to fester. Regional disparity led to resentment. Northerners and other outsiders treated the South with derision. Proud Southerners felt shame about their hardscrabble circumstances. With no future to look forward to, they clung increasingly to the past. The ante bellum years took on a mystique, a romanticism, that had very little to do with the reality of the oligarchical system in the South before the war:

Large slaveholders were extremely rare. In 1860 only 11,000 Southerners, three-quarters of one percent of the white population, owned more than 50 slaves; a mere 2,358 owned as many as 100 slaves. However, although large slaveholders were few in number, they owned most of the South’s slaves. Over half of all slaves lived on plantations with 20 or more slaves and a quarter lived on plantations with more than 50 slaves.

Slave ownership was relatively widespread. In the first half of the 19th century, one-third of all southern white families owned slaves, and a majority of white southern families either owned slaves, had owned them, or expected to own them. These slaveowners were a diverse lot. A few were African American, mulatto, or Native American; one-tenth were women; and more than one in ten worked as artisans, businesspeople, or merchants rather than as farmers or planters. Few led lives of leisure or refinement.

The average slaveowner lived in a log cabin rather than a mansion and was a farmer rather than a planter. The average holding varied between four and six slaves, and most slaveholders possessed no more than five.

By the time industrialization and a modicum of prosperity finally arrived, a highly idealized version of the plantation era had become ingrained in the culture. In addition, a yearning among the burgeoning middle class for a time when “everyone knew their place” gave cover to the perpetuation of Jim Crow laws, the express purpose of which was to keep African Americans “in their place” at the bottom of society.

Southerners’ psychic investment in this fictionalized past came into full flower in the 1930s with the publication of Margaret Mitchell’s romance novel, Gone with the Wind. Set on a plantation in Georgia before the war and in Atlanta during the war and afterward, the book quickly became a runaway bestseller. In 1939, the movie version starring Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable became the prototype of Hollywood potboiler blockbusters to follow. It won multiple Oscars and remains one of the most popular movies of all time.

“History is written by the victors,” Winston Churchill once said. Margaret Mitchell, wittingly or not gave Southerners a rare opportunity to amend the historical record with a story sympathetic to the losers’ point of view. The popularity of the movie raised public interest in the Civil War South, and the Confederate battle flag became an emblem in the marketing of this romantic ideal.

This was perhaps the high point in the history of the flag. Within two years after the release of the movie, it became the focus of controversy for the first time since it was banned in the late 1860s. During World War II, military units made up mostly of Southerners adopted the Confederate flag as their emblem, a move that prompted complaints from African-American soldiers. In 1945, after the U.S. victory at Okinawa, even white soldiers found it unsettling when the Confederate flag was raised over the battle site. It was quickly replaced with an American flag on orders from Gen. Simon Buckner Jr., whose father had been a Confederate general.

After the war, the flag inexplicably enjoyed a moment as a fad:

In 1950, the Confederate flag swept across the Mason-Dixon Line and began decorating front porches from California to New York. Cultural observers were baffled by the craze. “Don’t ask me why,” wrote a contributor in the NAACP’s magazine, The Crisis. “Sometimes it’s little green lizards, sometimes it’s birds-on-a-stick. Now it is Confederate flags.”

The fad ended two years later when the flag was commandeered by the segregationist movement.

A Symbol of Bigotry and Anti-Americanism

The most dramatic, and darkest, transformation of the meaning of battle flag occurred in the early years of Civil Rights era when some Southern politicians — mostly members of the then-conservative Democratic Party — made the battle flag an official symbol of their fight to preserve the Jim Crow system. As Democratic Gov. George Wallace of Alabama put it, “Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. Segregation forever.”

In 1962, the South Carolina Legislature voted to fly the battle flag above the capitol building in Columbia, where it remained there for 38 years. In 2000, it was moved a few feet away to a Confederate memorial on the grounds, where it remains on display.

In the post-Civil Rights era, the Confederate battle flag once again became a symbol of resistance to the U.S. government. It was adopted by domestic anti-government groups like the KKK and the Aryan Nation, for whom it still signifies their hatred toward blacks, Jews, Catholics, gays and others (the Anti-Defamation League lists the Confederate flag as a hate symbol), as well as by foreign anti-U.S. forces like the Viet Cong and, more recently, Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard.

It also remains popular among Christian nationalists. In Embattled Banner: A Reasonable Defense of the Confederate Battle Flag, Don Hinkle, editor of “The Pathway,” a publication of the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC), describes in detail the meaning of the flag to conservative fundamentalists. Hinkle recently defended his position online in an exchange discussed here:

Hinkle argued in his book that the flag is actually a Christian symbol because it features St. Andrew’s Cross and because the Confederate Constitution acknowledged God while the U.S. Constitution does not. His book even included a photo of the flag flying next to the Christian flag.

In his book, the Confederate’s fight becomes a religious mission, and this fight is not yet over. He even argued that those attacking the flag should remember that Southerners “will ‘draw their sabers’ in a second if they feel their honor has been questioned” and pointed to Union cemeteries as proof.

After asking if the flag is a “racist relic,” Hinkle declared, “Absolutely not!” He added that “the battle flag was not — nor will ever be — symbolic of slavery or racism.”

Rather than seeing the Confederate battle flag as a symbol of hate, Hinkle asserted that it is the “anti-flag minority” who are trying to “bully” the South through “character assassination.” He also accused critics of using “petty politics based on distortion and bigotry.”

He declared the attacks to be “cultural genocide” and even argued that Missouri was among the states hurt by the attacks on the flag. Among his examples of “attacks being launched against Southern culture” is criticism of William Jewell College, which at the time was affiliated with the MBC, for not allowing the flag flown during a ceremony in the school’s chapel.

Hinkle claimed that many of critics of the Confederate flag are actually also opposed to the American flag. He suggested that this movement would result in “feeding the Constitution to a shredder” and remove American historical artifacts “like what the Communists did to rewrite Russian history after the fall of the Czar.”

Southern Stereotypes

“The South shall rise again” was a phrase that was bandied about when I was growing up in North Carolina in the 1960s. At my house, at least, it was another way of saying, “Don’t hold your breath.” Brigadoon may reappear once every century but the Old South is gone for good.
Little did we know then that a new South would indeed rise in the ashes of the old — and that the economic development that resurrected the South would come as a byproduct of finally extending equal rights to Southern blacks. Why didn’t we think of that sooner?
Little did we know then that a new South would indeed rise in the ashes of the old — and that the economic development that resurrected the South would come as a byproduct of finally extending equal rights to Southern blacks. By offering education to all their citizens, most of the Southern states upgraded their work force, which made local economies ripe for investment. Education and these investments provided access to prosperity for everyone, black and white.

Why didn’t we think of this sooner?

In the final analysis, the fate of the Confederate flag rests not so much with politics but with marketing. Today, non-Southerners, especially young ones, are likely to associate the South with its colleges and university, the beaches and resorts and the logos of its international corporate successes — Coca-Cola, CNN, NASCAR, Bank of America, RJR, Wachovia, Duke Energy, to name a few.

But show these people a Confederate flag and it brings to mind the very stereotypes Southerners object to. Some people are reminded of the iconography of Jim Crow: photos of lynched men hanging from trees and old news footage of white adults spitting on high school students and big-bellied sheriffs loosing German shepherds on protesters or blasting them with fire hoses.

Others may be reminded of Hollywood versions of Southern yahoos, like the yokels who drove the muscle car with the flag on it in the “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

I would argue that as a symbol — a logo, a marketing emblem — the Confederate flag has outlived its usefulness. The time has come to relegate it to the Jim Crow exhibits in museums, and to replace it on the graves of the Confederate veterans with the Stars and Bars, which was the actual national flag for which they died.

Southerners no longer need their own flag. Like their fellow Americans in the North, Midwest, West and Pacific Coast, the Stars and Stripes ought to suffice as symbol of heritage and patriotism.

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8 thoughts on “The Confederate Flag: A Short History”

  1. Personally, flying the Confederate flag doesn’t bother me. If someone wants to fly it (or wear it on a t-shirt, or decal on a truck, etc) so be it. Maybe this is a good thing, you know, a warning to minorities and/or educated folk. I don’t really care for the south, so since I don’t go there (except occasionally for work) I couldn’t care less if the damn thing were flying from every flagpole; they can have it, they are there, and I’m here, so I don’t have to tolerate it and therefore I don’t care. I don’t care that some people fly the American flag at every opportunity either, but I look at it about the same as the southerners who fly the Confederate flag every chance they get. Worshipping a flag and swearing alliegence to it? Ridiculous no matter which flag!
    THAT’S what REALLY bothers me. Fly your stupid flags all you want, but DON’T expect me to salute them!

  2. Jon,thanks for a beautifully written and educational essay. I learned something today.
    Tell the truth, I look forward to a time when all flags, which are nothing more than symbols of separation and divisiveness, disappear altogether, maybe to be replaced by a “world” flag that represents all people under one banner.

  3. Let’s review the symbols of the KKK:

    The first edition of the Klan used the Cross.

    The second used the United States flag…and the Cross.

    The Confederate flag doesn’t show up until the 1950s with the third edition…but they still used the US flag and the Cross.

    Why the selective denunciation of only one symbol?

  4. Hey JohnDWoodSR …

    As long as American ideals and our Constitution are the pillars of said world, its cool with me. Anything else is useless.

  5. “Southerners no longer need their own flag. Like their fellow Americans in the North, Midwest, West and Pacific Coast, the Stars and Stripes ought to suffice as symbol of heritage and patriotism.” –>

    If someone wants to exercise the 1stA by their display of the flag of their choice, so be it. I see many flags of nations that the US has fought, Mexico, Italy, etc.

    “Southerners no longer need …”

    BTW: Thats why its called the Bill of Rights, not the Bill of needs.

  6. I never knew that about the Bonnie Blue flag and we have visited almost every historical site in the southeast. Thank you for an informative post!

  7. Considering you are not a fan of the “Confederate Flag” I think your article is most gracious. You make the point no other region of the U.S. has a flag. No other region of the U.S. is this country’s scapegoat. All other regions, the media and African-Americans with an agenda enjoy unlimited freedom to degrade us without mercy. People outside the south decided the song “Dixie” is racist. The NCAA has required Mississippi host regional playoffs
    in a state whose flag has a design they approve. Slavery was an American issue.Few people know “The Emancipation Proclamation” freed slaves only is states, and in some cases, portions of states, declaring independence from the Union. Racism is not a southern issue. I think race relations in today’s South are the most progressive in the country. How can anyone truly believe the Confederate Flag and the song Dixie be banned and not have the same opinion of Old Glory and The National Anthem? Do you think American Indians or slaves equate either with freedom?
    It’s the hipocrisy I resent.

  8. ok im sorry but the rebel flag is no where near the swastika. I was born and raised in the south and i love it. i fly both full size american and rebel flags off my truck. Hell there is the biggest flag on america that is the rebel flag off the interstate.It is just that is the most recognized southern label. SO you can hate all you want and call it a swastika. but for the people who know what it is and love it just as much as i do they wouldnt mind people like you post a blog on what they learned off of google.

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