The Confederate Battle Flag and My Novel

If I were God I’d spread my arms to calm the stormy waters, to stop the battle flag hysteria that has popped up following a heinous mass murder of innocents in church.

But, I’m not God and I actually do have a dog in this fight. Take a look at the cover of my novel Tangled Honor. There’s the Confederate battle flag as a background feature at the top.

In that context l admit that I’m conflicted. I’m more than conflicted. My feet are planted firmly on both sides of the fence. But here I go anyway:

I probably included in one of my first blog posts my favorite quote from southern novelist William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It’s not even past.” The current Confederate battle flag hysteria is living proof that Faulkner got it right.

I don’t own a Rebel battle flag bigger than the size of my fingernail and those are attached to the pewter flag staffs of toy soldiers I use for wargaming the Civil War.

I’ve also reenacted many battles as a Confederate soldier under a full-size cloth Confederate battle flag, and will continue to do so. Yet, I’ve never put a Rebel battle flag bumper sticker on my car or worn one as a lapel pin of my suit. Why? Because the battle flag makes me uncomfortable. It makes me uneasy. It makes feel like a whiner who can’t let go of a war my ancestors lost.

Maybe that’s it. I don’t like whiners. Our ancestor Confederate soldiers gave it their all. As the poignant phrase goes, our Confederate ancestor soldiers gave their last full measure. God bless them for that. I’m like the John Wayne billboard I see nowadays: I don’t much like quitters. Go ‘til you fall, then get up and go further. Give that last full measure.

But for all that courage and perseverance, in the end they (we) lost the Civil War. After 150 years we southerners need to get over it and move on. Quit whining, for heaven’s sake. That means taking down the damned battle flag from places where it is a slap in the face of the African-American citizens of our wonderful country. That doesn’t mean everywhere, but it does mean many public places.

Forget the KKK and their “hijacking” of the Confederate battle flag. Those white-sheeted goons also carried the US Stars and Stripes and big Christian crosses. The KKK were (are) racist thugs who stole every symbol they could, so forget them.

Symbols are powerful and important because they mold emotions, and the Confederate battle flag has outlived its initial positive function to motivate southern soldiers to honorably give their last full measure.

I can’t get away from the stark fact that my Confederate soldier ancestors’ devotion was to a flawed cause. A deeply flawed cause. Not a lost cause, but a flawed cause. The wrong cause.

Just think of the Confederate battle flag as the banner carried by an army forged to protect the southern states’ “right” to secede so that the institution of slavery might be continued and the political power of the southern plantation planter aristocracy secured for a few more decades. That’s enough.

Come on, think about it: What can be more flawed than human bondage, slavery, ripping families apart? Generations of white men raping young African-American women with impunity? White men ignoring their children borne of a slave?

Do you know that in 1860 the US Census had three choices of race: White, Negro, and Mulatto.

 White daddies of kids born to black women were so pervasive that a name was created for those kids. And how many of those couplings between a white slave-owning man and his young black female slave would have been consensual? 

A word worse than “flawed” or even “despicable” needs to be invented for what slavery did to the white men of the south.  Not to mention the young black women, their mulatto children, and all African-American slaves destined to lives of bondage.

How disgusting is it to create terms like “mulatto” to acknowledge white fatherhood, but to let the term replace any responsibility for that fatherhood, knowing he may even profit by the young woman slave giving birth to a new infant slave worth a $1,000, a sum that would be more like $25,000 in 2015. It may have been the norm in the south before the Civil War, good business even, but even the memory is despicable, abhorrent. And the battle flag is the primary symbol connected to that aberration.

A short rhetorical question comes to mind. One used often with great effect in movies and books when a misguided person realizes in a moment of epiphany the great harm his actions have caused others. I remember it best from the grand WWII movie The Bridge Over the River Kwai when Alex Guinness’s incredibly strong, but flawed character utters, “Dear God, what have I done?”

Personally, I think all of us should be asking “Dear God, what have we done?” about a lot of wrong-headed laws and individual practices that have grown large in our culture as aftershocks of the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Shame on us for Jim Crow voting eligibility laws and barring the doors of our schools and universities to African-Americans for a hundred years after the Civil War ended. Separate but equal schools were never equal, but were certainly very separate. Shame on us now for the ongoing  white flight from our city schools to continue the separation of our white kids from kids of darker colors.

Looping back to the battle flag on the cover of my second Civil War novel Tangled Honor. I liked it when the graphic artist revealed it to me and I still like it. I freely admit that the Confederate battle flag is a bold, beautiful and striking design. It’s on the cover of my book because the characters are southerners caught in the middle of the Civil War.  As of today Amazon offers my book for sale, Confederate battle flag notwithstanding.  

Yet, at the same time as Amazon posts my novel for sale, the company has pulled from their virtual shelves all Confederate flags.  As of yesterday, the National Park Service souvenir stores located on Civil War battlefield parks have reportedly pulled stand-alone Confederate flags from their shelves.

I just read an hour ago that the head honcho at the National Cathedral in Washington DC has said the two Confederate flags included in stained glass windows honoring Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson need to go.

That’s wrong-headed too. We shouldn’t try to scrub history shiny clean and simply erase the memories of devout Christian southerners as Lee and Jackson both were. By that line of thought we might as well “redact” all those Bible passages that tell the story of King David when he was less than a paragon of virtue.

Jackson and Lee had flaws. Both owned slaves. Yet Jackson also practiced civil disobedience to Virginia law that forbade teaching slaves to read and write. Jackson openly founded and operated for many years a school for slave children from all over his home town of Lexington.

Yes, winners of wars get to write the history books. But smart winners don’t try to erase their opponents’ most cherished symbols and heroes.

So here it is for me: Take the Confederate battle flag down from modern public and government venues. Get it off statehouse lawns and off state flags. Let the Confederacy’s first national flag serve the heritage function that is a valid historical interest to many of us. Let the market decide where the battle flag will be seen in the private sector. 

Yes, some people and organizations will continue to flaunt the battle flag, just because they can. But most of us won’t. Its appearance will fade away in time.

Back to my novels, I will say that even before the current battle flag hysteria began this week, I had already directed the graphic artist to replace the battle flag with the Texas flag on the sequel to Tangled Honor. My thought is the Texas flag on the cover will add variety and attract more buyers to the second book in the series, Redeeming Honor. Good timing, huh? I guess so. But I don’t plan on taking the battle flag off the cover of the first book.