The Confederate Battle Flag

The Confederate Battle FlagAuthor(s): Guy DavenportSource: Callaloo, Vol. 24, No. 1 (Winter, 2001), pp. 51-54Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3300451 .

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THE CONFEDERATE BATTLE FLAG

by Guy Davenport

In the Church of Les Invalides in Paris there hangs on a staff and among many other flags the Swastika of Nazi Germany. It cannot be legally displayed anywhere in Germany itself, but here in the city where it was carried through the Arc de Triumphe in June 1940 and flew atop the Hotel de Ville for four awful years, it hangs in a church consecrated to the fallen. It is a captured flag.

After Lee handed his sword to Grant at Appomattox, Lincoln asked to hear "Dixie" on the White House lawn. The symbolism of this surprising request wavers between generosity and the fact that "Dixie" was a captured song. So one way of thinking about the Stars and Bars is that it is a captured flag, a defeated flag, a flag that belongs to history. But it is also an emblem of racist militias, of the Ku Klux Klan, and of various college fraternities. Its being on the State House at Columbia is as appropriate as Hitler's Swastika on the Knesset, or the Union Jack in Dublin.

Having said this, let's consider the matter from other angles. When I see motorcycle gangs wearing Nazi regalia, I know that I'm looking at ignorance and stupidity. They're too dumb to know what the symbols mean. They could not give you an account of the Second World War (of which many of them have never heard). Of disrespect to veterans of that war, to Jews, to the tortured and enslaved in the concentration camps, to ordinary decency they have no more concept than I of quantum physics. When I see the Confederate flag in front of a fraternity, I know that I'm looking at childish mindlessness. There is such a thing as obsolete patriotism: that's what I see when the South Carolina capitol displays the Confederate flag. And here we need to turn to the ambiguity of all symbols, for this flag obviously means one thing to some people, and something else to others. And how does a democracy deal with ambiguous symbols?

In Denmark you will see everywhere, in practically every yard, on boats and cars, the Danish flag, a white cross on a red field. It is Europe's oldest flag, handed down from heaven (they say) by the god of the Lutherans when the Danes were in a dire battle with their favorite enemy (and cousins) the Swedes. Up until the 19th century this flag was royal, flown only by the king and his ministers. But one day word went around that if every humble citizen displayed the flag, what then could the Palace do about it? So they did, and have ever since. (The Danes repeated this tactic under the Nazis-when all Jews were commanded to wear a Star of David on a yellow arm band, the whole country, even the king, donned yellow arm bands).

While we're on the subject of Danes, let us consider Sven Achen's International Flag Book, published in Copenhagen, a guide to all the world's contemporary flags. Hr.

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Achen gives us the Confederate flag as "the flag of the South" as if the last 140 years didn't exist. He may have found justification for his anachronism by noting that the state flags of Mississippi and Georgia incorporate the stars and bars, and that those of Florida and Alabama are St. Andrew's crosses, the old standard of Scotland (for its allusion to the Highland clans). The design of the Confederate flag takes its stars from Old Glory, symbolizing a state by each star, distributed along the arms of a St. Andrews cross: these stars have seceded from the Union just as the stars in the national flag had seceded from British rule.

American history chooses to forget that in 1814 a group of Disunionists headed by Gouverneur Morris (the man who gave us dollars and cents, Founding Father, diplomat, and instigator of the Erie Canal) planned to take the New England states out of the Union and set up a rival republic. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions made the same threat. In all thirteen colonies we can see that the Revolution (which the South said it was continuing) was an edgy confederation for the purpose of declaring independence, not especially a union with each other. The "Confederate flag" that has now been removed from the South Carolina State House but retained on a flag-pole nearby is a fiction. The Confederate flag "consisted of two horizontal bars with a narrow white bar between them; in the top left corner a blue union bearing eleven white stars arranged in a circle" (Brewer, Dictionary of Phrase and Fable). As a matter of fact, the Confederacy never decided on a flag from a number of competing designs. The one we're familiar with was understood to be a battle flag. It has figured so often in illustrations, movies, and the popular imagination that it has become the synecdo- che of the Old South. Folklore always trumps history.

A flag is a visual signal. Regimental guidons are more important in battle than national flags, but bugles and shouts were far more important. The Civil War was

visually drab; all of its eloquence, on both sides, was in music. Not since William III's "Lillibulero" had there been so sprightly a song as "Dixie" (so ironically in Negro dialect). The military music of the time was derived from parlor dances, flings, two- steps, "Scottish" reels, and was suited for military bands. 18th-century soldiers were dressed as if for Grand Opera (one of the annoying expenses for the British army in the Revolution was powder for wigs). They went into battle, as with Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, in scarlet coats, white knee-breeches, white wigs, blue tricornes with rosettes and ribbons. The front line was a veritable wall of color: large flags, drums and fifes.

William III landed at Torbay in 1688 with contingents of all the Protestant armies of Europe and their brand-new Reformation banners, flags, and standards: Swedes with pikes (and a bear), Swiss infantry, Dutch artillery, Danes and Huguenots. Their uniforms would have put a circus to shame.

Lee wore a fancy uniform, with sash and sword, but Stonewall Jackson wore his civilian overcoat and slouch hat. Insignia in both armies was minimal. Medals, forbidden by the Constitution, didn't yet exist. Grant wore the letters "U.S." on his collar, and his general's stars on his shoulder straps "to indicate to the army who I was," but not until Mao Zedong was any commander so self-effacingly dressed. (Compare Hermann Goering in full fig.) So the Confederate flag was at least a touch of color in a field of gray. I cannot find it in a contemporary lithograph of First

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Manassas (Bull Run, if you're a Yankee) and suspect it didn't then exist. Mary Chesnut's diary does not mention the Stars and Bars, and who was the Confederate Betsy Ross? It would be interesting to know if this annoying flag even existed before the Emancipation Proclamation.

Nothing could be clearer than the signal to African Americans of the Confederate battle flag: it is one more affront. It is a persisting trace of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, discrimination, insult, disrespect. It is naive of the South Carolina legislature to imagine it isn't outrageous, demeaning, and morally tacky.

There are Germans who resent the bad name history has given Hitler. "Grand- mother loved him so!" There have been few defeats so thorough and so ruinous as that of the Confederacy. A whole culture was obliterated. The tragedy is not cancelled by saying good riddance. Reconstruction was as great a tragedy, as it did not reconstruct. Hard as it is to argue, an alternate to the Civil War might plausibly-very plausibly- have been a Confederate States of America into which the Industrial Revolution would have eventually reached. Machine power obsoletes slave power.

I cannot subscribe to either Faulkner's or Margaret Mitchell's myth of the Old South. Nor do I think we can generalize so diverse and complex a culture into a single myth. I grew up on a street in Anderson, South Carolina (an Andersonian fired the first shot at Fort Sumter). On this street lived the Holmans, Browns, and Harts, gentry to their back teeth. One of the most impressive and lovely houses (and the only one with a wrought-iron fence around its spacious lawn) was next door to ours. In this house lived Dave and Ina Dooley, both born slaves. Mr. Dooley was a carriage-maker and smith. Their children were sent "up North" for their educations. After Dave's death and when the children were grown, Ina boarded black school teachers. The

Dooley children were my playmates; Ina was one of my mother's closest friends. Ina

provided me with a fine lesson in moral philosophy one winter afternoon in our kitchen. Mama and Ina were shelling peas; I was reading Macbeth by the kitchen stove. There had been a rash of chicken-stealing in the neighborhood-Mama and Ina both "raised hens." Ina told about her time of being a chicken thief, when she was a slave, how to slip into the henhouse and throttle a roosting hen with a quick grab, and how to slip out without waking the other hens. Ina, who was religious and a stern moralist, explained that stealing from people who had enslaved you was not a breach of the Commandments; God allowed it, "as only fair."

Lives are private integrities and unique arrangements in a society. Did Ina give the least attention to the Confederate monument in the town square? I imagine, however gratuitously, that she couldn't have cared less: none of her business. The teachers she boarded cared, and felt perfectly helpless. They could not enter our Carnegie Library, or the white Baptist, Methodist, or Presbyterian churches. They could not vote. It would be decades before they could protest a Confederate flag on a government building.

All of American history is a forgetting and a remembering, in cycles. It's hard to say whether it's a good thing or a bad to forget the past. Catholics and Protestants in Ulster make certain that the Battle of the Boyne (1690) is a constant cause of murderous bigotry and hatred. At the moment there are some forty wars raging on every continent. For the past forty years the United States has been conducting a sociological

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experiment the outcome of which has yet to be seen. We're far from being a pluribus unum; we're still very much Mark Twain's "damned human race." If a display of a defeated flag is a snag in the process, pull it down. There might also be some witty compromise in African Americans displaying the Stars and Bars as the Swastika is displayed in the Church of the Invalides, a captured flag now invalid.

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Documents

The Confederate Battle Flag