In light of the recent racially linked murder, at
the “Mother Emanuel” Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, a lot
has been said in the news and on the pages of the social media concerning the
linkage of the Confederate “Battle Flag” –the stars and bars, to anti-Negro
(Afro-American) hatred. As my Facebook acquaintance Shia Altman mentions in his
recent Blog; “Take Down The Flag”
“Even if one thinks the flag does not represent
racial hatred in some way, and I think it does or in the very least is being
used to do so, it represents those who wanted to separate from the United
States, be it for “States’ Rights” or to defend slavery.”
So as a Southerner, born and bred, I started
contemplating; “What is the history behind the whole story?”
Personally, I say it is way past time to lower and
remove the Stars and Bars to the museums.
However as Shia reminded me in his Blog, to many of us in the South it is part
of the proud “fighting’ heritage of the South. To very many in the South it is
almost sacrilegious to remove the Confederate Battle Flag. You might say it is
the final blow for them as it is truly the “Night they Drove Ole Dixie Down”.
Virgil Caine is my name and I drove on the
Danville train
’Til
Stoneman’s cavalry came and tore up the tracks again.
In the winter of ’65, we were hungry, just barely
alive.
By May the 10th, Richmond had fell.
It’s a time I remember, oh so well.
The night they drove old Dixie down
And all the bells were ringing,
The night they drove old Dixie down
Before continuing I wish to present, as I always
do, some historical background and point out to “Youz Yankees” that the South
(The Confederate States of America) had three flags. The flag which is causing the
controversy is the one known as the Confederate “Battle Flag” (or the battle
flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E. Lee). It
was designed by William Porcher Miles of South Carolina.
Southern Heros
Here is a Color lithograph from 1896 showing four
versions of the flag of the Confederate States of America. Standing at the
center are Stonewall Jackson, P. G. T. Beauregard, and Robert E. Lee,
surrounded by bust portraits of Jefferson Davis and Confederate Army officers.
Clockwise from upper-left corner: Gen. Braxton Bragg, Gen. P. T. Beauregard,
Jefferson Davis, Alexander H. Stephens, Lt. Gen. T.J. Jackson, Gen S. Price,
Lt. Gen Polk, Lt. Gen Hardee, Gen J.E.B. Stuart, Gen J.E. Johnston, Lt. Gen
Kirby Smith, John H. Morgan, Albert Sidney Johnston, Gen. Wade Hampton, Gen
John B. Gordon, Lt. Gen Longstreet, Gen A.P. Hill, Gen Hood.
South Carolina Secessionist flag of Miles’ design
was inspired by one of the many “secessionist flags” flown at the South
Carolina secession convention in Charleston of December 1860. The specific flag
that inspired him was a flag with a blue St George’s Cross (an upright or Latin
cross) on a red field, with 15 white stars on the cross, representing the
slaveholding states, and, on the red field, palmetto and crescent symbols.
What is very interesting to note is that there is
a Jewish connection to the flag:
“Miles received a variety of feedback on this
design, including a critique from Charles Moise, a self-described “Southerner
of Jewish persuasion”. Moise liked the design but asked that; “the symbol of a
particular religion not be made the symbol of the nation”. Taking this into
account, Miles changed his flag, removing the palmetto and crescent, and
substituting a heraldic saltire (“X”) for the upright one. The number of stars
was changed several times as well. He described these changes and his reasons for
making them in early 1861. The diagonal cross was preferable, he wrote,
because, “it avoided the religious objection about the cross (from the Jews and
many Protestant sects), because it did not stand out so conspicuously as if the
cross had been placed upright thus”. He also argued that the diagonal cross was
“more Heraldric [sic] than Ecclesiastical, it being the ‘saltire’ of Heraldry,
and significant of strength and progress”.
According to historian John Coski;
“The “Saint Andrew’s Cross” (also used as the flag of Scotland), had no special place in Southern iconography at the time, and if Miles had not been eager to conciliate the Southern Jews his flag would have used the traditional Latin, “Saint George’s Cross” (as used in the old ancient flag of England, a red cross on a white field). A colonel named James B. Walton submitted a battle flag design essentially identical to Miles’ except with an upright Saint George’s cross, but Beauregard chose the diagonal cross design.”
The Confederate “Battle Flag” was mainly carried
into battle to inspire and lead the “Son’s of the South”. The Stars and Bars is still
emotionally symbolic for Southerners who wanted to honor those brave, barefoot,
starving young men in
tattered butternut brown (Not Grey) uniforms who fell defending their lands.
Many of those young men were proud woodsmen from the hills of Northern Alabama who had advanced
gallantly and bravely in tight rows across the deadly fields at Gettysburg in
Pickets charge or up the hill to the Little Round top only to be mowed down in
the withering
hail of lead.
Many of them that died that hot July day were not
slave owners they were just plain farmers who believed that their rights as
free Americans were being challenged by those in the North. They were motivated
by honor among brothers to
fight. They had fought outnumbered and out gunned by a highly industrialized
modern army for
four long bloody years in the deadliest conflict ever faced by Americans for
their rights as
free men to do as they wish.
Entitled “Bonnie Blue Flag Most famously” or the
“Bonnie Blue Flag” was used as an unofficial flag during the early months of
1861. It was flying above the Confederate batteries that first opened fire on
Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor, in South Carolina beginning the Civil War.
“The Bonnie Blue Flag” also known as “We Are a
Band of Brothers”, is an 1861 marching song associated with the Confederate
States of America. The words were written by the Ulster-Scots entertainer Harry
McCarthy, with the melody taken from the song “The Irish Jaunting Car”. The
song’s title refers to the unofficial first flag of the Confederacy, the Bonnie
Blue Flag but the words reflect the true spirit of why the South separated from
the Union.
We are a band of brothers
And native to the soil,
Fighting for the property
We gained by honest toil;
And when our rights were threatened,
The cry rose near and far–
”Hurrah
for the Bonnie Blue Flag
That bears a single star!” .
Hurrah! Hurrah!
For Southern rights hurrah!
Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag
That bears a single star.
As long as the Union
Was faithful to her trust,
Like friends and like brothers
Both kind were we and just;
But now, when Northern treachery
Attempts our rights to mar,
We hoist on high the Bonnie Blue Flag
That bears a single star.
For many of us in the South we were taught that
the Stars and Bars was symbolic of
a proud pioneering heritage of freedom and homesteading. The movement of the
American frontiersmen inspired by those like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone to claim the Appalachians and
the vast forest areas to the west. Those “free men” many who had themselves once
been “indentured servants” went west to build a free “god fearing” country from
the “honest toil” of the land.
For those of us born 100 years after the Civil War
in the South this was the version of the heritage of the proud American that
was taught to us.
We were taught that the “Carpetbaggers” as
Northerners were called always liked to take the higher moral ground and claim
that the war was to free the slaves, which to us in the South was not why the
war began. Most northerners apparently think that the institution of slavery
was only in existence in the south, when in fact it was all over the United
States when the war began. Throughout the years young American school children
have been told that the Civil War was fought over slavery in the South. But this is NOT
entirely true. In fact, there were many Afro-Americans held as slaves in the
North as well.
“During most of the British colonial period,
slavery existed in all the colonies. People enslaved in the North typically
worked as house servants, artisans, laborers and craftsmen, with the greater
number in cities. In 1703, more than 42 percent of New York City households
held slaves, the second-highest proportion of any city in the colonies after
Charleston, South Carolina. But slaves were also used as agricultural workers
in farm communities, including in areas of New York and Long Island,
Connecticut and New Jersey.”
Maryland is a fine example of a state that fought
on behalf of the Union, yet over half of the state was in fact pro-slavery. To
claim that the south was exclusive to this scourge would be totally false and
biased. History is written by the winners, and much of what people are taught
in school about the war is biased and taken as gospel by the masses.
Truthfully, Abraham Lincoln was neither for or against slavery, he was for
preserving the Union. He admitted this himself many times, and in fact said
that if he could keep the Union whole by not freeing the slaves, he would do
that, or by freeing some of the slaves and leaving others, that he would also
do that as well. So much for the “Great Emancipator” that folks build him up to
be.
Most people don’t realize that the majority of the
soldiers who fought for the south didn’t fight to keep slavery alive, and that
many didn’t own a single slave actually. They fought because they felt they
needed to protect their homes from a foreign invader, which is what was
happening.
It is true that the great majority of slaves were
indeed held in the “Black Belt” states of Virginian, Maryland, North Carolina,
South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Louisiana. They had large
Negro slave populations from the times of British Colonialism because they had
developed an agricultural economy dependent on commodity crops. Its planters
rapidly acquired a significantly higher number and proportion of slaves in the
population overall, as its commodity crops were labor-intensive.
It is estimated that more than half of all white
immigrants to the English colonies of North America during the 17th and 18th centuries
came as indentured servants. Many Germans, Scots-Irish, and Irish came to the
colonies in the 18th century, settling in the backcountry of Pennsylvania and
further south
At first the English Crown had emptied out it’s
prisons of impoverished Scotsmen, Englishmen and Irishmen. The number of
indentured servants among immigrants was particularly high in the South. These
“White Men” –and women, who were originally brought in through the “Indentured
Servant” program could not endure the grueling work in the hot humid fields or
in the muddy rice fields of the wide coastal areas. Many were rebellious and if
they escaped, they were hard to find because they could easily fade into the
sympathetic population.
The plantation owners found that the major problem
with indentured servants was that many left after several years, just when they
had become skilled and the most valuable workers. With the improvement of the
British economy in the late 17th and early 18th centuries from profits realized
in the new colonies abroad meant that fewer workers chose to go to the
colonies.
As time went by the need to hire cheap slave labor
created the impetus for the slave trade in Afro-Americans in states like
Virginian, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia where cotton
reigned supreme and so did large plantations with aristocratic land lords many
of them descendants of English aristocracy who were British Loyalists who received
their lands in grants from the Kings of England. Oh yes Charlestown and the
coastal regions of the “Linas” North and South were “big” slave states. These
states had large holdings that necessitated the use of large groups of slaves
to till the hot humid low coastal rice fields.
True historically the majority of Southerners who
had very small family-based farms or homesteads rarely owned slaves. But that
is not the issue.
The question that must be asked here is; “What
issue was worth splitting the nation in two and fighting a terrible war over,
at the cost of 600,000 lives? States rights or Slavery? And what state right
was being questioned?
The objective of what the South sought was not to
end the Union but to preserve slavery. There would have been no secession, no
Confederacy and no war had the South not been intent on maintaining its
“peculiar institution.” Slavery was the raison d’etre of the Confederacy. The
“liberty” the Confederacy sought to preserve was the liberty to own human
beings.
So now knowing the truth the reality is that the
Civil War was not fought to end slavery; it was fought to defend slavery.
As to the use of the Confederate “Battle Flag” as
a hated symbol of blind racism.
Ever since the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the
early 1920’s with the post World War I rise of racial and immigrant hatred. The
Stars and Bars – the Confederate
“Battle Flag,” had increasingly become identified by with it’s usage by the KKK
with the utmost blind racial hatred.
During
the 1950’s the Stars and Bars was usurped to become symbolically identified
together with hoods and white sheets to be the centerpiece of abject white
supremacist hatred. This vile hatred reached it’s zenith during the Civil
Rights period of the 1960’s.
The flag was a centerpiece, along with Nazi Aryan
symbols, in the “preaching’s” of William LutherPierce III. Pierce was a prominent anti-Semite, anti-Zionist and American (read
Aryan) white nationalist (supremacist) an associate of George Lincoln Rockwell,
founder of the American Nazi Party.
Pierce was
one of the most influential ideologues of the white nationalist movement for
some 30 years. His
follower David Ernest Duke has continued to spread Piece’s rabid hate filled
slanderous teachings. Duke’s an American White nationalist, writer, right-wing politician, and a
former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, has also defamed the southern heritage
by his use of the Stars and Bars with his philosophies of white supremacist and ardent
anti-Semitism /Judaism and utterly vile anti-Zionism.
Dukes has aligned himself with every venue of
hatred of Jews and Zionism from Iran, the Palestinians and Hezbollah. He is one
of the chief sources of rabid anti-Semitism on the World Wide Web.
The massive Iranian funding of the anti-Zionistic Jew hating organizations, linked to the philosophies of William Luther Pierce III a prominent American white nationalist came under the "watch" of President Clinton and Obama's administrations.
So the "Big" question is just why is the mainstream media only now making "Jew Hatred" a big story now while ignoring the ugly extremely vile and violent "Jew Hatred" against Zionism and Israel backed by Pro-Palestinian groups on hundreds of University and College Campuses through out the USA and Canada?
And if any action should be taken it should be to outlaw and ban the spreading of YouTube videos of abject and utter racial hatred narrated
by William Luther
Pierce or David Duke’s through the use of social media on the Internet to
influence young naive Americans and even Europeans.
