This is all a good tribute. I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley and I have complicated feelings about it. The Confederate flag is a good part of why. It’s a beautiful area and it was a good place to grow up. But I hated seeing that flag every day and I have always hated the nostalgia for traitors who took up arms against the United States.
Shenandoah and the blue ridge mountains have long been our go-to weekend getaway. You captured the beautiful contradictions wonderfully. Glad you're exploring the area!
Perhaps a history lesson is in order. The battle flag was not the flag of a slave state. It was a battle flag for an army that did not come into existence until Lincoln declared in his inaugural address (before the firing on Sumter) that he was going to invade the South "to collect his revenue." The South wished merely to withdraw from the Union, and the reasons for that had nothing to do with slavery. Had it been over slavery, the South would have accepted the North's offer of the Crittenden Compromise, which would have permanently ensconced slavery into the US Constitution. Instead, the South declined. Permanent slavery wasn't what the South wanted (more on that later, in the tariff discussion). The South had long since outlawed the importation of slaves, but the North had not, and in fact the importation of slaves was such big business in New York City that the mayor of NYC threatened to secede in early 1861. Six slave states sent men to fight for the North. In actual fact, the US flag was the flag of all slave states, until secession. And what is secession, except what the Founders declared on July 4, 1776?? As Charles Dickens so cogently pointed out, a country founded on secession cannot deny the right of secession without that nation being considered the height of hypocrisy.
If you believe in the Constitution, you should not abhor the Confederate flag. It is a symbol of states' rights, and a statement that the federal govt should never again turn the weapons of war on its own people. (Yes, I'm aware of the neo-Nazi usurping that symbolism, but that fact doesn't negate what it stands for to the people of Shenandoah.) People in Minnesota are, right now, discovering the power of states' rights, and indeed the framers never intended the behemoth federal govt. that we have today. That flag does not represent nostalgia for slavery - which, btw, did not end in any northern state until the 13th amendment was passed in late 1865. It instead represents a history that we are fighting to preserve - not because we want to celebrate the owning of human beings, but because we want to tell the truth, and that truth is being obliterated at a record pace by the Marxists who are now running states like Virginia. Lee is often the subject of hatred, and yet Robert E. Lee himself hated slavery, and argued in favor of its abolishing; his wife and mother in law were both abolitionists. He wrote in 1857 that slavery brought out the very worst in white men, and he felt that a policy of gradual emancipation, where blacks were taught basic reading and math, taught a trade, and perhaps given some land to make a good start, was advisable. Just imagine if we had done that, instead of freeing people suddenly, with them having no home to go to, no shelter, no food, no nothing. (Compare Lee's idea of emancipation with Lincoln's, who wanted to ship blacks out of the United States b/c he didn't want to live with them.) Sudden emancipation was not very kind to the ex-slaves, and absent from your tale above is any mention of the many, many testimonies of ex slaves of the love that existed between them and their masters, love that carried through multiple generations, with families that were devoted to one another in multiple ways. One diary I read discussed how an elderly black man begged his mistress to keep him on after the war; that land was his family's land, too. They had lived and died on it for four generations, and he was desperate not to leave it. But the law said he had to be turned out, despite his age and infirmity. He wept before her, but she could do nothing, or she herself would be in violation of the law. Just one more instance of the unintended consequences of laws that were supposed to do good.
None of this, of course, makes the owning of human beings "okay," but it's a fact that cruelty was not the general rule; it was the exception, and any perusal of agricultural journals of the period would show that cruelty was advised against, over and over again, as a poor way to manage human beings and likely to engender resentment and retaliation. Jefferson Davis, on his plantation, had a separate justice system for slaves whereby any slave who committed a wrong was judged and sentenced by his/her peers, not by his/her white owner. Slavery at the time was a worldwide condition, and these were people of their time who did not invent slavery, which had existed for hundreds of years, but were born into that world through no fault of their own. They should not be universally vilified.
To circle back to the idea of slavery as a cause of the war ... In 1863, after two years of war and after the Emancipation Proclamation (which was a war tactic and had no real legal effect), Lincoln accepted West Virginia into the Union as a slave state. So it can hardly be claimed that the war was fought over slavery. That idea came into being after a US attorney general refused to prosecute Jefferson Davis on the grounds that if a trial was held, the entire world would learn that the US had perpetrated an illegal war on the its own people, and the US govt would face the ire of hundreds of thousands of wives, sisters, and children who had lost beloved husbands, brothers, and fathers. At that point the US govt then required that all Southern schools teach the "the war was about slavery" narrative in order to receive federal monies. Funny how that works.
The Shenandoah Valley was particularly targeted by Union troops during the War. Lincoln, in defiance of the Geneva Convention, which he had previously agreed to, ordered the army to target civilians. The resultant violence perpetrated on the Valley's citizens was unprecedented in our history: Women were gang raped, often murdered, their animals butchered and left senselessly, their homes burned. The atrocities have been documented in books like "War Crimes Against Southern Civilians" and "Blood in the Ozarks." If you read the first one, you'll understand a bit more about why people in the Shenandoah Valley might want to fly a Confederate flag.
If people in the Valley want to remember their ancestors, who lived through years of horror perpetrated on citizens, including Amish and Mennonites (who were abstainers from both sides, and at the beginning of the war both sides had agreed to leave them alone, but the Union army shot and killed many of them), then let them. And let the history be told. If you try to silence the flags, then what else will you silence? Where does the slippery slope end? The entire story needs to be told, not just one side of it.
For the fact is, the war was fought over money and power, as all wars are; the South paid about 80% of the costs of running the federal govt., via tariffs levied on it by the North-controlled Congress, and Lincoln wanted to double that tariff (ie, the Morrill Tariff), while sending most of the money to develop industries in the North. This had been going on for decades, with the North-dominated Congress continually appropriating Southern funds to Northern states. Because of his support for the Morrill Tariff, Lincoln had so little support in the South that his name did not appear on the ballot in a single Southern state. So it's no wonder the South looked on with horror at Lincoln's election, knowing that it meant even more economic hardship for one section of the nation while the other section profited handsomely from it. And so they politely seceded. There did not have to be a war. Lincoln was the one who did that - and don't talk about the firing at Sumter unless you understand why the South suddenly fired on a fort after weeks of its occupation. There did not even have to be a war to free the slaves; other nations had done it via a system of compensation, and economic studies have proven that the US had sufficient funds to do that - but Lincoln chose war b/c he wanted to strengthen the central federal govt and teach the states a lesson. They were not going to withhold his monies, not without bloodshed. And that's exactly what he told them in his inaugural address.
So. Let the flags fly, because if the flags are silenced, then a huge section of history is silenced. And that's the real tragedy. Because really, the only difference between the Fathers of the Revolutionary War, and the Confederacy, is that the Confederacy lost - and you know what they say: The victor tells the tale, and most of the time that tale is not entirely the truth.
The Confederate battle flag was created for an army formed to defend a slaveholding order, and the seceding states said so plainly in their own declarations. Rebranding it as a neutral symbol of “states’ rights” requires ignoring those primary sources and flattening the lived reality of chattel slavery. When a symbol’s origin and stated purpose are set aside in favour of nostalgic myth, that isn’t heritage—it’s historical illiteracy.
In 1861, ‘states’ rights’ meant the right of states to preserve a legal system in which human beings were property. A political movement built on denying individual liberty to millions cannot plausibly claim to be a pure defence of individual rights. That contradiction is written into the Confederacy’s own founding documents.
Nice demonstration of where and when you attended high school. Please share for the class (a) which Article of the 1864 Convention addresses the treatment of civilians and (b) on exactly what date did the United States sign?
As with most of history, Oliver, it is very much more nuanced than it might seem. The American Civil War, certainly falls in that category. As, likely does the English Civil about which I think I have known something, but have long suspected not enough to make hard judgements on who or what was really right.
In the case of the American CW: it was not at all about slavery, but about federal power and money. One of the intended consequences of the war, on the part of the Federal government, was to create a country in which ceding is illegal/impossible. It was a momentous act of government centralization, despite the intent of the Constitution.
We have been taught it was about freeing the slaves in the schools for at least 100 years(probably), but I am old enough to recall some of our school texts that let the truth slip through—not directly, but via innuendo.
I did not put it together until I spent a few intense few days in some southern CW museums…Atlanta’s being the best. My taught perspective on the war evaporated on the spot and my understanding has since been affirmed in further reading and consideration.
I agree, let the flags fly. If for no other reason than to mark an era of our history that we may or may not be proud of… but are, at least, being honest about. There could be another reason, though… that of remembering Constitutionally guaranteed State’s Rights, before all of them completely disappear, as did the right to cede from the Union.
Pairs of gas stations and pairs of churches? Or church/gas station pairs? I suspect, based on Harold Hotelling, the former. And a difference between the callow communists and the Confederate flag wavers is that, in my experience, most of the former are convinced that communism didn't really cause those deaths while the latter do understand that slavery was real but it's not enough to upset them. Until fairly recently, I'd have said that makes the red bridges possibly more dangerous, but definitely more pleasant to be around than the Dukes of Hazzard, the Dukes being inevitably too small in number to be more than locally destructive. I'm no longer convinced of that now.
I also suspect that most of the callow Communists grew out of it within a year - that it was more a fashion statement, or at best a statement of ‘I am against American capitalism’ than ‘I have read “Das Kapital” and “‘Left-Wing’ Communism: an Infantile Disorder”’.
Attending a meeting organised by the University Communist society is usually a good cure for most.
At a hunch, I would say the ones who take it seriously are far less likely to indulge in Soviet chic.
I’m old; I don’t remember seeing Confederate flags (certainly not in any number) on a week long visit to the Shenandoah Valley sometime around 1970. Is this a sign of contemporary political protest based on an ahistorical, romanticized past? On a visit to Decatur Alabama several years ago there were vastly more Confederate flags than would have been the case, say 25 years ago. Many were of the Indian head type, again presumably indicating a rebellious spirit toward the status quo.
We used to head south every Easter in the sixties/seventies/early eighties. When I visited more recently I was astounded to see the number of Confederate flags flying. It was far different from my previous trips.
Henry, I am glad you are enjoying your trips into the countryside. They will be instructive in many ways.
This is all a good tribute. I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley and I have complicated feelings about it. The Confederate flag is a good part of why. It’s a beautiful area and it was a good place to grow up. But I hated seeing that flag every day and I have always hated the nostalgia for traitors who took up arms against the United States.
Shenandoah and the blue ridge mountains have long been our go-to weekend getaway. You captured the beautiful contradictions wonderfully. Glad you're exploring the area!
Perhaps a history lesson is in order. The battle flag was not the flag of a slave state. It was a battle flag for an army that did not come into existence until Lincoln declared in his inaugural address (before the firing on Sumter) that he was going to invade the South "to collect his revenue." The South wished merely to withdraw from the Union, and the reasons for that had nothing to do with slavery. Had it been over slavery, the South would have accepted the North's offer of the Crittenden Compromise, which would have permanently ensconced slavery into the US Constitution. Instead, the South declined. Permanent slavery wasn't what the South wanted (more on that later, in the tariff discussion). The South had long since outlawed the importation of slaves, but the North had not, and in fact the importation of slaves was such big business in New York City that the mayor of NYC threatened to secede in early 1861. Six slave states sent men to fight for the North. In actual fact, the US flag was the flag of all slave states, until secession. And what is secession, except what the Founders declared on July 4, 1776?? As Charles Dickens so cogently pointed out, a country founded on secession cannot deny the right of secession without that nation being considered the height of hypocrisy.
If you believe in the Constitution, you should not abhor the Confederate flag. It is a symbol of states' rights, and a statement that the federal govt should never again turn the weapons of war on its own people. (Yes, I'm aware of the neo-Nazi usurping that symbolism, but that fact doesn't negate what it stands for to the people of Shenandoah.) People in Minnesota are, right now, discovering the power of states' rights, and indeed the framers never intended the behemoth federal govt. that we have today. That flag does not represent nostalgia for slavery - which, btw, did not end in any northern state until the 13th amendment was passed in late 1865. It instead represents a history that we are fighting to preserve - not because we want to celebrate the owning of human beings, but because we want to tell the truth, and that truth is being obliterated at a record pace by the Marxists who are now running states like Virginia. Lee is often the subject of hatred, and yet Robert E. Lee himself hated slavery, and argued in favor of its abolishing; his wife and mother in law were both abolitionists. He wrote in 1857 that slavery brought out the very worst in white men, and he felt that a policy of gradual emancipation, where blacks were taught basic reading and math, taught a trade, and perhaps given some land to make a good start, was advisable. Just imagine if we had done that, instead of freeing people suddenly, with them having no home to go to, no shelter, no food, no nothing. (Compare Lee's idea of emancipation with Lincoln's, who wanted to ship blacks out of the United States b/c he didn't want to live with them.) Sudden emancipation was not very kind to the ex-slaves, and absent from your tale above is any mention of the many, many testimonies of ex slaves of the love that existed between them and their masters, love that carried through multiple generations, with families that were devoted to one another in multiple ways. One diary I read discussed how an elderly black man begged his mistress to keep him on after the war; that land was his family's land, too. They had lived and died on it for four generations, and he was desperate not to leave it. But the law said he had to be turned out, despite his age and infirmity. He wept before her, but she could do nothing, or she herself would be in violation of the law. Just one more instance of the unintended consequences of laws that were supposed to do good.
None of this, of course, makes the owning of human beings "okay," but it's a fact that cruelty was not the general rule; it was the exception, and any perusal of agricultural journals of the period would show that cruelty was advised against, over and over again, as a poor way to manage human beings and likely to engender resentment and retaliation. Jefferson Davis, on his plantation, had a separate justice system for slaves whereby any slave who committed a wrong was judged and sentenced by his/her peers, not by his/her white owner. Slavery at the time was a worldwide condition, and these were people of their time who did not invent slavery, which had existed for hundreds of years, but were born into that world through no fault of their own. They should not be universally vilified.
To circle back to the idea of slavery as a cause of the war ... In 1863, after two years of war and after the Emancipation Proclamation (which was a war tactic and had no real legal effect), Lincoln accepted West Virginia into the Union as a slave state. So it can hardly be claimed that the war was fought over slavery. That idea came into being after a US attorney general refused to prosecute Jefferson Davis on the grounds that if a trial was held, the entire world would learn that the US had perpetrated an illegal war on the its own people, and the US govt would face the ire of hundreds of thousands of wives, sisters, and children who had lost beloved husbands, brothers, and fathers. At that point the US govt then required that all Southern schools teach the "the war was about slavery" narrative in order to receive federal monies. Funny how that works.
The Shenandoah Valley was particularly targeted by Union troops during the War. Lincoln, in defiance of the Geneva Convention, which he had previously agreed to, ordered the army to target civilians. The resultant violence perpetrated on the Valley's citizens was unprecedented in our history: Women were gang raped, often murdered, their animals butchered and left senselessly, their homes burned. The atrocities have been documented in books like "War Crimes Against Southern Civilians" and "Blood in the Ozarks." If you read the first one, you'll understand a bit more about why people in the Shenandoah Valley might want to fly a Confederate flag.
If people in the Valley want to remember their ancestors, who lived through years of horror perpetrated on citizens, including Amish and Mennonites (who were abstainers from both sides, and at the beginning of the war both sides had agreed to leave them alone, but the Union army shot and killed many of them), then let them. And let the history be told. If you try to silence the flags, then what else will you silence? Where does the slippery slope end? The entire story needs to be told, not just one side of it.
For the fact is, the war was fought over money and power, as all wars are; the South paid about 80% of the costs of running the federal govt., via tariffs levied on it by the North-controlled Congress, and Lincoln wanted to double that tariff (ie, the Morrill Tariff), while sending most of the money to develop industries in the North. This had been going on for decades, with the North-dominated Congress continually appropriating Southern funds to Northern states. Because of his support for the Morrill Tariff, Lincoln had so little support in the South that his name did not appear on the ballot in a single Southern state. So it's no wonder the South looked on with horror at Lincoln's election, knowing that it meant even more economic hardship for one section of the nation while the other section profited handsomely from it. And so they politely seceded. There did not have to be a war. Lincoln was the one who did that - and don't talk about the firing at Sumter unless you understand why the South suddenly fired on a fort after weeks of its occupation. There did not even have to be a war to free the slaves; other nations had done it via a system of compensation, and economic studies have proven that the US had sufficient funds to do that - but Lincoln chose war b/c he wanted to strengthen the central federal govt and teach the states a lesson. They were not going to withhold his monies, not without bloodshed. And that's exactly what he told them in his inaugural address.
So. Let the flags fly, because if the flags are silenced, then a huge section of history is silenced. And that's the real tragedy. Because really, the only difference between the Fathers of the Revolutionary War, and the Confederacy, is that the Confederacy lost - and you know what they say: The victor tells the tale, and most of the time that tale is not entirely the truth.
The Confederate battle flag was created for an army formed to defend a slaveholding order, and the seceding states said so plainly in their own declarations. Rebranding it as a neutral symbol of “states’ rights” requires ignoring those primary sources and flattening the lived reality of chattel slavery. When a symbol’s origin and stated purpose are set aside in favour of nostalgic myth, that isn’t heritage—it’s historical illiteracy.
In 1861, ‘states’ rights’ meant the right of states to preserve a legal system in which human beings were property. A political movement built on denying individual liberty to millions cannot plausibly claim to be a pure defence of individual rights. That contradiction is written into the Confederacy’s own founding documents.
Nice demonstration of where and when you attended high school. Please share for the class (a) which Article of the 1864 Convention addresses the treatment of civilians and (b) on exactly what date did the United States sign?
As with most of history, Oliver, it is very much more nuanced than it might seem. The American Civil War, certainly falls in that category. As, likely does the English Civil about which I think I have known something, but have long suspected not enough to make hard judgements on who or what was really right.
In the case of the American CW: it was not at all about slavery, but about federal power and money. One of the intended consequences of the war, on the part of the Federal government, was to create a country in which ceding is illegal/impossible. It was a momentous act of government centralization, despite the intent of the Constitution.
We have been taught it was about freeing the slaves in the schools for at least 100 years(probably), but I am old enough to recall some of our school texts that let the truth slip through—not directly, but via innuendo.
I did not put it together until I spent a few intense few days in some southern CW museums…Atlanta’s being the best. My taught perspective on the war evaporated on the spot and my understanding has since been affirmed in further reading and consideration.
I agree, let the flags fly. If for no other reason than to mark an era of our history that we may or may not be proud of… but are, at least, being honest about. There could be another reason, though… that of remembering Constitutionally guaranteed State’s Rights, before all of them completely disappear, as did the right to cede from the Union.
Pairs of gas stations and pairs of churches? Or church/gas station pairs? I suspect, based on Harold Hotelling, the former. And a difference between the callow communists and the Confederate flag wavers is that, in my experience, most of the former are convinced that communism didn't really cause those deaths while the latter do understand that slavery was real but it's not enough to upset them. Until fairly recently, I'd have said that makes the red bridges possibly more dangerous, but definitely more pleasant to be around than the Dukes of Hazzard, the Dukes being inevitably too small in number to be more than locally destructive. I'm no longer convinced of that now.
I also suspect that most of the callow Communists grew out of it within a year - that it was more a fashion statement, or at best a statement of ‘I am against American capitalism’ than ‘I have read “Das Kapital” and “‘Left-Wing’ Communism: an Infantile Disorder”’.
Attending a meeting organised by the University Communist society is usually a good cure for most.
At a hunch, I would say the ones who take it seriously are far less likely to indulge in Soviet chic.
I’m old; I don’t remember seeing Confederate flags (certainly not in any number) on a week long visit to the Shenandoah Valley sometime around 1970. Is this a sign of contemporary political protest based on an ahistorical, romanticized past? On a visit to Decatur Alabama several years ago there were vastly more Confederate flags than would have been the case, say 25 years ago. Many were of the Indian head type, again presumably indicating a rebellious spirit toward the status quo.
We used to head south every Easter in the sixties/seventies/early eighties. When I visited more recently I was astounded to see the number of Confederate flags flying. It was far different from my previous trips.
Henry, I am glad you are enjoying your trips into the countryside. They will be instructive in many ways.
I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley in the 2000s and early 2010s. When I was a kid the flag was ubiquitous
Loved this. Thank you.