To the place of the defeated, to the foot of a 66-foot-tall monument erected in 1873 to their memory and the cause they died for, former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes returned Saturday.

He was at Oakland Cemetery in downtown Atlanta and, for the first time since he lost the governorship after ordering the Confederate battle emblem removed from the state flag, he was speaking to a group on Confederate Memorial Day.

Tami Chappell/AJC (ENLARGE)

Barry Denard, re-enactor with the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Lilburn prepares for a cannon salute at the Confederate Memorial Day service at the Historic Gwinnett County Courthouse in Lawrenceville on Saturday, April 26, 2008.

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Best to start with a joke.

"I have always attended Confederate memorial services," Barnes said. " But for the last few years, I have not been invited."

The group of about 100 laughed. And a little while later, he explained he changed the state flag only because the battle emblem — the blue St. Andrew's cross with white stars on a red background — had been embraced for the wrong causes and by hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

"I didn't think a flag that had been appropriated by some groups for the wrong purposes should be the symbol of our state," Barnes said.

Changed once in 1956 to incorporate the battle emblem, the state flag was changed in 2001, on Barnes' orders, to remove the emblem, and again in 2004 to incorporate an image from the first national flag of the Confederacy. That first flag has always flown, without controversy, in the Confederate section of Oakland Cemetery.

Similar memorial services were hosted around the state Saturday, in Lawrenceville, Americus, Roswell, Marietta, Ringgold and Warner Robins. On Monday, Georgia state workers will get Confederate Memorial Day off.

About 3,000 Confederate soldiers, including five generals, are laid to rest at Oakland Cemetery. But in a city regarded as the cradle of the Civil Rights movement, that history, and the history of a Civil War fought in part to preserve the right of Southerners to own slaves, have never coexisted easily.

In his remarks to Alfred Holt Colquitt Chapter 2018, United Daughters of the Confederacy, Barnes addressed that issue. He said he knew the Civil War was fought for other reasons, but slavery was one of them.

"That is wrong," he said. "No man should be enslaved."

Americans who died in the Civil War should be honored for the same reason Americans who died in other wars are honored, the former governor said. "We should always hold them up as an example of valor for future generations," he said.