Driving past the small, crowded cemetery in Tyrone, I noticed a few tiny Confederate flags stuck in the ground at graves of Confederate soldiers by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I wondered how long until vandals ride the current wave of popular sentiment to do their nasty work.
The Charleston murderer was white, Southern and a racist, but that doesn’t make white Southerners racist. Take the Confederate battle flag down from government displays for one simple reason: Too many fellow citizens see it as a symbol that excludes them. That is enough to render the flag a historical relic, where it should be displayed with Southern pride.
Slavery was wrong in the South, and in the North, too, but most Southerners did not fight to protect slavery. Wealthy plantation owners had slaves, while most other people did not, but every Southerner deeply resented outsiders inflicting their will by force. Southern boys fought and died for the cause they thought of as their country’s freedom.
Activists are now denouncing memorials and even streets and buildings bearing the names of Confederate heroes, a politically correct attempt to purge the warts and wrinkles of history. That would be ill-advised.
One of our revered figures is Gen. Robert E. Lee. He was offered command of Union forces defending Washington, D.C. at the beginning of the Civil War, but in a difficult decision, Lee resigned his commission in the Union Army and took leadership of forces in his home state of Virginia. During the war, General Lee earned respect on both sides for his wisdom, style and leadership. When he blundered, as when he ordered Pickett’s Charge, he confessed to his men the losses were his fault alone.
When Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House in 1865, his men implored him to let them melt into the mountains and fight as a guerrilla force, but he told them, “So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interests of the South.”
Contrast Lee’s honorable conduct with Union Gen. William T. Sherman’s march through Georgia — burning farms, plantations, towns and cities, encouraging his troops to steal what they could, inflicting untold death, destruction and suffering on the civilian population. But his side prevailed and wrote the history, making Sherman a Union hero.
Some call the North’s cause pure and the South’s evil, but slaves were still held in some states outside the Confederacy. Union Gens. Sherman and Ulysses S. Grant used slaves, though it is unclear who legally owned them and when they were set free. At the beginning of the war, Confederate General Lee set free the slaves he had inherited.
President Abraham Lincoln himself gave strength to the argument the Civil War was not just about slavery when he wrote, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.”
Lincoln is credited with freeing slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was not a humanitarian gesture at all. It was a tool of war to inflict chaos on the South. The Proclamation freed slaves — if they could escape — only in the 10 rebel states, not the million slaves held in the North.
Lincoln worried that freed blacks could not assimilate into white America, and he established the Bureau of Immigration to arrange for them to be shipped out of the country. Places considered were present-day Belize, Guyana, Panama, British Honduras and Isle a Vache just off Haiti, where several hundred freed slaves settled in 1862, but the settlement failed within a year.
I actually am a fan of Abraham Lincoln. He was a great man, but like so many admired figures in history, Lincoln’s record was far from perfect. We should be careful of oversimplified history as we deify some historical figures and condemn others, especially in waves of passion.
Remove the offending flag from government displays, but don’t apply today’s standards to erase our Southern past. Trying to purge reminders of the Confederacy as if it didn’t happen is a dangerous game that is not only misguided, it will further divide us and breed bitter conflict for a very long time.
Terry Garlock, a U.S. Army helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War, is a retired financial professional. He lives in Peachtree City.
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