The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (review)

At least fourteen proud men fell carrying the colors of the 26th North Carolina Infantry during its assault against McPherson's Ridge on the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. The St. Andrew's cross battle flag—a star-studded blue diagonal cross on a red field—continues to this day to stir fierce emotions. In this deeply researched, dispassionately argued, and ultimately wise book, John M. Coski provides a careful history of that flag, its uses, abuses, and meanings. The Confederate Battle Flag examines mundane matters—the flag's size and shape, for example—but it mainly grapples with the large question: what really does the flag stand for? As Coski demonstrates, the flag has always been subjected to vastly different interpretations, accumulating over time layers of contradictory meaning about slavery, liberty, valor, and identity.

The St. Andrew's cross flag was never the official flag of the Confederacy, but by 1863 it had emerged as the Confederacy's principal symbol. While reverence for the Confederacy increased after the war, Coski shows that for a surprisingly long time Southerners paid relatively little attention to the flag. They respectfully unfurled it at certain ritual occasions—memorial commemorations, dedications of monuments, birthdays of prominent Confederates—but afterward they also quickly furled it. Significant changes came only in the 1940s, when uses of the flag proliferated. In November 1948, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), keeper of the Confederate flame for more than a half-century, created a Committee on Legislation to Protect the Confederate Flag. The UDC felt compelled to defend the "sacred symbol" from its many despoilers: rowdy football fans at Ole Miss; hawkers of trinkets, souvenirs, and t-shirts; malevolent Ku Kluxers; and Dixiecrats intent on exploiting the flag for political gain. The UDC's protest against the flag's trivialization and politicization became another lost cause, however, for by the 1940s the flag had escaped their hands and entered national popular culture.

The "flag wars" were on. The final chapters of The Confederate Battle Flag examine dozens of confrontations between groups who battled over the true meaning of the Confederate battle flag. Heritage organizations, particularly the Sons of Confederate Veterans, skirmished with civil rights groups, particularly the NAACP, about the presence of the battle flag on southern state flags, about it flying above state capitols and Confederate monuments, about it emblazed on school mascots, and more. As early as 1952, the Afro-American, a newspaper published in Richmond and Baltimore, recognizing that racists and segregationists had adopted the flag, claimed that it stood for "slavery . . . rebellion . . . bloodshed and segregation . . . oppression and disfranchisement . . . [and] white supremacy" (122). At the same time, the flag wars helped to make the St. Andrews's cross battle flag central to white southern identity.

Coski does more than simply recount the flag battles; he attempts to understand how and why groups arrived at their differing interpretations of the flag's meaning. And he does not retreat into tepid neutrality about the historical cases opposing groups make. When neo-Confederates claim that the flag represents only history, heritage, and valor, for example, Coski lifts up the inextricable connections between the Confederacy, slavery, and white supremacy. Moreover, Coski seeks to move us beyond the flag wars by offering guidance on the question of when and where the St. Andrew's cross flag can properly be displayed. He suggests that we ask: When does the flag merely "acknowledge objective historical fact" and when does it "celebrate the Confederacy" (274)?

Coski's prescription to display the flag "only as an unambiguously historical or memorial symbol" (302), to return it to museums, is unlikely to end the flag wars, however, for the very reasons he has explained so well. The debate about the St. Andrews's battle flag represents "one of the most intensive and extensive ongoing public dialogues about U.S. history" (x). Rather than a silly sideshow, the flag is the litmus test of our...