Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History

12 The Real War

320 12 The Real War The fellow was near tears. He stood at the back of the room and cried out, “I feel that my heart is being ripped out every day. . . . They’re taking everything away from us.” The audience cheered. I had just completed a twenty-minute presentation on the historical connection between white supremacy and the Confederate battle flag. The audience of roughly 125 white men and women, tightly packed into the community room of the CharlotteMecklenburg Government Center, had punctuated my remarks with epithets and boos.1 In July 2004, Warren Turner, an African American city councilman in Charlotte, demanded the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the city-owned Elmwood Cemetery. The flag flew above the graves of Confederate veterans interred in one section of the cemetery. Turner asserted that the flag’s presence implied the local government’s endorsement of white supremacy . Confederate heritage groups responded that the battle flag represented “heritage” not hate, and that it appeared in an appropriate historical context as a memorial for fallen soldiers. The contention generated by Turner’s appeal led to the meeting and my presentation. The city also asked me to suggest a solution that could be amenable to all parties. I recommended that Charlotte replace the battle flag with the North Carolina state flag that flew over the capitol in Raleigh during the Civil War. Few people would recognize the standard, as it had a life of less than four years and reappeared only in museums. Also, it was more likely that the buried Rebels fought under the state flag than the final iteration of the battle flag. The Real War 321 The obscurity of the state flag meant that it did not carry the heavy baggage of the battle flag. Or, so I hoped. The city rejected my attempt at compromise, citing a potential legal thicket if it periodically had to issue permits about which flags could or could not be flown on public property. In March 2005, Charlotte removed both the flag and flagpole. Another chapter in the century-and-a-half conflict over the Civil War in the South. The episode’s resolution represented a microcosm of the difficulties in trying to end that war in the decade since the first edition of Still Fighting the Civil War appeared. I thought the historical context argument carried some weight. Flying the flag over the graves of Confederate veterans was significantly different from brandishing the flag atop the state capitol building in Columbia, South Carolina. But these battles, as the first edition of the book emphasized, are less about the past than about the present. What the flag’s opponents are taking away from heritage groups is the white narrative that has monopolized the memory of the southern past. White supremacy and patriarchy are not dead in the South, but they are in extremis . The political and economic power of African Americans and women in the South, combined with the migration of people to the region from across the country and the around world, have rendered parochial perspectives on history less quaint than irrelevant. Newcomers tend to settle in the South’s expanding metropolitan areas, and it is the cosmopolitan standard that increasingly defines the region as it does in the rest of the country. They give considerably more thought to the ingredients of a latte than whether or not the battle flag should be furled. It would be unfortunate, however, if the Civil War were to pass from contention to irrelevance in the South, or in the nation, for that matter. There is still much for Americans to learn about the war and, therefore, about themselves . That it still generates conflict in the South is not a rationale to avoid the war. The way in which white southerners remembered the Civil War had a great impact on life in the century after Appomattox. Remembrance resounds . It is still important to address those memories, challenge them when appropriate, and create a new narrative of the conflict that will reflect what Walt Whitman called “the real war.” Only then would it be possible to reconcile the disparate perspectives on the bloodiest war in American history. For southerners, white and black, the symbols of the Confederate era obviously carry very different implications. While some whites might legitimately cherish these artifacts as part of their family history as much as, say, a Bible, 322...