“We’ll rally ‘round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again -
shouting the battle cry of freedom”
~
Well folks, its after the first of the year and I’m pretty sure that marks the start of my tenure as Greene County Historian. It’s quite a thing, and here’s hoping I can keep after it. I figured I ought to start things off with a bang, and lo and behold Governor Cuomo went ahead and banned the sale of Confederate flags on State property. Now there is a lively issue! I couldn’t have imagined a better circus ring in which to toss my hat.
On a day not unlike today nine years ago I was but a young rube sitting in American History 101 at Columbia-Greene Community College. The professor sat with his feet up on the desk and a smirk as he asked us general questions about US History to gather what I can only assume was a sense for class density.
He went over the syllabus, eyeballed all of us, and asked: “When did the Civil War end?”
Several of us geniuses replied with the correct date, and some really iced the cake and gave names of notables and the place where Lee surrendered. The professor, feet still on the desk, looked at us with the mildly amused disappointment of a parent who has just watched their child accidentally jet themselves in the face with the garden hose.
“Wrong!” was all he said, and amidst flailing entreaties for him to explain further he supplied a different date: August 1965. The month the Voting Rights Act was passed into law.
I have a working theory called the “Three-Step Path towards Civil War Awareness” that I’ve been developing since that day nine years ago. Mind you, it’s only a theory, but gravity is a theory too. My theory postulates that we "history dorks” must go through three phases of awareness before we attain an enlightened understanding of the American Civil War. The first step is textbook awareness. This step is when we are told in grade school that the Civil War was about Slavery. Countless millions accept this as fact and remain blissfully planted at the start of the path never to march onwards.
Then there are those neophytes who dispense with this initial undertanding and move on to the second step. This is the “States Rights” step in the threefold path, and acolytes will brandish many curious facts and citations, and perhaps Edward Pollard’s “The Lost Cause” to back it up. They will say that one must read between the lines to discern the facts, admonishing others to “do their research.” Yet another countless million stop and rest comfortably at this step, loathe to move beyond Pollard and his Confederate apologies.
Finally, there are those who dare search further. These souls inadvertently complete a harmonious circle and finally arrive at the enlightened state titled “Oh geez, the Civil War really was about Slavery after all.”
This three-step path is borne from a fundamental failing in the way the Civil War is taught to American students. For a century children have languished in classrooms bored out of their minds as old men stood before them discussing battles, troop movements, and the peculiar temperaments of various generals. This is fine to an extent, and certainly fulfills the “War” part of Civil War curriculum, but it never gets at the gist of it. What is never mentioned is that everyone had been mad at each other essentially since 1787, and that the Civil War almost started in 1820, then again in the 1830s, and finally got rolling in the 1850s.
The crux of these myriad issues which led to bloodshed is still often described in the context of politicians reconciling state and federal power, or state sovereignty, or balance of power between the states. These descriptions make the antebellum period sound like an era of benign policy games concerning banks and territorial expansion, entirely divested of the identities of those filling the bank coffers and the people who lived in these expanding territories.
Indeed, what these descriptors touch at (but never distill to their essential truth) is that there was a fundamental ethical and cultural imbalance at play between Slave States and the so-called Free States that comprised our imperfect union. In essence, the core of the issue was that chattel slavery in America was an institution robed in nearly untouchable political power, was deeply economically entrenched, and fundamentally at odds with the Enlightenment soul of our democratic philosophy.
If that doesn’t quite hit it on the nose for you, oblige me by reading Alexander Stephens’ Cornerstone Speech in which the Vice President of the Confederacy rivetingly outlined the idealogical underpinnings and political objectives of the Confederacy, explicitly stating: “Our new government foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”
After the Civil War myriad institutions sprang up across the nation to perpetuate the subjugation of African-Americans. The war had ended, but the peace was far from won. These sharecroppers, in a photo by Catskill resident James Van Gelder, are held in bondage in the 1880s not by chains, but by manipulative leases that tied them to the land they once worked on as enslaved labor in Louisiana.
And so we circle back to Governor Cuomo and his recent ban on the sale of the Confederate Flag on State property. There is urgency in the need to address the phenomenon his ban tries to tackle. There are fourteen townships in Greene County, and in practically every single one of them I have seen at least one Confederate Flag flying — be it on the back of a truck, on a flagpole, or hanging in a garage or on the side of a house. Alexander Stephens’ words flash through my mind every time I see one, and how can I not be driven to anything other than abject rage contemplating the scene? What is that doing on display in New York?
Of course a discussion of the Confederate flag’s symbolism, much like discussion of the War itself, can be robed and paraded in half-truths: “it is a symbol of rebellion” or “it is part of our heritage” and “you can’t erase history**” but at the end of the day the Confederate flag cannot be divested of its enduring original meaning. It is that root symbolism which inspires Klansmen to hoist it over their marches, and really — if you see the Ku Klux Klan waving it on the evening news why on earth would you want to display it too?
I really wish it were the case that the Civil War had ended in 1965. The passage of the Voting Rights Act that year was the greatest single refutation of the ideology of the Confederacy since Lincoln’s call for troops to suppress the rebellion in 1861. I will be curious to see if Governor Cuomo’s ban is challenged and survives the courts, and while I laud the spirit of his effort the best remedy probably lies in classrooms — not more orders from the Governor’s desk. A solution for now remains elusive, so instead we are left with the question: “why is this the flag you’ve decided to rally ‘round?”
Picture inside the US Capitol Building a few hours after I originally published this article. Photo by JIM LO SCALZO/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK taken from an article published by People Magazine.
By Jonathan Palmer, Greene County Historian
Questions and comments can be directed to him via archivist@gchistory.org
**obviously you can’t erase history, especially when it is festooned on the front lawn scaring the neighbors.