Flag Wars: does the Confederate flag symbolise identity or slavery?

The Confederate flag has become both a weapon and a battleground in America’s culture wars: either an object of pride, enthusiastically embraced, or a matter of shame, consigned to the dustbin of history. On 6 January 2021, it entered the US Capitol for the first time ever, brandished aloft by a member of the pro-Trump mob that stormed the building. Five days later, it disappeared for the last time from a US state flag when Mississippi formally adopted a new one. 

In the US, flags are important, very important: a Flag Day has been held every year since 1923 and more than one federal law prescribes what should and shouldn’t be done with the flag –practices enshrined in the lengthy United States Flag Code. Almost uniquely among flags, the Confederate flag provokes widely polarised responses, particularly today in the current era of heightened concern over issues of nativism, nationhood, identity, ethnicity and racism.

To understand the contemporary resonance of the Confederate flag, it is worth first stepping back to the time of the American Civil War, which began in 1861 when the pro-slavery Confederate states of the rural south rebelled against the pro-emancipation Union states of the industrialised north. The new national flag of the Confederacy – the stars and bars – was deliberately chosen to be close to the national flag of the Union because reluctant southern secessionists couldn’t quite believe they had broken away. But after their troops fired on each other in the first big battle of the war, the Confederate military decided a more differentiated banner was required for battlefield recognition. 

Paradoxically the origin of the battle-flag could not have been more “woke” to a contemporary audience – the first designs were based on a straight Christian or St George’s cross, but this was rejected as potentially offensive to Southern Jews. Thus came into being the Confederate battle-flag: a white-edged blue diagonal cross or saltire bearing white stars, on a red field. It never formally replaced the national flag of the Confederacy; but after the war ended in 1865, it was the battle-flag that was flown at veterans’ ceremonies and events commemorating the war. Indeed, it came to represent everything the Confederacy stood for: either romantic notions of southern pride and identity or, as organisations like the Ku Klux Klan adopted it as their emblem, slavery, segregation and racism.

Two southern states – Mississippi and Georgia – used the Confederate battle-flag in their own state flags. But with the coming of the new millennium they realised they were out of step with growing consciousness of the historic mistreatment of African Americans. Both states had a referendum to change their flags in 2001, but while Georgia succeeded, almost two-thirds of Mississippians wanted to keep theirs. 

However, a series of racist atrocities culminated in the 2015 killing of nine black parishioners in a mass shooting in Charleston, Mississippi, by a Confederate-sympathising white supremacist. He included the battle-flag in a video. This massacre led to a further referendum in November 2020. The former flag was not included as an option and the result was that a new flag, bearing a magnolia flower instead of the Confederate symbol, was adopted. 

Neither change was universally welcomed. A group in Mississippi is campaigning for yet another referendum, including the original flag as an option. And one city in Georgia changed its city flag to a virtual copy of the old state flag, incorporating the Confederate battle-flag. 

Arguably more important in understanding the changing significance of the Confederate flag, however, is not the date of its removal from, but the date of its inclusion in, state flags. In neither Mississippi nor Georgia’s case was it a question of the defiant vanquished preserving a beloved symbol for public display in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. Instead, both were included much later; significantly, both coincided with periods of heightened turmoil in US racial politics.  

Mississippi did not incorporate the battle-flag into its state flag until 1894, nearly thirty years after the war’s end. It was a time when the so-called Jim Crow laws were being passed by southern state and local legislatures, seeking to undo the advances made for African Americans in the Reconstruction period after the end of the Civil War. Two years later, the US Supreme Court endorsed the “separate but equal” legal doctrine, which allowed southern states effectively to introduce segregation. 

Georgia’s innocuous-looking state flag had in fact been based on the little-known Confederate national flag. However, in 1956, when the civil rights movement was at its height – the Supreme Court had outlawed segregation in state schools two years before – the state of Georgia made clear its view by incorporating the Confederate battle-flag into its state flag for the first time. Both these changes to state flags, one at the end of the nineteenth century, when segregation was being propagated in the south, and the other in the 1950s, when it was being dismantled by the civil rights movement, went hand in hand with wider physical and cultural assertions of southern pride and identity. These were key times for the erection of statues to, and naming of public facilities after, Confederate generals and leaders — many of which have now been swept away by the rising tide of consciousness of the power of these emblems to reflect and implicitly endorse the evils of the past.

Two factors are important in the debate on whether flags and statues are changed, removed or retained. First is the prevailing political thinking at the time – the public mood – on issues such as race; this can be substantially shifted by events such as the George Floyd killing. Second is the contemporaneous view of what is being memorialised. Here the cultural conception of the Confederate states presents a problem, in that it has been highly volatile almost from the day they surrendered. 

There are two opposing views. On the one hand is the idea of the Confederacy as the valiant underdog, asserting its right to self-determination against northern aggression — an idea that came to be articulated in the “Lost Cause” narrative around the time of the First World War. This view fostered the idea of the flag as a symbol of a noble cause and badge of rebellion, a notion which took hold in surprising quarters outside the US. Supporters of the southern Italian football team, Napoli, took to carrying the flag as a symbol of their resentment of the dominance of the impoverished rural south by the wealthy industrial north (of Italy). In Ireland, Cork has always prided itself as a centre of the national liberation struggle and its sports teams have correspondingly adopted the nickname “The Rebels”. As the term is also one applied to the Confederates, its battle-flag was informally adopted by the teams’ supporters. An awareness of the racist, as well as rebellious, overtones of the flag by the sporting authorities soon led to official censure.

The opposite view is that, however neatly packaged and sugar-coated the idea of the Confederacy comes, the central reason for its existence was to maintain slavery against the flow of history that saw slavery banned by country after country in the early years of the nineteenth century. To those on the Far Right its association with slavery, racism and segregation makes the Confederate flag the ideal banner to be flown alongside national flags and Nazi insignia. It was in this guise that the flag found itself in the Capitol on 6 January. However, notwithstanding the unsavoury and racist overtones that come with its use by the Far Right, polling in the US has consistently shown a majority viewing the Confederate flag as a symbol of southern pride, not of racism. Notably, in the south that majority is significantly increased among whites — and the opposite among African Americans. 

The American Civil War is unusual among wars in that it was fought over an idea – slavery — and, although it ended 150 years ago, the Confederate flag continues to enflame high emotions and finds itself grabbing headlines. In 2015 the Supreme Court ruled by five to four that the refusal of a state to allow drivers to display the flag on a car licence plate was lawful because what was on the plate was the speech of the state and, therefore, the car owner’s First Amendment right to freedom of speech was not infringed. As recently as 2017, two stained glass windows bearing the flag in the Washington National Cathedral, installed in 1953 to memorialise Confederate generals, were removed after an outcry. 

What started as an attempt to use flags to differentiate forces on the field of battle continues to defy attempts to consign it to a history book or museum. What has become known as the “Flag Wars” are, in fact, a theatre of the wider culture wars that have engulfed US politics. Far from being an ephemeral sideshow, their outcome could help determine whether the new US President, Joe Biden, can carry his country with him when he looks down with a more sympathetic gaze on the Black Lives Matter movement than he does on the Proud Boys. 

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