The Meaning of the Confederate Flag

The Origin of the Flag as a Symbol

Tea Party demonstrators in Washington are waving the confederate flag in front of the White House. Why are they doing it, and what are they trying to say?  Why do people continue to find it a moving symbol 150 years after the end of the Confederacy?  The flag was as we all know, the confederate battle flag.  So, at the beginning, it symbolized the southerners’ fight against what they perceived as an unjust invasion by the United States into southern territory. The South claimed the right to secede from the Union, and the federal government said, “No.” In this context, the confederate flag fit well into the long, American political tradition of opposition to a strong, federal government, and hundreds of thousands of southerners rallied to the flag in the name of state patriotism.  A man like Robert E. Lee, supported the secession in part because of his devotion to his native state of Virginia.

From the beginning, however, the meaning of the flag was ambiguous because the secession was not disinterested. The people of the South did not choose to secede from the Union because of a disinterested devotion to the principle of states’ rights.  They seceded in order to preserve the institution of slavery, and the secession was led by the class of large slaveholders. However, most of those who fought in the confederate army were not slave holders. They had no need to secede, but they were persuaded that it was their duty to fight.  Thus, they fought and died in defense of interests that were not theirs.  

The Flag in the South after the Civil War

After the Civil War and the Reconstruction, the confederate flag was used again by the southern ruling classes to regain and then to maintain the control that they had lost in the war.  They wrapped themselves in the confederate flag as they justified the Jim Crow system of racial segregation, but the real purpose of that system was to use the power of local governments to keep a cheap labor force on the land. People were terrorized to keep them docile. Voting restrictions like poll taxes and literacy tests were devised.  This system resulted in the oppression and poverty not only of African Americans but also of hundreds of thousands of poor white people who labored as sharecroppers on southern plantations. Their interests were actually the same as those of their black neighbors, but the ruling class whipped up racist feelings, waved the confederate flag, and enlisted the poor whites in the defense of the system that oppressed them.

The Flag Today

Now, again, we see the confederate flag being used to get ordinary people to act against their own interests. A person who waves the confederate flag in front of the White House is expressing his anger at what he sees as an overbearing federal government that is trying to take away his rights and his freedom, but again, he is being manipulated. 

Some very wealthy people want to keep their taxes as low as possible. They want to be able to pollute the environment in order to make money. They want to keep wages low.  They have supported a huge propaganda campaign to portray the EPA and OSHA as unwarranted interference into the rights of businesses and as killers of jobs. They oppose the Affordable Care Act (ACA) because it is an expansion of the role of government, and they know that down the road, it will prevent their taxes from being lowered.  So, they have poured money into persuading people whose lives may be saved by the EPA or by OSHA to campaign for their elimination. They have poured money into persuading people who have no health insurance that the ACA will be an infringement on their liberties and a killer of jobs. Thus, the confederate flag is today what it always has been. It is a symbol of citizens’ resistance to federal power that is used by elites to manipulate people into opposing policies that would benefit them.  Those who wave the confederate flag see themselves as Davids facing a government Goliath, and they do not understand that this is not their fight. In the name of freedom, they wave the flag of slavery and fight to strengthen the chains that hold them down.