Mr. Bearden:

A question for you, honestly posed and with no subtext:

Would I be fair characterizing your position to be that
slavery was not a primary cause of the Civil War--that the
causes of the war must be located elsewhere, perhaps in
disputes over tariff policy, or in the constitutional
question of whether or not the compact theory of the Union
was correct?

If the answer to this question is "yes," then your arguments
about redeeming the meaning of the Confederate flag make
sense to me.  I have been arguing elsewhere that if you
believe that the essence of the Confederacy was something
other than slavery, then it is entirely consistent to argue
that the Confederate flag is not of necessity a symbol of
racism.  It seems to me that you are making exactly this
argument, when you suggest that bigots hi-jacked the symbol
in the 1950s for their own egregious purposes.  I would urge
you to read the scholarship of Fred Arthur Bailey, however,
since Bailey pretty convincingly demonstrates that the
Confederate heritage groups worked to achieve racial
subordination in Virginia starting in the decades after the
Civil War (see his essay on Virginia in the VMHB--Warren
Hofstra and I included it in our essay collection VIRGINIA
RECONSIDERED).  But even so--if you believe the symbol
got "hi-jacked," then pretty clearly it had to have had a
different meaning at some prior point.  And pretty clearly,
that starting point really must be the Confederacy itself,
not the people who memorialized it later on.

Part of the conversation here has been about whether or not
the flag of necessity is racist (which impliess that the
people who support it of necessity must be racist too). I
know people who strike me as folk of good will and good
intention, who are not racist at all, and who are fully
committed elsewhere in their lives to the kind of civic work
necessary to create a non-racist society, but who also fly
the flag.  The conundrum to me has been how to explain their
quite sincere belief that the there is no contradiction; the
answer, it seems to me, hinges on what you think the
Confederacy meant.

For the record, I think the weight of scholarship suggests
overwhelmingly that secession WAS about protecting slavery
(for Virginia, see the excellent book by William Link, ROOTS
OF SECESSION:  SLAVERY AND POLITICS IN ANTEBELLUM VIRGINIA,
which is based on extraordinarily deep and compelling
research, and which to my reading is not ideological in the
least).  But I also think that it is entirely possible for
people to support the flag, and not be either dupes of
racists, or racist themselves.  They have, in my belief, a
misguided understanding of history--but that does not make
them racist.

Warm regards,
Kevin
Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
Department of History
James Madison University

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