News and Observer (Raleigh NC)They sang "Dixie" in the white-columned House chamber of the historic State Capitol on Saturday, gathering to hear a fierce defense of their Confederate heritage.
An all-white crowd that numbered more than 100 people, they also stood to salute the colors marched in by three men wearing the rough gray cloth of Confederate soldiers -- an American flag, the state flag that flew over North Carolina during the Civil War and the Rebel battle banner with its familiar blue X of stars on a field of bright red.
Those salutes marked the start of a Confederate Flag Day commemoration sponsored by the N.C. Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Though restrained and reverential, the annual ceremony also represented another muffled salvo in the ongoing Southern culture war over the symbols of the Confederacy and what they stand for, said Fitzhugh Brundage, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Outside in the bright winter sun, the less familiar and racially inflammatory Stars and Bars of the first national flag of the Confederacy snapped in the breeze over the north wing of the Capitol, a banner that some historians say was designed by North Carolinian Orren Randolph Smith and first flown over Louisburg in 1861.
But inside the chamber, Clyde Wilson, a history professor at the University of South Carolina, made it clear that honoring the Confederate soldier is indelibly linked to vindicating the cause of the Confederacy itself.
"If we allowed the cause that the Confederate soldier fought for to be condemned, it would be impossible to defend their good name," Wilson said. "You all know there's a vicious campaign against all things Southern. It's not really the flag they hate, it's not really the Confederacy -- it's us, it's the South."
During the past two decades, there has been a series of bitter battles about public displays of these racially charged Confederate emblems, which many whites see as commemorations of an honorable heritage.
But for many blacks -- and more than a few whites -- flying any Confederate flag over the state capitol is an offensively official endorsement of the Confederacy's defense of slavery and the era of white supremacy and lynch mob violence that followed.
Muted N.C. debates
North Carolina has largely avoided the Confederate flag controversy that has boiled over in other Southern states, ever since former Gov. Jim Hunt decided to replace the Rebel battle banner with the less offensive Stars and Bars over the Capitol, as mandated by state law for Confederate Memorial Day (May 10) and Robert E. Lee's birthday (Jan. 19).
That hasn't exempted the state from public scraps over other Confederate symbols. The latest conflict flared almost two weeks ago when a predominantly black grass-roots community group called for the removal of a towering Confederate memorial that has stood on a corner of the Pitt County Courthouse grounds in Greenville since 1914.
In essence, Brundage said, clashes over Rebel battle banners and monuments to the Confederate dead are also a reflection of the relatively recent emergence of a muscular black viewpoint that challenges the traditional white interpretation of Southern history, said Brundage, author of "The Southern Past: A Clash Of Race and Memory."
Other academics say modern-day tension about Southern history can be defused by erecting public memorials to civil rights heroes or the slaves who helped build the antebellum South -- such as the display recently unveiled at UNC-CH. Don't knock down Silent Sam, the Confederate soldier statue who stands guard at the UNC campus; build new monuments to other portions of the Southern saga, they say.
"You can't erase history -- it is what it is," said William Ferris, associate director of UNC's Center for the Study of the American South.
Shaping history
The commemoration of Confederate heritage is intertwined with the Lost Cause myth that emerged from the ashes of Civil War devastation and spurred the proliferation of monuments to the Confederate dead erected in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The central tenet of this myth is the Civil War was fought over states' rights, not slavery, and the Confederate cause was just.
This doesn't mean there wasn't a sincere desire to honor the Confederate dead and grieve the South's Civil War losses, said Tom Vincent, a state archivist whose article on the history of North Carolina's 78 Confederate monuments will soon be published in the North Carolina Historical Review, a quarterly publication.
After the war, informal groups of Southern women solicited contributions for monuments to the Confederate dead. But as the years passed, local groups like the Ladies Memorial Association became powerful statewide organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
"I started out as a Civil War military nut, but what's become more fascinating to me is the memory of the Civil War, how people recast and reshape that memory," said Vincent.
By 1895, these women's organizations packed the gallery of the state Senate to pressure lawmakers to appropriate money for the Confederate monument erected on the Capitol grounds in Raleigh at a cost of $25,000, Vincent said.
To the degree that modern-day defenders of Confederate heritage embrace the Lost Cause myth, they undermine their sincere efforts to honor their ancestors, Brundage said.
"Divorce yourself from the need to defend the Confederacy," he said. "Good people can fight for bad causes -- just accept that."
But the Sons of Confederate Veterans doesn't want to end the marriage, as evidenced by the invocation given by the Rev. Herman White, pastor of the Archdale Church of God in High Point and chaplain of the Confederate heritage group.
"Eternal God, God of our Confederate ancestors. ... I ask you to give us the strength to go against all who would destroy our Confederate heritage," White said.
(News researcher Denise Jones contributed to this article.)
Staff writer Jim Nesbitt can be reached at (919) 829-8955 or jim.nesbitt@newsobserver.com.
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