What is Your Reaction to the Confederate Battle Flag?

I am interested in knowing what comes over you when you see the Confederate flag?  As someone who is studying the Civil War, grew up in Virginia where the flag was displayed by many—and even seeing that flag on many vehicles here in Kentucky, I am curious as to what your reaction is in seeing this flag? (This is the Confederate Navy Jack, and also the flag of the Army of Tennessee which became the battle flag for the Confederacy during the American Civil War from 1861-1865).
Here’s a Wikipedia article on why many display this flag

The display of the Confederate flag remains a highly controversial and emotional topic, generally because of disagreement over the nature of its symbolism.

Opponents of the Confederate flag see it as an overt symbol of racism (especially directed toward African Americans), both for the history of racialslavery in the United States, and the establishment of Jim Crow laws bySouthern states following the end of Reconstruction in late 1870s, enforcingracial segregation within state borders for nearly a century until the Civil Rights Movement. Some hate groups use the Southern Cross as one of thesymbols associated with their organizations, including racist groups such as the Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.^[18] The flag is also sometimes used by separatist organizations such as the Aryan Nations. The Aryan Nation also uses the U.S. flag as well as the Christian flag displayed in some Protestant churches.

Supporters of the flag view it as a symbol of heritage and the freedom of the distinct cultural tradition of the South from the oppression of Northern government. Also, in light of some schools and universities banning it as a racist symbol "speech codes", it could also be seen as a symbol of freedom of speech.^[19]

White southerners often claim that they see the flag as merely a symbol of southern culture without any political or racial connotation. An example of this would be the Bocephus Rebel Flag often sold at concerts performed bycountry music star Hank Williams, Jr or Kevin Fowler, heavy metal bandPantera, and southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. For some, the flag represents only a past era of southern sovereignty.^[20] Some historical societies such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy also use the flag as part of their symbols. Also some rockabilly fans hold the Confederate flag as their emblem.^[21]Also, the flag is a regular cultural meme, often appearing in association with a character who reflects Southerner stereotypes.

As a result of these varying perceptions, there have been a number of political controversies surrounding the use of the Confederate flag in Southern state flags, at sporting events, at Southern universities, and on public buildings. According to Civil War historian and native SouthernerShelby Foote, the flag traditionally represented the South’s resistance toNorthern political dominance; it became racially charged during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when fighting against desegregation suddenly became the focal point of that resistance.

Symbols of the Confederacy remain a contentious issue across the United States and have been debated vigorously in many Southern state legislatures over their civic placement since the 1990s.

In other countries, the Confederate flag can be used as a symbol for other things. For example, in Sweden it is used by people who drive and enjoy old American cars and enjoy the American life style from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. In the United Kingdom it is frequently used by people who enjoy line dancing, country music and American life style.

So what think ye?

Honoring the Chaplains of the Civil War—The National Civil War Chaplain’s Museum

James I. Robertson, Jr. and others talk about a wonderful museum located in Lynchburg, VA known as the National Civil War Chaplain’s Museum.  It focuses on the role of priests, ministers, and rabbis during the tumult of the American Civil War. 

While I have not visited there, it is on my short list of historical places to visit.  I reviewed a great book entitled “Christ in the Camp” regarding the chaplains of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.  Currently, I’m reading through Faith in the Fight: Civil War Chaplains with contributions by John W. Brinsfield, William C. Davis, Benedict Maryniak, and James Robertson. 

For both the Union and Confederate soldiers, religion was the greatest sustainer of morale in the Civil War, and faith was a refuge in times of need. Guarding and guiding the spiritual well being of the fighters, the army chaplain was a voice of hope and reason in an otherwise chaotic military existence. The clerics’ duties did not end after Sunday prayers; rather, many ministers could be found performing daily regimental duties, and some even found their way onto fields of battle. Identifies for the first time 3,694 ministers who were commissioned as chaplains in the Union and Confederate armies and serves as a starting point for any research into the neglected area of Civil War chaplains (Product review on Amazon).

Also of interest is a ministry known as the Re-Enactors Missions for Jesus Christ.  These men seek to minister within the context of the Civil War re-enactments.  Here’s their description:

Welcome to the web site for the Re-enactor’s Missions for Jesus Christ (RMJC).  This site is dedicated first and foremost to the glory of Almighty God.  It stands as a tribute to the heroism of those men who comprised the ranks of the chaplaincy during the War Between the States (Civil War), to their unswerving devotion to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and to the missionary work they began in the 1860s.

In like manner, the business of the RMJC is the spreading of the Gospel through the re-printed Civil War period Gospel tracts, the spoken word, this web site as well as the National Civil War Chaplains Museum.

Its members, who serve as chaplains and colporteurs, are sent into the field, not as sham play-actors bent on pretentious historical interpretation, but as men and women of God, solidly committed to preaching, teaching and sharing the Gospel to the winning of souls among the ranks of Civil War re-enactors and enthusiasts across the United States.

On this site is a great little 4:00 clip entitled, “Whose Side Was God On During the Civil War?”  This gives a marvelous answer. 

May we thank God for using such a tragedy like the Civil War to use these chaplains as instruments of bringing them (and the re-enactors) to Jesus Christ.

Book Review: “An Honorable Defeat: The Last Days of the Confederate Government” by William C. Davis

The Confederate States of America has long held an interest for this ‘son of Virginia,’ ever since my second-grade teacher took us on a field trip to Appomattox. It’s infused in every Virginian the history of his native state. William C. Davis’ book on the last four months of the Confederacy is a marvelous book in giving the grim realities of how ‘the Cause’ flickered out.

Now living in Kentucky, this book offered me my first glimpse at John C. Breckinridge. Against secession and against the notion of taking up arms against the Union, he did so nonetheless in defense of the South. He served as the only one who would stand up to Jefferson Davis’ stubbornness with some modicum of (as a previous reviewer noted) statesmanship. He knew when the Confederacy was over, unlike Davis who was willing to continue the cause in Texas, and he helped more than anyone in the South (along with Lee) to make sure the South wasn’t completely crushed in the aftermath of Lincoln’s death.

This book was meticulously researched–and imminently readable! I couldn’t put it down–especially at the part when Davis was captured by Yankee soldiers in Irwinville, GA, and how Breckinridge and Judah P. Benjamin escaped through Florida, survived over open water to Cuba, then the Bahamas. Benjamin went to England, Breckinridge returned to the North American continent, stayed with expatriate Confederates in Toronto until Andrew Johnson’ Universal Amnesty allowed him to return to his beloved Kentucky. Unlike Davis, Breckinridge did not continue the vitriol in who was to blame (unlike Davis), but remained quite, save a brief eulogy in 1870 for the death of Robert E. Lee.

Breckinridge was a noble man caught up in a bad cause. It’s because of him that the Confederacy contains any nobility at all. For some of you, that may not be a ringing endorsement for the man. But this book will help you see the warts and wrinkles of it all–and show that not everyone caught up in that cause was inherently evil. This book is worth your time.

For a more extended (and much better) review, check out Ryan McMaken’s review. 

The 2011 Bottimore Lecture at the Museum of the Confederacy: “Fire Eaters at War”

William Lowndes Yancey and Lawrence Massillon Keitt: two fire-eaters that will be discussed at the lecture.

Throughout the 1850s, they were accused of conspiring to instigate secession and to destroy the Union. Most southerners considered them extremists, their rhetoric shrill, their recommendations unrealistic and unnecessary.

But in the crisis of 1860-1861, the so-called “Fire-Eaters” gained the upper hand. Events apparently vindicated their shrill warnings and made their extremism seem like a rational reaction to the election of a Republican president.

Then what? Having succeeded in taking the lower South states out of the Union, what role did the Fire-Eaters play in the nation they helped to create and in the war they helped to cause?

Dr. Eric H. Walther will provide answers to these and other questions in the 2011 Elizabeth Roller Bottimore Lecture, “Fire-Eaters at War.” Co-sponsored by the University of Richmond’s Department of History, the lecture will be held in UR’s Keller Hall at 7:30 p.m., on Thursday, September 22^nd. 

A professor of history at the University of Houston, Walther is a leading authority on the fire-eaters. He is author of The Fire-Eaters, Shattering of the Union: America in the 1850s,and William Lowndes Yancey and the Coming of the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). The latter received the Museum’s 2007 Jefferson Davis Award and was an alternate selection of the History Book Club.

The Bottimore Lecture is free, but reservations are required. Click here to register. 

Date: Thursday, September 22, 2011
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM

Song of the Rebel Irish

This song was included in the 2003 movie Gods and Generals.  It is now included on the Blu-Ray version, but was originally a deleted scene.  It is the song from the Confederate Irish. 

LYRICS:
Oh, not now for songs of a nation's wrongs,
not the groans of starving labor;
Let the rifle ring and the bullet sing
to the clash of the flashing sabre!
There are Irish ranks on the tented banks
of Columbia's guarded ocean;
And an iron clank from flank to flank
tells of armed men in motion.

The Irish green shall again be seen
as our Irish fathers bore it,
A burning wind from the South behind,
and the Yankee rout before it!
O'Neil's red hand shall purge the land-
Rain a fire on men and cattle,
Till the Lincoln snakes in their own cold lakes
Plunge from the blaze of battle.

Whoe'er shall march by triumphal arch
Whoe'er may swell the slaughter,
Our drums shall roll from the Capitol
O'er Potomac's fateful water!
Rise, bleeding ghosts, to the Lord of Hosts
For judgment final and solemn;
Your fanatic horde to the edge if the sword
Is doomed line, square, and column!

Stonewall Jackson Honored in an African-American Church?: Deconstructing One Stereotype

This is a window from the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in Roanoke, VA. On it, it depicts the last words of Confederate General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson: “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the tree”–spoken on May 10, 1863. Oh, one more thing: this is an African-American congregation! The descendants of this church sat under Jackson’s Sunday School class from 1855-1861 when it was illegal in Virginia for blacks to learn how to read and write, making Jackson a lawbreaker. They were so grateful for his work with them that these congregants chose never to forget the legacy of teaching Scripture. Take a listen.

How do we reconcile this matter?  Listening to many history classes and documentaries, all Southerners were racists and all Northerners were color-blind.  Just the closest of perusals will show a more moderate and middle-ground approach is needed.  To take our 21st century sensibilities and put them on 19th century mindsets is misguided at best, but arrogant at worst.  Few blacks in the North were permitted to vote.  Most people in the North may have believed slavery was oppressive and disgusting, but few believed the African-American on equal ground with the whites. 

Jackson breaks the stereotype by teaching slaves to read and write!  Not every Southerner saw them as animals or inferior.  While this does not excuse the institution of slavery so prevalent in the South, it does shed light that there were good men on both sides, regardless of the goodness of their cause.
Richard G. Williams in his book Stonewall Jackson: The Black Man’s Friend observed:

It has been said that General Jackson “fought for slavery and the Southern Confederacy with the unshaken conviction that both were to endure.” This statement is true with regard to the latter, but I am very confident that he would never have fought for the sole object of perpetuating slavery. It was for her constitutional rights that the South resisted the North, and slavery was only comprehended among those rights. He found the institution a responsible and troublesome one, and I have heard him say that he would prefer to see the negroes free, but he believed that the Bible taught that slavery was sanctioned by the Creator himself, who maketh men to differ, and instituted laws for the bond and the free. He therefore accepted slavery, as it existed in the Southern States, not as a thing desirable in itself, but as allowed by God for ends which it was not his business to determine. At the same time, the negroes had no truer friend, no greater benefactor. Those who were servants in his own house he treated with the greatest kindness, and never was more happy or more devoted to any work than that of teaching the colored children in his Sunday-school.

As deplorable as aspects of this sound (“He found the institution a responsible and troublesome one” . . . “he believed that the Bible taught slavery, etc.”), he was devoted to teach those whom no one else would teach.  And, again, I just find it interesting that an African-American congregation in the heart of the South (Virginia) would put a monument to someone that everyone else all around says hated them because he fought for the Confederacy.  Maybe all the stereotypes we have constructed need to be reevaluated.

What think ye?

When Lincoln’s Honesty Did Not Serve Him Well

Whose Side Was God On in the Civil War?

“The will of God prevails.  In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God.  Both may be, and one must be wrong.  God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.  In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect this purpose.  I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.  By His mere great power on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest.  Yet the contest began.  And having begun, He could give the final victory to either side any day.  Yet the contest proceeds.”

--Abraham Lincoln, 1862.  From Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, 5:419-25, 433-36.  Edited by Roy Basler, Rutgers University Press, 1953.  Quoted in Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, New York: Penguin Books, 2006.  p. 146.

My Trip to the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery

I made a trip to the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery in Lexington, Virginia back in March 2010 on my way to the IMB to see one of our former members commissioned to international missions in Africa.

Understanding the Confederate “Rebel Yell”

Waite Rawls, the President and the CEO of the Museum of the Confederacy, has done an excellent job of preserving and helping the understanding of the mindset of the short-lived Confederacy.  Below are two clips of the research on their part on what the Confederate “Rebel Yell” sounds like.  Again, I appreciate what Rawls has done to help us understand this important turning point in our American history.  In listening to this, you can understand how horrifying this sound would be to Union troops who came against them in battle.

Waite Rawls, President and CEO, the Museum of the Confederacy

Part II: