February 20, 2007
A Modest Proposal Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:30 PM EST Hillary Clinton was campaigning yesterday in South Carolina—which is likely to have an important, perhaps decisive, primary next year. She called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds. It used to fly over the capitol building itself but now is flown from a separate flag pole. Senator Clinton said, “I think about how many South Carolinians have served in our military and who are serving today under our flag and I believe that we should have one flag that we all pay honor to, as I know that most people in South Carolina do every single day . . .”
All politicians, not just Senator Clinton, are on the horns of a dilemma here. The so-called Confederate flag is understandably and deeply offensive to many people because of its association with Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and violent opposition to the civil rights movement in the middle years of the twentieth century. On the other hand, millions of decent, non-bigoted Southerners have ancestors who fought for the Confederacy and who sacrificed their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for what they genuinely thought was a just cause. It is not unnatural that they would want that sacrifice memorialized, and there are few symbols more emotionally powerful than a flag.
As an example of how deep those feeling can run, consider Major William Meade Pegram, who happens to be my great-great-grandfather. Virginia-born but Maryland-bred, he sided with the Confederacy and was commissioned a captain by the Confederate secretary of war, Judah P. Benjamin, in January 1862, in the recruiting service. He resigned this commission in order to serve in the “Black Horse” light Virginia cavalry. He had three horses shot out from under him before being wounded at Brandy Station, June 9, 1863, the greatest cavalry engagement of the war. He served as an aide to the adjutant general of the Confederate Cavalry Corps, J. E. B. Stuart, until the latter’s death in 1864, and is mentioned in Douglas Southall Freeman’s Lee’s Lieutenants: “Down the road there rode rapidly toward the battalion a courier who drew rein and called for the commanding officer. Major Haskell stepped forward. As good luck would have it, the courier was a fine young Baltimore boy of the distinguished name of Pegram.”
After the war Pegram returned to Baltimore and flourished in the insurance business. But he was also a published poet, and in 1907 he wrote and delivered the Official Opening Hymn at the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown. In 1909, when the state of Ohio returned to Maryland the captured battle flag of the Second Maryland Infantry (which had fought for the Confederacy), Pegram wrote the following:
Recovered relic of those stirring days,
Long lost, ne’er surrendered, now restored,
We greet thee, to thy donors give the praise,
For loving kindness, not to be ignored.
We hail thee: ‘Hallowed Banner!” and we love
To con o’er fields where thou wast proudly borne
Straight to the front, which did the prowess prove
Of those great souls, all, save a few, now gone!
We honor that brave band, whose every breath
Marked deep devotion to the holy cause
Wherein they struggled, even unto death:
Defending homes! Upholding righteous laws!
And here, dear flag, we place thee now to rest
Among they fellows, evermore to be
Entombed in state, amid the sacred, blest
Emblems of blood-bought immortality!
So what to do? Senator Clinton chose to call for the flag’s removal. I have a modest proposal to make as an alternative. What everyone—except serious historians of the Confederacy and vexillologists—thinks of as “the Confederate flag” in fact is no such thing. It is the battle flag. And, as far as I’m concerned, it is ruined as a symbol by its post–Civil War associations, just as no one can look at a swastika—a design of great antiquity—without thinking of the Nazis.
So why not fly the national flag of the Confederacy instead? The Confederacy had three national flags during its four-year existence. The first, known as “the stars and bars” was the national flag until 1863, when it was replaced with the second, known as “the stainless banner.” At the very end of the war, fearing that the second flag could be mistaken for a surrender flag on a windless day, the third flag was adopted.
 | | Top left: The Confederate battle flag. Top right: The first flag of the Confederacy. Bottom left: The second flag of the Confederacy. Bottom right: The third flag of the Confederacy. |
The stars and bars would certainly serve as a memorial to those who fought under it and its successors, but it is free of the stain of twentieth-century racism. Most people, I fancy, seeing it flying from a pole on the capitol grounds in Columbia would have no idea what it was and go on about their business. But those who cared most certainly would recognize it as an honorable emblem of their ancestors’ “blood-bought immortality.”
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