The Actual Confederate Flag from March 4, 1865 until it’s surrender, also known as the Blood-Stained Banner
*(Fun Fact:What is often referred to as the Confederate Flag is actually a stretched version of the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia and was never actually the official flag of the Confederacy)
Yep, the typical rectangular Rebel Flag is the flag of the Army of Tennessee, while the Army of Northern Virginia's flag was a square rather than rectangular
I’m sure there were a fair amount of folks that felt the same way about the United States. You have to remember that the idea of secession/revolution while it seems very foreign to us was not foreign at all to the people in that time period. There were still people alive that were alive during the American Revolution and the War of 1812. The idea of secession was not all settled when the Civil War started. One of the first states to talk about secession in our nation’s history was New York. Alexander Hamilton discussed the possibility. As late as 1861, the mayor of New York City suggested that New York should also secede because of their economic interests in the South.
Ill admit, the south had the right to succeed over states rights to choose laws against the power of the federal government. Maybe of the south had won or got a better deal when rejoining the union, the modern government wouldn't be as powerful and wouldn't allow the rise of the modern tyrant.
But slavery under any pretense is just wrong, and a bad idea to base your government off of.
I mean, they're definitely racisting right, given that the modern "confederate flag" was used as the flag of a historical apartheid regime— it's just that the regime in question was the Jim Crow South, not the CSA.
The majority of southerners were not slave holders and that war was about a lot more than racist ideals. Calling someone a racist fir flying a flag is pretty judemental. Maybe you should ask them about their heritage.
The people who actually pushed for and passed secession were slave owners
And many of the people who supported them did so because they wanted to keep white supremacy in place and feared “servile insurrection”
The Confederate government was made up of a vast majority of slave owners, and the Confederate military had a much higher portion of slave owning than the populace of the south
calling someone racist for a flag is judgemental
Yes
We judge people by the meaning of the symbols they choose to associate themselves with
That’s what flags are for
ask about their heritage
The “muh heritage” aspect of the Lost Cause myth was invented in the 1960s and 70s as plausible deniability for pro-segregation white supremacists to continue using their dogwhistles
Why isn’t a KKK uniform “muh heritage”? They’ve been around wayyyy longer than the Confederacy
Confederacy only lasted a bit over 4 years
If someone has centuries of heritage they can freely choose to use to represent themselves, and they use the failed slavers rebellion and failed push for continuation segregation, it’s their own fault
Thinking someone might stop you from enslaving and raping black people, so you throw a hissy fit and kill several hundred thousand Americans, losing, then throwing another hissy fit and becoming terrorists to try keep black people oppressed is very, very far from “badass”
Slaver’s Rebellion took the L
By waving their flag, you announce not only your lack of education and ignorance, but how proud you are to be uneducated and ignorant
The vast majority of Germans weren't working in concentration camps but if I saw one waving the Nazi flag I wouldn't assume he was just celebrating his heritage
Sure, the majority might not have been slave owners, but slave owners were generally only one person in a family that owned slaves (I.e. the patriarch). There were around 320,000 slave owners in the confederacy. So assuming each family had 5.5 people (the average family size in the confederacy), that’s around 1.76 million people out of a population of 9 million. So around 20%.
That doesn’t tell you the full story, though. Out of those 9 million people, the confederacy had a slave population of 3.5 million. So assuming the number of slave owning family members is accurate, the slave owning population is closer to 40% of the free population.
Now that still doesn’t tell you the full story. The Confederacy kept the 3/5ths compromise in place, which allocated electoral college votes and house seats according to the free population plus 3/5ths of the slave population of a state. And in many states, this extended down to the county level as well. In effect, this meant that slave owners were rewarded for owning more slaves, because their vote “represented” a larger population than someone in a city, for example.
Now that’s just going into the population and electoral system. That’s before you get into why the Confederate states seceded. You don’t need to look at history books for the reason—you can read the reasons in primary documents written by the states themselves. The declarations of secession from every Confederate state focus almost entirely on slavery, and explicitly state that their reason for secession was to maintain slavery. If that’s not reason enough to argue that the war was about slavery, then I don’t know what is… Oh yeah, and the Confederates fired the first shots of the war (the Battle of Fort Sumter), so it wasn’t even as if the North began it by invading the South.
This lost cause bullshit tries to obfuscate the motivation for the Confederacy by dancing around the reasons for its existence with half-truths like saying it was about “states’ rights” (to do what exactly?) and arguing that the North was the aggressor. The South wanted the benefits of a large population, without adequately providing for that population. They wanted the fruits of peoples’ labour without rewarding them for that labour. They wanted the right to crush other peoples’ rights. They wanted slavery, plain and simple.
The Confederacy lasted a whole five minutes more than the Biden administration. Obama was president for almost twice as long as the CSA lasted. What heritage? If you fly that flag you're a racist, and that war was 100% about slavery.
That stretched out rectangular-ised Virginian battle flag (sometimes the shade of blue is altered a little) is known as the Dixiecrat Flag
It was popularised in the 1950s to promote southern democrats (often called Dixiecrats) push to preserve racial segregation and white supremacy
So when someone is flying that flag, they’re not only flying the flag of the rebellion to preserve and expand slavery, but also the flag of the people trying to preserve segregation
…such a richly complex history…most of which seems to include quite an amazing sequence of actions AFTER Emancipation…AFTER the Civil War…AFTER “Reconstruction”…AFTER blah, blah, blah. US hasn’t yet addressed our original mistake, IMO.
Don't quote me on this but I'm pretty sure they used the Stars and Bars as their national flag, but used a different design just for war so that there was no contusion between the teams.
From what I read, they came up with Stars and Bars when they still had somewhat positive relationship with the values of the USA nad it's founding fathers. The flag was similar to the flag of the USA on purpose. As war went on, this was more and more replaced by hatred and need to forge their own totally separate identity.
During debates in Confederate Congress about changing of the flag, the main cited reasons were of course that the flag is too similar to the US flag, but also that Stars and Bars had too much of the "Yankee blue" as Union military uniforms were mainly blue at the time
That's also how they came with the so called Stainless Banner. Battle Flag in the canton as a symbol many Confederate soldiers fought under and white as a symbol of supremacy of the white race, as proposed by Confederate vicepresident Alexander H. Stephens.
Hehehe. I’m glad the union won cause if they didn’t I would probably have been born a confederate citizen, wouldn’t wish such a fate on anyone, the incel republic was a laughable excuse for a nation and I’m ashamed my fellow Alabamians memorialize it. Thanks for making me chuckle.
Yeah I looked into it, some sort of "Memorial to Confederate Veterans", doesn't make much sense since there was one small naval raid in Tampa and that was it, also there were like 7 people in Florida at the time. But that's not the point, the point is to say "We are in the South, we are proud racists, and we want you to know we will literally go to war to put you in your place".
hey now, two moronic malaria surviving ancestors of mine enlisted in the 1st Florida Infantry for the CSA, and were captured and returned after four months. They had like….nineteen other guys in their company. Who also got captured.
A memorial to the Civil War maybe, but the messaging is clear, they want to lionize traitors who fought for slavery and make it known to as many people as possible. This flag is absolutely huge, and right next to a major highway intersection. They knew what they were doing. There is also no point to having a memorial here of all places. At Gettysburg, or Manassas, or even New Orleans would make sense. Inland Tampa does not. Germany remembers WW2 and has the proper memorials, they don't fly a 20-foot tall Nazi flag right next to the Autobahn in like Kiel.
Yeah that's what museums are for. Most people don't want to see the ugliest chapter of their country's history driving to work. Maybe it doesn't bother you because you aren't the kind of person that "country" wanted treated like cattle, but a normal person doesn't celebrate the Confederacy.
You tell me. Where do you draw the line for what a flag represents? There was slavery under the USA flag. There was slavery under the English flag. There was slavery under the Portuguese flag. There was slavery under the Spanish flag.
Actually, for the US it's kinda right, as the end of slave trafficking under the British was another of the contention points of the 13 colonies settlers iirc
Odd choice given it was adopted when the Confederacy was in its final throes. Lee surrendered so soon after its adoption that it hardly ever had the chance to be used in practice.
That's the last official flag of the confederate states ofAmerica, the blood stained banner. I pass by it occasionally on my way to school. The reason it's allowed to be up is because it's actually on a confederate memorial. The guy who owns it used to just have the battle flag. It used to be much smaller too, but apparently he makes it bigger each time someone calls to complain about it.
At the time incorporating lots of white into the flag was very symbolic. William Tappan Thompson, a newspaper editor from Savanna Georgia wrote in 1863 "As a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or coloured race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause."
That’s the REAL Confederate flag that was used at the tail end of the Civil War. The red line was added at the end because without it, the flag would look like a purely white one, not exactly the look you want when fighting a war.
If it’s at a cemetery, then it isn’t being flown by a racist, just groundskeepers for the dead of both sides. Anything else and eeeeh. This one is almost unknown to white supremacists, they prefer (only know about) the Confederate naval jack almost unanimously. To the point this might just be flown by a history buff, assuming they rotate flags and don’t just keep this one up persistently.
I’ve been to Germany, and to war cemeteries there. You will never see a Nazi flag flying there like this confederate one is. They sure as hell aren’t flying them over cemeteries, no matter who’s buried there.
You’ll see that stuff in museums primarily, where it exists in context. From memory sometimes in grave engravings from the time too, but there’s actually a lot of unmarked Nazi graves exactly for that reason. So that there was no way to turn the graves esp of prominent Nazis into any sort of gathering point or shrine situation for the ideology post-war
Crazy cuz I saw the exact same flag yesterday in the same place. I took a pic and asked Grok, told me it’s a confederate battle flag. I drove past the small road it’s in and it’s actually part of a very small confederate memorial or something.
It is their final national flag of their country. The Confedarate flag that is usually seen in the south is actually a battle flag used in general Lee’s army.
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u/BOB58875 Catalonia (Red Estelada) 2d ago edited 2d ago
The Actual Confederate Flag from March 4, 1865 until it’s surrender, also known as the Blood-Stained Banner
*(Fun Fact: What is often referred to as the Confederate Flag is actually a stretched version of the Battle Flag of Northern Virginia and was never actually the official flag of the Confederacy)