The Germans who fought under the Swastika perpetrated horrible crimes throughout Germany and Europe, conceived by evil men who intended to make a new world order based on racism and a violent corrupt political system. The swastika is outlawed in Germany. But in the United States, at Charlottesville, that flag was raised with the rebel flag. Nikki Haley’s calling the rebel flag a symbol of honor is just wrong and it perpetuates racism as an honorable position in our culture and politics. You don’t see swastikas in Germany; you see them in the United States.
Article III, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution defines treason as “levying War” against the United States. The men who took up arms against the Union and fought for the South were traitors. The men who killed Americans for the South fought to prop up a racist, pernicious system of slavery. Read the secession ordinances, read the newspapers in the South that supported secession, and read what the leaders of the South had to say about secession and its cause- it was slavery.
Nikki Haley joins a long line of politicians from South Carolina and other southern states who glorified the lost cause. Strom Thurmond filibustered hard to prevent the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act claiming his cause was honorable, and Mitch McConnel still stands for obstruction on civil rights issues. The lost cause is racism and slavery. Neither is honorable. The lost cause was fought because the South would not give up its slaves. South Carolinian Andrew Pickens Calhoun attacked the North for electing an abolitionist president. He wrote that a “depraved” federal government would “seduce the poor, ignorant and stupid nature of the negro in the midst of his home and happiness.” The South Carolina secession ordinance cited the North’s failure to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, provisions in the Constitution protecting slavery, and the federal government’s adoption of an abolitionist view of slavery.
William Seward described his observations of the South that flag flew over: “Ten naked little boys, between six and twelve years old, tied together, two and two, by their wrists, were all fastened to a long rope, and followed by a tall, gaunt white man, who, with his long lash, whipped up the sad and weary little procession, drove it to the horse-trough to drink, and thence to a shed, where they lay down on the ground and sobbed and moaned themselves to sleep.”
As Murray and Hsieh said in their book, A Savage War, “One must count the deep fears of the slave-holding South and the aggressive manifestation of those fears as the primary factor in the outbreak of war.” The Richmond Examiner said: “It is all hallucination to suppose that we are ever going to get rid of slavery, or that it will ever be desirable to do so.” The figures for the cost of suppressing the rebellion range from 650,000 to 750,000 dead. This war was fought over slavery, and after black men were armed to fight for their freedom the rebel government promised slavery, to those black soldiers captured on the field of battle and death to their white officers. The battle flag that Nikki Haley hails as a symbol of honor flew over massacres of black troops at Fort Pillow and the Battle of the Crater during the siege of Petersburg, Virginia.
She has got it all wrong. The fairy tale of the lost cause persists. To be sure poor white southerners fought for the rebel government willingly and unwillingly. Many deserted and many were hung for objecting to service in the rebel army. The rebel obsession with slavery lasted till the bitter end. When rebel officials had a chance to end the war and bloodshed and destruction of property in 1865, their primary demand was the preservation of slavery. The myth persists because it makes it honorable to fight for slavery, and racism. Racism endures in our politics today because the fairy tale of the lost cause persists. White racists use it to legitimize their hate. Nikki Haley should take a look at the history of the soldiers in blue, the men of the “watchfires of the hundred circling camps.” The men who fought under the stars and stripes for freedom. The men who fought an honorable war against slavery.
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