A historian explains why many white Americans cling to the Confederate flag like a security blanket

On the other hand, in my books I show that there was a Civil War because people didn’t believe there could be one. They just kept calling each other's bluff and drawing new lines in the sand. They ended up basically talking and voting themselves into a war that nobody wanted. It is always good to be alert to the danger, but it’s also important to have some sense of historical perspective about what true war looks like. America is not there yet.

Yes, things that are much worse than we can imagine can happen. You have to be alert. But that same vigilance can also allow you to see the possibilities for hopeful change that surround us as well.

The Republican Party is in many ways the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South updated for the 21st century. There has long been a neo-Confederate element in the post-civil rights era Republican Party. With Trump's election they have fully empowered. And in the aftermath of the Charlottesville violence we actually saw the president of the United States, suggesting that there are "some very fine people" among neo-Nazis and white supremacists. How do you make sense of this?

I was in Charlottesville that day. I was going to teach a class that afternoon at the University of Virginia. I would start by explaining how there are people who turn to the symbols of the Confederacy as a native, indigenous rebellion against the power of the federal government. That appeals to a lot of people. But when you see that Confederate flag being mingled with Nazi flags, suddenly that claim upon an indigenous, pure and non-racialized argument about politics and "traditions" is gone. It has been forever entangled with white supremacy.

You might be surprised by the number of people who will come up to me after I give a lecture and tell me, "Slavery was wrong, I would never defend it. But the fact is that Robert E. Lee was a fine man and he was fighting for his home, right? He was fighting for what he thought was right." You hear that a lot. It makes you realize all the evasions that are built into this defense of the Confederacy.

We have all these formulas that people use to say that they are proud of their ancestors. For example, he was a "good" slaveholder. Two, he didn’t really believe in slavery. Three, he wanted to get rid of slavery. Four, most white Southerners weren’t slaveholders so they could not have been fighting for slavery, and so forth. I listen to these folks and I then say, yes, let’s think about this. Let’s forget about whatever you might think about the character or identity of Robert E. Lee. What if the Confederacy had won? What if those men on horseback had actually accomplished what they set out to do? They would have created a nation explicitly based on perpetual bondage that would have been the fourth-richest economy in the world with a monopoly over the single most valuable commodity in the world. How would world history have been different? Other parts of the world would have looked to the South and said, “Ah, the path to the future leads through slavery."

If you try to argue with them on the same ground that they form the question on, you will have a hard time persuading them. But it’s also the case that white Northerners and Westerners have a smug belief in the inevitable end of American slavery that is not warranted either.

Are there any well-respected and properly trained historians who believe that the Civil War was about something other than slavery? Is it that just bad pop history at this point? Where do these ridiculous ideas come from?

No serious historian has argued for more than half a century that the Civil War was over anything other than slavery. Yes, there are different ways that it was over slavery, right? One of the formulas I have for this is that white Southerners didn’t fight for slavery, they fought for a nation based on slavery. If you don’t put the nation part in there, you don’t have a place for the flags and a place for your girl to love you, a way for your mama to believe that this is Jesus’ plan, right? You have a larger framework of identity that obscures the centrality of slavery.

Many of the statues that were at the center of the protests and the racist riot at Charlottesville are relatively new. They were erected well after the Civil War, even through the middle of the 20th century as expressions of white supremacy, especially in response to the black freedom struggle and the civil rights movement.

A lot of schools were named after Lee and [Stonewall] Jackson in the 1950s and 1960s. This is something that people either had not known or maybe had forgotten. The Confederate battle flag also became popular during roughly the same time period. Somebody asked me about that in a recent talk and I pointed out this is the same time the Confederate battle flag became popular. I think we have to seize this moment for people to understand the real consequences of the things that they think are just their "heritage."

Confederate statues and other monuments are an effort to create a type of living history. After World War II, statues and monuments to Hitler and the Nazi regime were removed. That was a choice, because that type of public memory was not acceptable in post-war Germany. For a lot of black folks, and a good number of white folks as well, the Confederate flag is the American swastika. Why are so many white Southerners and others so psychologically invested in these symbols?

They just say, "You don’t understand what it really means. I wish no harm to anybody but they just need to be educated to the true history of Robert E. Lee." I offer this story. I gave a talk in Richmond where an older African-American woman came up to me at the end. She shook my hand and then said, "Dr. Ayers, when I was a child, my parents would take me to look at those statues and they said to me, 'These are for us. These are symbols for us to be quiet, to stay out of the way. The city doesn’t belong to us.'"

The movement to remove those statues is not contemporary "political correctness." John Mitchell Jr., who was on the city council and was also the editor of the Richmond Planet, African-American newspaper, said in 1890 that the Robert E. Lee statue was "a monument to treason." Ultimately, we need to think of new ways to recall the horror of slavery and the suffering of the Civil War.

What are you hopeful for in this moment of American history? What are you afraid of, or worried about?    

I hope that all the people of good will can find commonality. That there are a lot of fundamental things in this nation that transcend any particular identity that we might have. Freedom of the press, freedom to vote, freedom of conscience and related values have gotten a little fragmented. My hope is that people will find a common voice to come together and to defend freedom and democracy more broadly.

What do I fear? Resentment and resistance will actually gain force rather than be diminished in the struggle that is to come. That’s the big question. Will people realize that we’re standing on the precipice of something much worse if we keep going down the road we are on? Or will they say, “Wait -- this is not really what’s best about America"?