CONFEDERATE FLAGS ARE A TOOL TO ACHIEVE A POLITICAL END

In the 1950s and 1960s the Confederate flag of my youth was not very controversial.  Everyone had bigger concerns.  The South was being segregated.  Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and later Johnson, pressed for new civil rights laws.  Kennedy sent US Marshals and federal troops (nationalized Alabama Guard) to Birmingham to protect civil rights marchers and force the integration of the University of Alabama.  It was a painful time, to be sure, but nobody had time to worry about a flag.

Unfortunately, it may have been during that time period that our modern generalizations and impressions about the Confederate flag were formed.  It is indeed unfortunate that some segregationists and white supremacists choose the "Confederate flag" to symbolize their misguided cause.  

But most of us had no such impression of the Confederate flag and we assigned no such context to it.  That would happen later at the direction of the ever-left leaning media and the extreme left wing race baiting politicians.  

The Confederate flags, and there were many different ones, had a historical context.  It was a symbol of a by gone time, a historical era, in which the North and South met on hundreds of battlefields large and small to test two widely different political convictions.  The North's conviction was that the Union was sovereign, inseparable and must be preserved at all costs.  The South's equally fervent conviction was that the Union was a voluntary compact into which each state entered by its own will and could leave if it saw fit.  For many years following the war, constitutional scholars in the North and South stated that the Southern viewpoint was the more legally correct.  Look it up and you can prove that to yourself.  It wasn't a universal view by any means but there are an ample number of legal scholars who held the same view as Thomas Jefferson had expressed on this matter.

It is true and must be recognized that wealthy men in the South in the 1860s owned slaves, held political power and used that power to protect their investment in slavery.  That is a justifiable point up until Lincoln called for an invasion of the South in response to Fort Sumter.  However, the throngs of Southern men who answered their states' calls for volunteers to repel the invasion were not motivated by slavery but by loyalty and duty to their states.  Virtually no one is recorded by historians as marching into battle shouting, "Save slavery."  Very few Southern soldiers would have died for slavery.  In fact, I contend that most of the Southern military's rank and file resented the aristocrats who owned slaves, more out of an economic resentment than any political or moral problem with slavery, though some Confederate soldiers openly disapproved of slavery on moral grounds. A journalist recently noted, correctly, that when Gen.George Pickett prepared his brave but doomed charge at Gettysburg, his division shouted, "For Virginia," not "For Slavery."  

"It is not the Confederate flags that divide us--it is people who use the flags as a tool, as they will use any tool, to achieve their political ends."

Modern revisionists have assigned their own context to the "Confederate flag."  They have willed it to represent white supremacy, slavery, hatred, racial divide or segregation, or whatever else they can use to achieve political power.  It is not the Confederate flags that divide people--it is people who use  the flags as a tool, as they will use any tool, to achieve their political ends.  If their ends could be achieved by using the US flag, the Bible, marriage, baseball or apple pie, they would use any of those things just as they use their perception of the Confederate flag - to divide and conquer.  

"They use the Confederate flags as they would use any tool... If their ends could be achieved by using the US flag, the Bible, marriage, baseball or apple pie--they would use any of those things just as they use their conception of the Confederate flag-to divide and conquer.
"