A time-honored tradition: Our State Flag Bracket. It’s here again, and it’s beautiful (I think some of the flags are a little stretched by the dimensions of rectangles I chose—gotta fix that as the rounds go along):
There’s a parenthetical there in the bracket’s title, and it’s pretty necessary. You can’t just be waving Confederate flags around. The time for that stopped in 1865. Earlier, honestly. This is a controversial stance these days, I know, but I think the Civil War was bad.
We do owe it to any newcomers to explain our stances on all of this, and I’ll warn you here that we’re going to show the flags: One confederate flag as well as the five state flags that, in our view, glorify slavery.
There are three parts to this, and they’re all a pain in the ass that could have been avoided had humanity come around on slavery being a bad thing earlier (still waiting on you, China and others). The first part is explaining why we believe the Confederacy was about slavery. The second part is explaining why we think Confederate honorifics glorify slavery, then separating honorifics from history, which is important. The third part is parsing out the flags of the former Confederate states.
The Confederacy Was About Slavery
There’s a teaching in some circles that the Confederacy was about something other than slavery, and while it’s fair to say that the decision by the states in question to secede from the United States of America was about more than slavery, slavery was the central theme. The best evidence for this that I’ve seen comes from the declarations of secession themselves, or at least these five: Georgia’s, which makes mention of slavery 35 times, beginning in the declaration’s second sentence; Mississippi’s, which mentions slavery seven times, beginning in its second sentence; South Carolina’s, which mentions it 18 times, beginning in the first sentence; Texas’s, which mentions it 22 times despite only first mentioning it in the third paragraph; and Virginia’s, which only mentions it once but offers no other reasons for its attempt to leave the U.S.A.
The Confederacy was about slavery. The Civil War was about slavery. More than six hundred thousand young men died over five years in a war where one side wanted to continue the practice of slavery.
Confederate Honorifics Glorify Slavery
There are two popular defenses of the continued display of Confederate flags, the continued display of statues of Confederate leaders, the continued use of Confederate leaders’ names to name places and things, etc.
The first defense is that “history should be remembered.” History should, full stop, be remembered. But there’s a difference between remembrance and honor. Museums remember. History books remember. Flags honor. Statues honor. We have museums about tenement houses in New York. We have statues of the Virgin Mary. We’ll get into this a little more with the specific flags we exclude from our bracket, but a huge number of these statues were erected in the post-Reconstruction era in the South, when those in power were resegregating their societies, when lynchings were at their peak, when all those things were happening which the Civil Rights Movement eventually arose to oppose. The statues weren’t erected to memorialize the dead—those memorials were built earlier, and they’re another matter. The flags weren’t erected to memorialize the dead either. The flags were sewn to honor the Confederacy, which brings us to the second defense.
The second defense is that the Confederate flag is more an emblem of the South than it is an honorific of the Confederacy. There’s a good-hearted element sometimes present in this: The South has a distinct culture within America, and there is a sense of unity within some regarding the South as an entity. Where this falls apart is that there are plenty of other symbols of the South—the magnolia, for example—which don’t hearken back to a coalition whose primary purpose was preserving the enslavement of Black Americans, Black Americans who, by the way, make up something like a fifth of the population of the five states whose flags we oppose. There are better symbols of the South, and just because the Confederate battle flag is the one longest-used doesn’t make it one that needs to stick around.
The Flags
There are two big things to know up front here.
The first is that there were eleven states who were fully members of the Confederacy—Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas—while two others, Kentucky and Missouri, had shadow governments admitted to the Confederacy but never officially seceded. These are the states we’ll focus on.
The second is that there was more than one Confederate flag. There was the Confederate battle flag, which we culturally call the Confederate flag, but there were others, including a national flag of the Confederacy which looks like this:
This is important to know, because not every Confederacy-honoring flag is designed to mimic the Confederate battle flag. Georgia’s, for example, is designed to mimic the old national flag:
Take out the coat of arms, you’ve got the Confederate flag. This was somehow adopted in 2001 (the previous one was worse, but…come on).
Moving on from Georgia, there are two that fairly directly mimic the Confederate battle flag—those of Alabama and Florida, which look like this:
Alabama’s was adopted in 1895, and per a 1915 account available via the Alabama Department of Archives and History, the flag was intended to “preserve in permanent form some of the more distinctive features of the Confederate battle flag, particularly the St. Andrew’s Cross.”
Florida’s was adopted in 1900, when Governor, former Confederate Captain, and noted segregationist Francis Fleming looked at the previous flag—a white banner featuring the same seal on today’s—and requested the addition of the St. Andrew’s Cross. The story goes that to Fleming, the flag looked too much like a surrender flag without that cross. Did the St. Andrew’s Cross predate the Confederacy? Of course. Did it mean anything more to Fleming than a Confederate honorific? Of course not.
Arkansas’s is straightforward. Originally, there were three blue stars on this guy—one for France, which once governed the territory which is now Arkansas; one for Spain, which once governed the territory which is now Arkansas; and one for the United States. In the 1920’s, though, per Arkansas’s Secretary of State, “Then there was trouble…there was no indication on the flag that Arkansas had been a member of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865. To correct that, the legislature in 1923 added a fourth blue star…”
They gave the Confederate star the best spot.
Next, Tennessee, the last we exclude. Tennessee had a cool flag for eight years. You can see it in this post (we’re going to link to this again later, it’s our 2020 post, which came at a time when people were way more on board with acknowledging that the Confederacy was messed up than they are now). It had three slanted bars honoring the three Grand Divisions of the state (the state of Tennessee is so cool—what an awesome state), it recognized its status as the 16th state in the Union, it had the nickname running across it, it was a good flag. Then, in 1905, Tennessee changed it to this one, which looks like someone took the Confederate battle flag, put it in a blender, and poured it out onto a new piece of cloth:
That bar on the right looks like an afterthought to me. Like they had the stars but needed a bar. Do you think orange juice has something to do with oranges?
There are eight other flags of Confederate and semi-Confederate states, and qualms have been raised with seven of the eight of them by others. Our stances, as of 2022, are as follows (you can see the flags in question at that post we linked to earlier):
- Kentucky: We’ve seen this catch some heat for depicting a very white-looking Native American, but that is not a Native American, that is a frontiersman, you can find that problematic, and America’s treatment of Native Americans is horrible, but we don’t find that problematic.
- Texas: The flag was created in 1838, when Texas won its independence from Mexico. Slavery had something to do with that war, but unlike the Civil War, it wasn’t the central cause, and the flag’s gone through it all with Texas. It is broader than the state’s time in the Confederacy.
- Louisiana: This one was used in an unofficial manner before secession, and while it only became the official state flag in 1912, it doesn’t have anything on it referencing the Confederacy. All about Louisiana.
- Missouri: The seal is basically the same as the one Confederate-allied Missourian troops slapped on a flag during the Civil War, but the seal’s from 1822.
- Virginia: This flag was first flown when Virginia seceded, because Virginia felt that, having seceded, it needed a flag. It uses a seal, though, which dates back to 1776. Also, the image of conquering tyranny is kind of the whole idea of liberating the enslaved.
- South Carolina: The crescent moon comes from the Moultrie Flag, which dates back to 1775. The palmetto was added in 1861 (also referencing Colonel Moultrie), but this flag was not designed to be a Confederate flag. It was designed to be a flag representing South Carolina, and they happened to first think to do that at the moment they, like Virginia, tried to leave the United States.
- North Carolina: This one’s messy. They adopted a flag in 1861 that had their own date of secession on it. In 1861, they adopted a new one with a slightly different design and a new date in place of the 1861 date (the new date is the 1776 date the Halifax Resolves were signed—the Halifax Resolves were the first official document by an American colony calling for Independence from Britain). Is it a dog whistle? We don’t think so. Partially because unlike other flags adopted during this era, it moved away from recognizing the Confederacy. That’s the right direction to go.
Obviously, there are bigger issues regarding race in America than what flags former Confederate states are flying, and issues regarding race are only some of the important issues in the world. But, if you’re going to do a state flag bracket, you have to address the racist elephant in the room, which is why we write this post every year before we start the bracket. Also, it’s not that hard to just change your state flag. Georgia could have a great one—peach-colored with a live oak. Tennessee’s could still recognize the Grand Divisions—just go back to the 1897 one but put the three stars in the circle where “The Volunteer State” once was. Alabama could have two bars of green—dark atop light—topped by a third bar of blue, like the Ukrainian wheatfield flag but illustrating a pine forest. Florida could do something similar with beach and sea and sky. Arkansas could just remove the fourth blue star. Mississippi changed theirs, and Mississippi’s is great now. It’s not that hard, guys. And the sooner the South pivots to symbols like the magnolia and the live oak and the peach and the beach, the sooner those symbols will grow into their natural place of prevalence. It’s good to have pride in the South. But the South is better than the ill-fated, ill-conceived nation its power-holders once tried to make it be.
