It’s true to say that the battle flag was never a big symbol in popular awareness until the days of segregation, when it was taken up specifically as a show of defiance.
However, it’s ridiculously false to state that the CSA never flew that flag. Invest the 5 minutes on Wikipedia before you embarrass yourself with further shouting on social media.
From your link:
Despite never having historically represented the Confederate States of America as a country, nor having been officially recognized as one of its national flags, the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia and its variants are now flag types commonly referred to as the Confederate Flag .
For that boss, and other yokels, there is the item that the Nazis looked at the confederacy statutes and the Jim Crow laws as blueprints for their evil Reich laws.
Did you miss all of the military units that officially used the saltire as all or part of their flag? Are you suggesting that the Army of Northern Virginia was not a Confederate army, or that P. G. T. Beauregard was not a Confederate general?
Or are you going to hang your hat on some niggling point about the battle flag not being a government flag?
Either way, it’s wrong in substance and spirit. The saltire was an official flag of Confederate military units, both alone and as parts of other flags, and it was used in this manner years before the KKK was ever founded.
If you’re going to nitpick, you need to get the details right and not take dramatic license.
The battle flag isn’t even the one we’re talking about. What is called the Confederate flag today, the one that was painted on the top of the Dukes of Hazzard car, looks like the Second Confederate Navy Jack but with the color blue of the (square) Battle Flag of Virginia/Tennessee. I don’t believe it ever existed in its current form while the Confederacy existed. Feel free to show me where I’m wrong, but your Wikipedia link doesn’t do that.
Here is a shot of the General Lee from the Dukes of Hazzard, also known as the Second Naval Jack of the Confederate States of America
So if the Dukes of Hazzard is your standard-bearer of all things confederate, then the Confederate flag is the 2nd Naval Jack of the CSA. Neither of which, you may now notice, bears exact resemblance to a lot of the replica flags and rebel kitsch floating around on the mass market.
I’m not sure what point there is in telling someone “You are not flying an official Confederate flag as codified by the Dukes of Hazzard.” The CSA was an irredeemably racist institution, as are all flags and artifacts that bear any of its symbology. That seems like the important point to me.
I’m saying the opposite. What most people call the Confederate flag today, the flag that’s painted on the General Lee, was not the Confederate flag at any point while the Confederacy existed. It’s the flag of the Ku Klux Klan, who adopted it as their own and popularized it throughout the South fifty years after the Confederacy failed.
You’re the one telling me I’m wrong but I have yet to see how.
This is false. The General Lee flag is the Second Confederate Navy Jack.
From the link you posted, captioning the flag we are currently discussing:
An elongated version of the Battle Flag of the Army of Tennessee, and similar to The Second Confederate Navy Jack, in use from 1863 until 1865, although with the darker blue field of the Army’s battle flag.
So, it’s similar to the Navy Jack in shape and layout, with the color of the square Battle Flag. but it is neither of those flags.
And anyway, neither the Battle Flag nor the Navy Jack were ever flags of the Confederacy. At best they were flown by Confederates during the Civil War, but by that standard the Gadsen flag could be called “The American Flag” and I don’t know anyone who would agree with calling it that.
I don’t think you looked at the link of the General Lee, or you didn’t notice, but it does use the lighter blue shade of the Navy Jack. As does a lot of “rebel” merch, as neither the manufacturers nor consumers really consider this an important distinction.
On this topic, I think Snopes said it best:
The fact that the Confederate battle flag was never the official national flag of the Confederacy is a technical historical aspect which is of little import today — that flag was nevertheless used by officially sanctioned Army and Navy units that fought in the service of the Confederate government, its Southern Cross design was incorporated into the Confederate national flag, and that banner was popularly recognized and regarded at the time as a symbol of the Confederate nation by the people who lived there. If it is considered a symbol of slavery and white supremacy by many people today, in part that’s because it did indeed represent a government, military, and people who fought to preserve those aspects of their society.
(bolding mine)
As for your assertion that it was popularized by the Ku Klux Klan, I noticed you haven’t provided a cite for that, but I’d like to see that cited and spelled out. AFAIK it was first chosen by Confederate veteran groups in the 1880’s or so as their enduring symbol of the Confederacy, and later was taken up by other groups and other people for that very same reason.
I very much agree with Snopes that this is a “technical historical aspect which is of little import today”. If somehow everybody who flies the current flag suddenly switched to any of the “official” CSA flags, we should still have the same problem with those people and those flags for the same reason. It’s unimportant which Confederate flag they chose, because all of them represent white supremacy.
From here:
Confederate soldiers were not familiar with the modern flag as such, but many were fond of the flags of their own units. These often included design elements found on the modern Confederate flag. They honored battlefield camaraderie rather than Southern nationalism. During the “memorial period” that ran from the late 19th century through the 1920s, use of Confederate flags broadened and they became the symbolic embodiment of the Lost Cause. The Confederate battle flag was added to the state flag of Mississippi in 1894 and appeared on two former state flags of Georgia from 1956 until 2003. The 50th anniversary reunion at Gettysburg in 1913 was a turning point in obtaining national acceptance of the flag and other Confederate symbols. The flag appears prominently in Birth of a Nation (1915), a highly successful and influential film. The second Ku Klux Klan (1915–1944), a group inspired by this film, was a nativist white supremacist organization that flew the flag exclusively. Margaret Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind, led to a brief but intense period of nostalgia for the Old South during which the Confederate flag appeared widely. In the film adaptation, the flag flutters over a scene of vast carnage.
And:
In their study of Confederate symbols in the contemporary Southern United States, the Southern political scientists James Michael Martinez, William Donald Richardson, and Ron McNinch-Su wrote:
“The battle flag was never adopted by the Confederate Congress, never flew over any state capitols during the Confederacy, and was never officially used by Confederate veterans’ groups. The flag probably would have been relegated to Civil War museums if it had not been resurrected by the resurgent KKK and used by Southern Dixiecrats during the 1948 presidential election.”
And that’s why I disagree that flying one of the actual Confederate flags would be as problematic as the “rebel flag”. It would still be shitty to celebrate the Confederacy in any way, but those flags are a historical curiosity. They don’t have over a century of KKK, Jim Crow, Lost Cause and segregationist symbolism behind them.
I would love for the flag discussion to be taken elsewhere!
Can we talk about that noose? I guess all those people concerned about history are remembering that lynching was definitely part of our history.
And then on race day, ALL of the drivers got together and pushed his car up to the front row.
Which is what makes it more insidious. The current flag of Georgia is very similar to the official Flag of the Confederate States; the current official state flag for Mississippi combines both.
Which does not in the slightest distract from the solidarity NASCAR and it’s associated drivers have shown.
IMHO. YMMV. Press on.
There might be solidarity among the drivers and the organization, but some NASCAR fans showed their true colors at Bristol this week, and those colors were confederate colors.
That is truly ugly and disturbing.
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