Colors That Bleed
The Civil War on its 150th birthday
From January 14 to 18 of this year, Mayor Jim Smithson of Marshall, Arkansas, decided to raise the Confederate flag at City Hall in observance of Robert E. Lee’s birthday. (The federal holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., occurred on January 17.)
About a week later, the city council repudiated the mayor’s decision by passing an ordinance that allows only the U.S. and Arkansas flags to be displayed on city property. Only one city-council member, Kenneth Daniel, voted against the measure. According to the Little Rock affiliate of Fox News:
Daniel and Mayor Smithson say flying the confederate flag is not a racial issue but standing up for Southern heritage, the military, and states' rights.
While the majority of the city council feels this ordinance was the appropriate response to the controversy last week, many people agree with the mayor….
One resident attending the meeting, Larry Cotton, was critical of the decision. “I’m going to be very frank, you’re afraid you’re going to offend the blacks, that’s what it amounts to.”
Cotton went on to say, “There are some of us that are proud of their heritage. My great-grandfather fought under that flag and I’m proud of that fact, and I think it’s a shame. I’m not a history buff, but I don’t think you can find anything in the history books bad about Robert E. Lee.”
If you are interested in the particulars, Marshall is the county seat of Searcy County, which is 96.9 percent white. (The black population in the county is 0.6 percent, according to 2009 U.S. Census estimates.)
Your initial reaction might be, Of course, it is. But we all know that these stories are more complicated than that. In fact, Marshall is a curious place for a Confederate flag to make a dramatic stand.
In the first place, Marshall sits high in the mountains of North Central Arkansas, and it has always been a poor, hardscrabble area. When the plantation owners in the Mississippi Delta region of the state were at the height of their wealth and power during the nineteenth century, the hillbillies of Searcy County lived in a more challenging environment. Most of them didn’t own slaves, and they probably had not encountered many black people, so for better or worse, they weren’t particularly animated on the subject. The idea of secession and civil war simply didn’t seem worth their time or trouble. According to the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas History and Culture:
At the beginning of the Civil War, almost all Searcy County citizens opposed secession and Confederate military service. Searcy County did provide three Confederate companies in 1861, but many men joined under duress. On November 17, 1861, the Arkansas Confederate authorities discovered a secret pro-Union Peace Society in north-central Arkansas and tried to arrest all members. Searcy County…was the center of the effort to suppress the organization. The captured Peace Society members were guarded in the courthouse. On December 9, 1861, seventy-seven prisoners were sent to Little Rock, where they were encouraged to join the Confederate army. Not all of the society’s men were arrested, however, and regular Confederate troops were stationed in Burrowsville to continue the campaign against the Unionists….
After the war, the political situation was still so volatile that U.S. troops were stationed in Burrowsville for a few months to keep peace. County Unionists pushed to change the town’s name to Marshall after U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall, and the legislature approved the change on March 18, 1867.
So the city of Marshall’s name is itself a disavowal of the Confederacy. That’s enough to make one wonder if Mayor Smithson and his supporters really understand the heritage they purport to honor by unfurling the Stars and Bars.
Let’s return to the details as reported by the Fox station. It’s certainly noteworthy that a white city council in an overwhelmingly white area in the South swiftly decided to reject a display of solidarity with the Confederate States of America.
Yet there was also an outpouring of support for the mayor’s actions, and apparently it was centered upon an appreciation of “southern heritage, the military, and states' rights.”
Kim Ragland, another resident who attended the city-council meeting, was said by Fox to be upset about the prohibition of the Stars and Bars and “wondered what effect this would have on the troops.”
Ragland said, “This is a slap in the face to every man or woman fighting for our country because you’re saying, ‘You know what, what you’re doing, it’s not going to matter.’”
The Fox report also noted: “Other residents who supported the mayor said that Robert E. Lee didn’t support slavery, but states' rights. They said they are not against the observance of Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, but they say they feel Robert E. Lee doesn’t get the respect they say he deserves.”
The comments about “Southern heritage” and “states' rights” are intelligible (albeit arguable). But it’s difficult to make the connection between a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old violent rebellion against the unifying structure of the United States and support for the Armed Forces that currently defend the nation. Nevertheless, a resident of Marshall expressed passionate concern that banning the exhibition of a Confederate flag on public grounds might negatively impact the morale of American troops, who might interpret it as “a slap in the face.”
It is true that Southerners are overrepresented in the U.S. military as a proportion of the population, but most of them are probably pretty sure that they are not fighting for the C.S.A. Also, many of them are black.
There are surely other towns across the South just like Marshall, with conflicting and confusing histories that are reflected in conflicted and confused residents.
The Marshall experience shows that even in a place where practically everyone is white, there will be serious disagreements about whether the Confederate flag is a symbol of pride or prejudice. At the very least, it makes clear that the power of the Confederate flag as a symbol lives on.
In the hearts and minds of its admirers, an emblem that inspired treason has come to represent patriotism. They uphold a banner to make the case for “states' rights,” overlooking that it stands for a nation conceived to deny fundamental human rights to some of its citizens. And they vigorously defend these colors as an expression of a complicated heritage that they do not fully comprehend.
Before the Civil War had ended, President Abraham Lincoln famously concluded his second inaugural address with an appeal for “malice toward none” and “charity for all,” and he also encouraged his audience “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves ….”
One hundred and fifty years since the South tore itself apart in order to tear itself away, that peace remains elusive, and it is the South’s most profound loss of all.
