GETTYSBURG - In a face-off that frequently pivoted from chanting to angry heckling, more than 300 people gathered on Saturday at the Eternal Peace Light Memorial in a boisterous display of support and opposition to the Confederate flag.

Saturday's clash began as rally, organized by the J.W. Culp Camp Sons of the Confederate Veterans, in response to what it views as increasing attacks on southern heritage. The rally was one of many held across the country by confederate heritage groups as part of campaign to begin a national 'Confederate Flag Day'.

But by 2 p.m., at least in Gettysburg, it was clear that the group's rally had morphed into something different. As a group of more than 200 Confederate flag-supporters gathered on the northern side of the Eternal Peace Light Memorial, a separate group of 100 people, divided by steel barriers and a hundred yards of yellowing grass, gathered in a heckling, sign-waving protest on the southern side.

"You're bad people," a young man, dressed entirely in black, yelled into a bullhorn aimed at the flag supporters. "Really bad people".

"Just because you're not wearing hoods doesn't mean we can't recognize you," a woman yelled, alluding to the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan.

It was an afternoon that often displayed two very different understandings of American history.

Dressed in a civil war reproduction dress, Leslie Brang, a civil war re-enactor who drove from her home in Mercersburg for the event, saw the protesters as misinformed about the flag's meaning.

"It stands for the rights of the people and the rights of the states," she said. "And it stands for the upholding of the constitution of this country."

Chris Brang, Leslie's son, dressed in his own civil war regalia, chimed in. He said that too many people erroneously associated the flag as a symbol of slavery.

"You can not deny there was slavery in the south, there was," he said. "That's just the way it was. But there was slavery all throughout the country at the time, it was common throughout the entire world."

Ron Kline, 48, a Gettysburg carpenter, agrees with that sentiment.

"This is history," he said. "This is Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. This is where a bloody battle happened. We have to remember our ancestors that were there. This has nothing to do with hate - this is just a battle flag."

But on the southern side of the memorial, still bellowing through their bullhorn, the protesters were unlikely to be convinced by those arguments.

Susan Russell, a professor of Theatre at Gettysburg College, grew up in the south. She said there was no pretense about what the confederate flag stood for where she grew up.

"Where I come from in the south, in Little Rock, Arkansas, it is a symbol of hate," she said. "Everyone knows that. No one makes these kind of arguments where I come from that I know of."

By 4 p.m., as the flag supporters began to filter out from their side of the memorial, the protesters began to do the same.

Scott Hancock, a key organizer of the protest, said he was disappointed with the aggressive rhetoric from some of the younger protesters, but overall he was pleased with the protest.

Hancock, a professor of history and Africana studies at Gettysburg College, said the key problem with the arguments of supporters of the Confederate flag is that they were interwoven with a selective and erroneous understanding of the civil war.

For a start, Hancock said, no serious historian would say that the civil war was not about slavery.

"It's bad history," he said. "You can't find a legitimate historian today who would agree with that. And part of it is because the leaders of the Confederacy, from every state, made it quite clear that they were fighting to protect slavery."

Hancock said another argument he also heard frequently from heritage groups was that the American government, flying the American flag, has its own controversial history. Therefore, the argument goes, there's no reason that the Confederate flag should be singled out as a symbol of hate.

But Hancock said that was a specious argument. He said there's no doubt that the American government had done many terrible things in the course of its history but its flag had never represented slavery as an explicit ideal.

"The American flag stands for larger ideals about freedom and independence and I would be the first to say we have often failed, we have often done things that contradict that," he said. "But that was the ideal. But the ideal of the confederacy is inseparable from black slavery."

Ultimately, Hancock said, he hoped that the Sons of the Confederate Veterans, and other heritage groups around the country, took a harder look at civil war history. The protest wasn't intended as a personal attack on the flag supporters.

"It's not about them personally," he said. "They're probably great fathers and brothers and all that kind of stuff, probably great guys, but for me, especially as a history teacher, if their purpose is to educate the public, I think it's a really misleading education."