Bruce Levine is the J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois. He has published four books on the era of the Civil War, most recently The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution that Transformed the South (2013). He is now working on a biography of the Radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens.

This week the inherent racism of Confederate flags finally seemed too much for America to stomach. As flag-laden memorabilia disappears from store shelves and the flags themselves face removal from state capitals, it’s time for the truth about the Confederacy and its symbols to be confronted squarely.

In the wake of the slaughter of nine black people in a Charleston, South Carolina church, photographs emerged of suspected killer Dylan Roof posing with a pistol in one hand and the Confederate battle flag in the other. Amid the ensuing pubic revulsion, southern white politicians at last began to bend to long-standing demands to remove Confederate flags from state capitals, government buildings and—in the case of Mississippi—from within the design of its own state flag.


Unfortunately, quite a few of these office-holders are acting without coming to terms with just what those flags do in fact stand for. The result is a half-hearted, incomplete distancing from the racist Confederate tradition that these symbols represent.

Many of these politicians have previously defended public veneration of Confederate flags. That is true, for example, of South Carolina governor Nikki Haley. When she first ran for that office five years ago, Haley insisted that the Confederate battle flag was “not something that is racist” but was just part of “a tradition that people feel proud of.” As she now alters her stance about flying that flag, she continues to claim that "for many people in our state" it "stands for traditions that are noble... traditions of history, of heritage, and of ancestry.” It should be lowered, she now says, only because people like Roof have unfortunately misunderstood and misused it for racist purposes. This alleged murderer, she continues, "has a sick and twisted view of the flag." Similar statements come from members of both major parties. Charleston's Democratic mayor, Joseph P. Riley Jr., grieves because those like Roof "have appropriated something and used it as a symbol of hatred." "The Confederate Battle Flag," regrets former U. S. senator Jim Webb, another Democrat, "has wrongly been used for racist and other purposes in recent decades."

This implicit apology for the Confederacy and its symbols is not new. Until 1996, the Confederate battle flag flew atop South Carolina's capitol building. When an NAACP boycott of that state finally forced the flag's removal to another (nearby) location, then-governor David Beasley continued to deny that there was anything inherently racist about it. The problem was simply that "the Klan can misuse it as a racist tool, as it has, and others can misuse it solely as a symbol for racism, as they have."

In fact, claims like these have little to do with historical reality. The Confederate States of America firmly and emphatically stood for slavery and white supremacy from its birth. Modern-day racists like Roof who brandish Confederate symbols are not distorting their meaning. On the contrary: these racists stand squarely within the Confederate tradition. Pretending otherwise is an obstacle to coming to terms honestly with this country's history and the enduring strength of the racist views that its symbols celebrate.

Before the Civil War the enslavement of African Americans was central to southern prosperity. In 1860, nearly one in every three people who lived in the southern states was enslaved, was owned outright by others. On the markets of the day, those nearly four million human beings were worth something like $3 billion. That was a sum greater than the value of all the farmland in all the states of the South. It was a sum fully three times as great as the cost of constructing all the railroads that then ran throughout all the United States. And even more important to southern wealth than the sale price of these human bodies were the very profitable crops that the slaves produced for their masters, crops central to the southern economy. And only slave labor—only the labor of people owned outright by the landowners, people who had no right to object to their conditions much less refuse to do the work—would cultivate those crops intensively and cheaply enough to yield the immense profits that they did. Black slavery was justified on the grounds that African Americans were inferior to whites, fit only for ostracism, subordination and bound labor.

The Northern population's mounting hostility to slavery during the 1850s—and especially to its continuing spread within the U.S.—led southern states to leave the Union and initiate the Civil War. The first state to secede, South Carolina, explicitly did so to safeguard "the right of property in slaves" against attempts by "the non-slaveholding States" to judge "the propriety of our domestic institutions" and to deny "the rights of property" in human beings. Slave states bolted from the Union and formed the Confederacy, as South Carolina announced, because of "the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery." The Confederacy's founders agreed with the influential Charleston newspaper, the Mercury, that Lincoln’s election foretold “the extinction of slavery” throughout the old Union.

In 1861 Confederate president Jefferson Davis reminded his congress that because “the labor of African slaves was and is indispensable” to southern prosperity. “With interests of such overwhelming magnitude imperiled” by the election to the presidency of an antislavery man like Abraham Lincoln, he declared, “the people of the Southern States were driven . . . to the adoption of some course of action to avert the danger with which they were openly menaced.” The Confederacy's vice president, Alexander Stephens, also acknowledged that disputes about "the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization" between North and South constituted "the immediate cause" of secession. "Our new Government," he exulted, was founded "upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition." The new slaveholders' republic fashioned itself a constitution that reflected secession's central purpose. In most ways a carbon copy of the U. S. Constitution, the South's version distinguished itself by guaranteeing that no “law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves” would ever be enacted by a Confederate government.

Union victory in the Civil War destroyed slavery. The thirteenth amendment enshrined abolition, and two additional amendments promised black men the same civil rights that white men enjoyed. During the 1870s and afterward, however, champions of white supremacy led a vicious terror campaign that successfully stripped former slaves and their descendants of many of the gains that they had achieved during the war and its immediate aftermath. Leaders of that campaign and upholders of the long-lived segregationist Jim Crow system that terrorism imposed regarded themselves as heirs of the Confederacy. The Sons of Confederate Veterans, for example, boasted more than half a century after Appomattox about the South's postwar victory in the "great battle for white supremacy and southern ideals." And as new efforts to overthrow Jim Crow gradually grew in strength during the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, segregationists fiercely resisted under the banners of the Confederacy. Various southern states incorporated Confederate insignia into their flags in defiance of that rising civil rights movement.

Dylan Roof and his kind, thus, do not dishonor the memory of the Confederacy; they do not misrepresent and misuse its symbols. The Confederate States of America came into existence to preserve African American slavery and white supremacy. After slavery's legal abolition, the defenders of white supremacy quite logically looked back upon the slaveholders' republic as their true forebears. If the country is at last really ready to cease celebrating and honoring the Confederacy and its symbols, it should do so with a full awareness of the long and poisonous traditions that makes this necessary.