Confederate flag to keep flying at Georgetown museum

A Confederate battle flag raised at a Georgetown museum is staying put, according to the group that worked to place it there.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans in Delaware, or the Delaware Grays, have maintained a flag site at the Marvel Carriage Museum since May 2007. The museum is run by a nonprofit organization and is not affiliated with state or Sussex County government.

"The blood of a lot of American ancestors is on that flag," said Jeffrey Plummer, a leader of the Delaware Grays who was instrumental in getting the monument where the flag flies established. "We're simply honoring those veterans who fought for the South during the war between the states."

Calls to remove Confederate symbols were reignited following the shooting deaths of nine people at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, last week. The white suspect, Dylann Roof, posed in photographs with Confederate flags.

The Confederate flags on the grounds of Alabama's Capitol were removed Wednesday on the orders of the governor. In South Carolina, Gov. Nikki Haley called for the same thing to happen. In Virginia, custom license plates will no longer show the divisive symbol.

Delaware did not secede the Union during the Civil War, as Alabama, South Carolina and nine other states did. But many Delawareans, and Marylanders for that matter, were sympathetic to the Confederates and left Delaware to fight on their side.

Douglas Harper, a Lancaster, Pennsylvania, historian who's authored books about the Civil War, estimates that about 1,800 slaves lived in Delaware at the start of the Civil War. "Seventy-five percent of them were in Sussex County, mostly in the Nanticoke River basin," Harper said. The state Legislature in 1862 rejected an offer from President Abraham Lincoln to pay slave-owners for freeing slaves in their households.

The Delaware Confederate Monument names some 96 Delawareans, both soldiers and civilians, who took up the cause of the Confederacy. Names are still being added to the monument, most recently in April of this year, according to the Grays website.

"Byrd, Charles DuPont. Southern sympathizer. Dover," reads one line. The research done by the Grays shows he wrote Virginia's governor a letter "giving details of his family's gunpowder factories in Delaware and how they could be taken by secessionists and destroyed."

On either side of the monument, flags fly: the Delaware state flag and the Confederate battle flag. In addition, five Confederate emblems are carved into the monument. On Wednesday afternoon, two more small, polyester flags were stuck into the ground around the monument's base.

The Confederate flag has always been controversial in post-Reconstruction America but more urgently so since Roof's capture and arrest. South Carolina's Haley, in a speech Monday calling for the flag to be removed, said the Confederate flag was "a symbol that divides us."

The Delaware Confederate Monument has largely avoided controversy. "My thought pattern might be different from others. But it's not the flag, it's the hatred behind the flag," said Jane Hovington, a leader of the Lower Sussex NAACP. "A flag over a memorial, like we have here, is not representative of hatred."

What bothers her more, Hovington said, is seeing the flag on shirts or bumper stickers in the context of Southern defiance, of I-wish-I-was-in-Dixie rebellion. "There are those who spew hatred and hide behind that flag," she said.

And she said she supports the pressure put on South Carolina to remove the flag from the grounds of the Capitol because that is a public, governmental property.

Plummer said no one has approached the Delaware Grays in the wake of the Charleston shooting to suggest the monument's flag should go.

"If you have one person disrespect the flag, you can't hold everyone accountable for one person's actions. We simply want to honor those who serve," Plummer said. "We feel very bad for the families who have lost their loved ones in Charleston. Our hearts go out to them."

Contact James Fisher at (302) 983-6772, on Twitter @JamesFisherTNJ or jfisher@delawareonline.com .

Contact Taylor Potter at wpotter@delawareonline.com.