The first flag they adopted, in 1861, so resembled the familiar old standard it confused soldiers on the battlefield and had to be replaced. The Confederates worshipped the American revolutionaries, especially fellow slave-holding rebels like George Washington (the “first rebel president,” they called him), and saw themselves as continuing his work, not repudiating it. Instead, they sought to strengthen it, expand it, and further solidify their control of its most powerful and least representative institutions: the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. In the period only later dubbed the antebellum era, white Southerners weren’t aching to leave the Union. Rather, they have been mutually constitutive and disturbingly aligned.įor the four years of the Civil War, the advocates of racial oppression and political reaction endeavored to destroy the United States for fourscore years before that, however, they were the country’s most stalwart friends. history, patriotism and white supremacy, the values supposedly embodied by the two flags, have hardly been at odds. The Lincoln Project evidently thinks the two ideologies are incompatible. “Nothing says ‘America First’ quite like Trump’s unadulterated support for the Confederacy,” the Lincoln Project, a band of Never Trump Republicans, sarcastically tweeted earlier this month after the president announced that he would “not even consider the renaming of.Magnificent and Fabled Military Installations” bearing the names of Confederate generals. This strikes some as comically contradictory. A century and a half after the Union and Confederate flags were flown by armies at war, a certain kind of conservative thinks nothing of celebrating both symbols, sometimes even on the same hoodie. In a seeming paradox, it is often the most flamboyantly patriotic Americans who appoint themselves guardians of a discredited rebel flag.
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