Remove Confederate symbols, but don’t blame just the South for slavery

The war over Confederate symbols began when the Confederate flag was lowered from its pole in front of the South Carolina statehouse after the mass shootings in June at a black church in Charleston – and no end is in sight.   The problem is, it’s only being fought over Confederate icons.  

Demands for the removal of Confederate statues and names on public buildings have swept across the South from Austin, Texas (a statue of  Jefferson Davis on the University of Austin campus) to Falls Church, Virginia (a high school named after a Confederate general).   The controversy over Confederate emblems had been peaceful until this week, when a district attorney in an Atlanta suburb filed gang terrorism charges against 15 members of a group called “Respect the Flag” for threatening black partygoers from their Confederate flag bearing pickup trucks.   The only place that so far appears above the fray is the Statuary Hall Collection in the Capitol, which includes statues of Davis, Confederate Vice President Alexander Hamilton Stephens, and pro-slavery South Carolina Senator John Calhoun.   The collection is governed by federal law, which means any removals of statues would have to be approved by Congress, absent agreement by a state’s governor and legislature. 

{mosads}But lost in the uproar over Confederate flags and statues is the fact that the South was not the only guilty party.   Slavery has been justly called America’s original sin because responsibility also lay with the North.  Yet the fights over Confederate emblems have kept the focus – and the blame — almost exclusively on the South.

Make no mistake, the Confederate cause was, to quote Union General Ulysses S. Grant, “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”  Long after the Civil War had ended, the Confederate flag was the rallying standard for appalling racists, such as then Alabama Governor George Wallace, who raised the Confederate battle flag in 1963 in Montgomery, Alabama as part of his “Segregation Forever” campaign.      

But the North was not a bystander to slavery or racism.  In the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, Abraham Lincoln observed that Southerners “are just what we would be in their situation” and that “when Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we, I acknowledge the fact.”  Slaves were once auctioned in downtown Philadelphia, on Merchants Row in Boston, and along Wall Street in New York City.   Benjamin Franklin owned slaves and ran slave sale notices in his newspaper.   Even after slavery ended in the Northern states, the Northern banking and textile industries provided financing and the market crucial to the South’s cotton-based economy, which made slavery economically sustainable. 

Perhaps one reason for the exclusive focus on the South is that there are no easily removable symbols of slavery in the Northern states like a Confederate flag.   But there are symbols.  In the 1850s, a predecessor of Aetna Inc., one of the nation’s largest insurance companies, sold policies that reimbursed slave owners for financial losses from the death of a slave.  No one in Hartford, Connecticut, where Aetna is based, is demanding that the insurer leave town (Aetna has apologized for its past).   

Likewise, no one in Columbus, Ohio apparently is demanding the removal from a Statehouse monument of the statue of one term President Rutherford B. Hayes.   After the close election of 1876, the Bush v. Gore of its day, ended up in the House of Representatives, then Republican candidate Hays from Ohio secured the presidency by cutting the political deal from hell.   Southern Democrats in Congress threw their support to Hayes, who in turn, once he became president, withdrew the last federal troops from the South and ended Reconstruction.   While some historians argue that the ensuing century of white rule and the hideous oppression of black southerners was inevitable even without a back room deal, there is a good case for taking down Hays’ statue.    

To be sure, the abolition movement and the Underground Railroad largely came from the North and the sacrifice of soldiers in the Union Army defeated the South and ended slavery.   But this is not a question of arguing comparative fault, as in an automobile accident.  In his Second Inaugural Address in 1865, Lincoln noted that slavery was “localized” in the South and that the war was fought because of slavery but refused to suggest that the North was blameless.  To the contrary, he explained, with a wisdom and humility that each generation must learn anew, that it was “American slavery” that God “now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came.”   Lincoln vowed that the war would go on even if it meant destroying all the wealth unjustly gained from “the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil,” that is, centuries of slavery in both North and South.

Remove the Confederate flag and relocate statues but don’t do away with history.  It wasn’t just the South that made slavery, and therefore that flag, possible.         

Wallance is an attorney and writer in New York City,  and the author of “Two Men Before the Storm: Arba Crane’s Recollection of Dred Scott and the Supreme Court Case That Started the Civil War.”