The Sins of My Confederate Fathers
For I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.
Exodus 20:5, King James Version
Of all the disturbing images from the failed January 6 coup, the one that made me sickest was a man carrying a full-sized Confederate battle flag through the halls of the United States Capitol. It was a dark day for our country, and it triggered some personal history that I’d just as soon forget.
My ancestors fought for that banner. As a native Georgian, I literally grew up under it; it was part of the state flag as long as I lived there. And it took me a disappointingly, embarrassingly long time to see that symbol for what it is.
Many commenters expressed shock at the image. The reaction isn’t surprising. That flag has flown over more than a century of state-sanctioned violence against Black Americans, from the end of Reconstruction through the present. Anyone familiar with this history should be appalled by its presence in the Capitol.
But for me, there’s more. My ancestors fought for that banner. As a native Georgian, I literally grew up under it; it was part of the state flag as long as I lived there. And it took me a disappointingly, embarrassingly long time to see the symbol for what it is. A wise friend recently posted on Facebook, “We all need to get comfortable wrestling with the uncomfortable truth of our individual, cultural, historical, regional, and national ancestries.” I’ve done some of that wrestling privately for years. This is one of my first extended attempts to do it publicly, to explore my responsibility for the iniquities of my fathers.
The school bus was somewhere south of Atlanta on a sticky June evening. I’d finished the sixth grade and was on my way home from a Beta Club trip to Atlanta. We’d visited the Cyclorama, a massive 360-degree painting of the Battle of Atlanta, one of the last decisive conflicts of the Civil War. We’d gone to Stone Mountain, to watch in awed silence as lasers brought Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis to life while “Dixie” played over the loudspeakers. So although I don’t recall exactly how the Civil War came up in conversation on the ride back, there was plenty of reason for it to.
I remember telling my seatmate that it was good the South lost the Civil War and slavery ended. It was a no-brainer for a bright, innocent kid like me. To my surprise, my friend disagreed. I don’t remember much of the conversation, beyond some historical revisionist fantasies about being alive during the Civil War and participating in a Confederate victory. But by the time the bus pulled into the parking lot of Chester Elementary School, my friend had awakened in me the first real inkling of Southern pride. It does no good now to berate my younger self, but I still feel ashamed when I think about that night. I knew better. It was morally obvious to me that slavery was evil, and the cause of the Confederacy was therefore evil, too. But even though I knew better, I was impressionable, and my friend was a year older, more popular, and in retrospect kind of cute. Even though I knew better, I swallowed the fictions of antebellum nostalgia and states’ rights hook, line, and sinker.
It never quite became an obsession, but I dabbled in Lost Cause mythology throughout high school. The tune “Dixie” made me smile wistfully, and Hank Jr.’s “If the South Woulda Won” was a guilty pleasure. I read up on Civil War history. I even thought about applying to join the Sons of Confederate Veterans, not realizing it was on its way to becoming a white supremacist organization. After all, I had at least two great-great-great grandfathers who fought for the South in the Civil War.
Jackson Hall, my distant namesake, was wounded in battle at Fredericksburg and spent time in a Union prison in Maryland. (I learned these facts from his pension application; yes, late in life, he received a pension from the same government he fought against.) After the war, he married my great-great-great grandmother, Mary Clementine Witherington the widow of another Confederate soldier who died in action. Jackson lived well into the twentieth century, long enough that older relatives still familiarly called him “Grandpa Hall” when I was growing up. The epitaph on his grave lists the two things that he was presumably proudest of in his life:
Served in Confederate Army 4 years.
Fought 22 battles.
Served as Deacon in Baptist church 50 years.
Dan Lister, another Confederate ancestor, enlisted Georgia’s 49th infantry with two of his brothers in 1862. His younger brother Hugh didn’t come back from the war. Dan was captured in battle in Virginia just days before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. When he died forty years later, the local newspaper called him “one of the oldest and most esteemed citizens of this section of the county.” His grave, just a couple of miles away from my childhood home, didn’t originally mention his military service. When I last visited the cemetery a decade ago, a rebel flag had been planted in an urn next to his headstone, and a new marble veteran’s monument lay at the foot of the grave slab, the result of recent efforts by Neo-Confederate organizations to mark Southern soldiers’ burial sites. These veterans monuments were paid for — yep, you guessed it — by the government against which these long-dead men had taken up arms in defense of slavery.
The rebel flag was a visible symbol of my pride in the South and the ancestors who fought for it. Although I can’t muster anything but disgust when I see it now, I remember finding it beautiful in high school, even sometimes feeling chills at the sight. When Georgia Governor Zell Miller proposed removing the Confederate banner from the state flag — this was before his reactionary embrace of conservatism — I was outraged, like almost everyone else I knew. I thought the tee-shirts were clever that had a picture of Malcolm X next to the Confederate flag, with the caption, “You keep your X, we’ll keep ours.” Of course, I still believed slavery was horrible, and racism was evil. I’d have been aghast had anyone explicitly suggested otherwise. But I loved the land where my family had lived for generations, and in my mind my ancestors only fought to defend it. Even Robert E. Lee had abhorred slavery, I believed, but heeded the call of his beloved Virginia. Turns out that’s a lie. The fact is, there were southerners who did oppose slavery and who didn’t support the Confederacy. That option was available to my own ancestors, but they didn’t take it.
I luckily emerged unscathed from my brief embrace of Confederate sympathies. If anything, I’m stronger for it, since I know firsthand the seductive power of the Lost Cause. I don’t remember exactly when I let go of the childish myths. It started in college, as I began critically examining much of my inherited worldview. Any lingering attachment evaporated once I moved north for graduate school. The break was final by 2003, when I was delighted that the Georgia legislature approved a referendum for a new state flag that wouldn’t include the Confederate flag. The icing on the cake? My old hometown representative cast the deciding vote.
“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner famously wrote. “It’s not even past.”
Faulkner’s own racial politics were problematic, to say the least, but his writings have helped me come to terms with the shame of my heritage. His 1942 novel Go Down, Moses tells the story of Ike McCaslin, heir to an antebellum estate, who discovers the atrocities committed there by his slaveholding grandfather. As a result, he renounces his inheritance, only to learn to his horror, decades later, that his cousins have repeated those atrocities on the very same land.
You can’t just walk away from your ancestors’ sins, Faulkner seems to say. Unless you devote your life to repudiating them, you’ll only perpetuate them.
One of the prized artifacts of the Minnesota Historical Society is a war-torn Confederate battle flag that was captured at Gettysburg by the First Minnesota Infantry. It’s a symbol of the state’s collective pride in their Union soldiers, who played a decisive role in that important victory. Since moving to Minnesota over a decade ago, I’ve wanted to claim that disgraced version of the Confederate flag as my own, instead of the one I proudly embraced in high school. Everybody has stupid ideas when they’re a teen-ager, right? Why should I be responsible for the beliefs and actions of long dead ancestors I never even knew?
The tale of Ike McCaslin warns against such easy acquiescence. You can’t just walk away from your ancestors’ sins, Faulkner seems to say. Unless you devote your life to repudiating them, you’ll only perpetuate them. Quietly washing my hands of my patrimony simply won’t cut it; some kind of penance is demanded of me. As I’ve tried to figure out what that looks like, I’ve been inspired by the recent efforts of descendants of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, who’ve publicly condemned their forebears’ actions and called for the removal of their monuments. As long as the real values of the Confederacy — commitment to white supremacy and opposition to pluralistic democracy — still find space in our national discourse, I have an obligation to denounce them.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate the South. Far from it. I may never live there again, but I still love its landscapes, its food, its rhythms of speech, and its people in all of their wonderful diversity. Nor do I despise my ancestors. Their lives made mine possible. I’ll never fully understand what they were thinking or why they made the choices they did. For better or worse, they’re resting now in the red clay from whence they came. Let them stay there. My responsibility is to the present. And for the rest of my life, I’m going to make damn well sure that anybody who’ll listen knows that the Confederate flag, and all it represents, have no place in this present.
