Let's Ban the Banning Before It's Too Late

The recent moves to ban Confederate flags, monuments and symbols reminded me of the description of a unique Confederate flag that I found in researching my book, Clear the Confederate Way!: The Irish in the Army of Northern Virginia.

An artist's rendition of the Emerald Guards flag.

 

One side of the flag featured the national colors of the Confederacy, the so-called Stars and Bars, with a standing portrait of President Washington super-imposed on its center. The reverse side of the banner was green, displaying a harp, the national symbol of Ireland, encircled by shamrocks. The Irish side of this most unusual Confederate flag included the inscriptions, “Erin go Bragh,” meaning “Ireland forever,” and “Faugh a ballagh,” the Irish battle cry translated as “Clear the way!”

 

This flag belonged to the Emerald Guards, a Confederate unit of Irishmen from Mobile, Alabama, part of the 8^th Alabama Infantry. They were the regiment’s color company, designated to hold the flags at the center of the battle line. They entered Confederate service in green militia uniforms and their banner was a ceremonial or presentation flag that remembered their Irish heritage but also showed allegiance to the Confederacy and to the founding of the nation under Washington. Washington after all was a Southerner who’d defeated the British in the War of Independence.

The intricacies of the Emerald Guards flag, its mixture of multi-cultural heritage and symbols, point up how this country’s history is layered, intertwined and complex. Pulling at the threads of history will unravel not just unpleasant images, but remembrance, and ultimately knowledge and understanding.

Banning historical relics seems a perilous step toward Orwellian dystopia. The Emerald Guards flag is lost to history, probably because of its fragile silk construction. But if we still had such a flag today, would it be banned? And who would decide? A banning czar? A banning panel? And how would they decide?

For now we ban the Battle Flag and its St. Andrew’s Cross.  But won’t other flags, other symbols replace it? For years, I am told, the Confederate battle flag was used by Irishmen serving with the British army as a symbol of their nationalist sympathies when the Irish Tri-Color was not allowed in barracks or mess.

The reverse of the Emerald Guards flag may have looked like this.

 

So what historical symbol will we ban next? The Stars and Bars seems already destined to fall. Eventually all Rebel flags will have to go, so says The Empire; even the Confederate national flag in its Emerald Guards incarnation, where it lurks behind a representation of the father of our diverse and tolerant nation.

We could ban all Confederate flags, but there were lots of different Southern flags. The Rebels could not defend their territory, feed their armies or win their independence, but they sure as hell knew how to design a flag. Who will even be able to identify the flag in its various forms? Who, after all, has the expertise to fathom all the symbols of every Confederate flag; the stars, the stripes, the bars, the crosses, the reds, the whites, the blues, the greens, the golds, the Irish harps, the nationalist sunbursts, George Washington?

To take this to its absurd yet logical conclusion, eventually the “Flag Police”, the "Department of Confederate Symbol Security," will develop the data collection systems and algorithms to detect and identify a criminal banner. They will move to protect the sensibilities of anyone who claims offense. But won’t those in the Underground, let’s call it the Flag Resistance Movement, like the Irish in the Queen’s army, find a way to preserve the meaning behind the discredited symbol by finding another one?

The symbol security bureaucracy will find other targets too. What if the meaning of a particular flag falls out of public favor--the rainbow flag say? Will the FP at the insistence of some furious mob of the future rip it down?

Perhaps we need to ban the banning before it’s too late.

When Confederate Flag Brought The Races Together

Flags decorate both Union and Confederate graves on Memorial Day.

The recent controversy over the Confederate flag reminded me of a story from the fall of 1999.

On a crisp October Saturday that year, about fifty family members gathered around a flag-draped grave in the Landa Cemetery in Suffolk, Virginia.

The event was the dedication of a new military grave marker for Civil War soldier Jason Boone. It was no different from dozens of such ceremonies which occur all across the United States every year.

Well, it was abit different. The flag on the grave was the Confederate Stars and Bars, the family was black and the soldier had served in the 41^st Virginia Infantry of the Confederate States Army. The black Boone descendants sat in a place of honor at the ceremony, surrounded by dozens of Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy wearing period dress.

The incongruent graveside tableau reminds us that history is not as “black and white” as we think.

The ceremony fifteen years ago was put together by Boone’s descendants led by Mrs. Katheryne B. Hamilton of Portsmouth and F. Lee Hart IV, then commander of the Tom Smith Camp of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, in Suffolk.

The story was chronicled in the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot by Linda McNatt (“Black Confederate Honored In Suffolk,” October 24, 1999) and later in the Washington Post by Linda Wheeler (“Honoring a Son of the South, Descendants of White Confederates Salute Black Man’s Service,” December 4, 1999).

Mrs. Hamilton had been researching family roots when she read a newspaper article about Hart’s efforts to restore Suffolk’s Cedar Hill Cemetery and mark the graves of every Confederate buried there.

 

She did not hesitate to call the SCV commander to tell him about her great grandfather Boone. He immediately asked if he had a headstone. Mrs. Hamilton did not even know where her ancestor was buried at that point, but when she located the grave in the old Landa Cemetery in the Skeetertown community south of the city near the airport, she found only an old concrete block marker.

Hart readily agreed to procure a new military gravestone from the United States Veterans Administration which provides stones for all American veterans, including those who served the Confederacy. In a perfect world we would salute an “only in America” moment and celebrate the happy ending to our story. But real life is not so simple.

Hart had traditions to uphold. That summer, he and some other SCV members visited Hamilton’s home to explain how the group conducts its dedication ceremonies and how seriously they take their duty to honor Confederate veterans. Remember that Jason Boone was not buried at Cedar Hill with most of the other Southrons. His new gravestone would require its own dedication ceremony, Hart told her, and the Tom Smith SCV Camp would not leave even one man behind, so to speak. It did not matter to Hart that Jason Boone was black. He deserved all the honors that any Confederate soldier would get.

But here’s the thing, he went on. A Confederate honor guard would march in Skeetertown's largely black neighborhood. The Confederate flag, the Stars and Bars, not the Battle flag, would lay across the grave and re-enactors in gray and butternut would parade other Rebel flags. The Confederacy had many in the four years of the war: the Battle flag modeled after the St. Andrew’s Cross; the Stars and Bars or First National Flag, the Second National Flag known as the Stainless Banner and the Last National Flag, sometimes called the Blood-Stained Banner, among them. Private Boone’s ceremony could be no different from other Confederate dedications, Hart told her matter-of-factly. This is how we do this; it is a solemn ritual and we cannot change it, he said.

But Mrs. Hamilton had a problem with the SCV group displaying Confederate flags in a black neighborhood, in a black cemetery. She expressed concern that children might see them. Her 24-year-old daughter Tanya had the typical visceral revulsion to the thought of seeing those flags as well. "Definitely not!" other family members counseled.

But Hart’s sincerity touched Mrs. Hamilton, who was then a hospice nurse. She respected him when he told her he could not furl the flags for which his ancestors fought. He told her he understood how white supremacist groups had poisoned minds against the flag—but explained that all of that had occurred well after the war. Jason Boone knew nothing of the political hi-jacking of the flag he fought under.

Hart told her what the flag meant to him and his brothers in the SCV and he assured her that no offense was meant in its display by them.

And that’s when hearts began to change. Mrs. Hamilton took some time to think about the situation. She checked the historical record that Hart had hinted at; she considered Hart’s conviction and heartfelt sincerity.

And she thought about Jason Boone. He was someone she had come to proudly love. She liked his independence. She admired his loyalty to the mixed-race community where he had prospered.

Boone was mixed-race himself, the free-born great grandson of Joseph Skeeter, an English surveyor in Suffolk’s Colonial period. Boone was a farmer when the war began. He married twice and fathered 30 children. In Mrs. Hamilton’s thinking, Boone, along with his brother Anthony, chose to fight with the men they farmed, fished and hunted with, though another brother fought for the Union. Boone lived to be 105 years old and was granted a Confederate pension in 1924. She was especially proud that none of his children had been born out of wedlock.

And so Mrs. Hamilton decided to go forward with Hart’s vision for the ceremony. She put the word out to her family, to the Suffolk neighborhoods, to the city’s black community.

“We can’t judge 1865 by the standards of 1999,” she later told the Post. “I decided that I didn’t own Jason Boone and I had no rights to him. This is the thing to do for Jason…Jason marched under that flag. He wasn’t ashamed. He was proud of it. I can’t be in the way of that.”

The Fredericksburg National Cemetery.

And so that October day, Confederate flags snapped in the autumn breezes of Skeetertown. A piper piped, prayers were recited, historians marked the occasion. Hart spoke as did Mrs. Hamilton and her daughter Kristin. Daughter Tanya later said the ceremony was wonderful. She said her feelings about the flag changed that day. “I know the history now. When I see it I realize it’s part of their heritage.” And after a pause, “It’s part of my heritage.”

A Confederate artillery battery from North Carolina fired a three-gun salute, a Rebel bugler sounded “Taps.”

And then the honor guard unveiled Jason Boone’s new smooth granite gravestone.. The men dressed as Confederate soldiers removed and reverently folded the National Flag of the Confederacy—Jason’s flag—and presented it to the remarkable Mrs. Hamilton—and she accepted it—for Jason.