Love, Joy, Feminism
This country has a weird relationship with the Civil War.
See, for example, the following from the Root:
In today’s “about damn time” news, the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, who apparently is almost as tired of seeing Confederate flags as my black ass is, has decided to remove them from Marine installations entirely.
This raises a question: why the heck were there Confederate flags at Marine installations in the first place? Look, I get that there are people in the U.S. South who wish the Confederacy had won the war. But they didn’t, and we’re talking U.S. military installations, not private yards.
You know, the same U.S. military that beat the Confederacy.
See the following, from Military.com:
As states continue to grapple with the passionate debate over whether to display statues and other tributes to Confederate leaders, Marines have been told the materials won’t be tolerated on any of the Corps’ installations.
Commandant Gen. David Berger last week instructed top Marine leaders to remove Confederate-related paraphernalia from the service’s bases worldwide.
Worldwide?
I am genuinely curious whether other countries do this: do other countries include flags from the side that lost an internal civil war over a century ago in their military installations?
I am not ignorant of how things got this way. After the Civil War, whites in both the North and the South wanted it to all just go away. They wanted things to get back to normal. The North chose to remember the war as quarreling brothers who had since made up, set about pardoning Confederates soldiers and officers, and then stood aside and let these same individuals set up order in the South however they liked—which, of course, meant lynchings and Jim Crow.
At the turn of the twentieth century, a movement to create memorials to Confederate soldiers flourished in the U.S. South, in part as a way to visually reaffirm the dominance of white power. The South may not have won the war, but they did win the peace. By the early 1900s, conditions in the South were so bad for black Americans that they began leaving for cities in the North in droves. In the South, they were free and equal only on paper.
A USA Today article on the decision to remove the Confederate flag from U.S. Marine Corps installations includes this note at the top:
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that The Citadel removed the Confederate Naval Jack from its chapel. The flag is still in place at the college.
I scrolled down to find the referenced section:
And in 2015, The Board of Visitors for The Citadel, South Carolina’s historic military academy, requested permission from the South Carolina General Assembly to remove the Confederate Jack ensign from its chapel. But the determination was made that the flag met criteria as a war memorial, and under the South Carolina Heritage Act, the ensign could not be legally removed.
After I read this, I realized I didn’t know much about what happened to military training schools and other military institutions in the U.S. South in the decades after the Civil War. So I looked up the history of The Citadel. I learned that when South Carolina seceded from the United States, The Citadel was repurposed as a Confederate military training school.
On February 18, 1865, the school ceased operation as a college when Union troops entered Charleston and occupied the site. Following the war, the Board of Visitors eventually regained possession of The Citadel campus and with the urging of Governor Johnson Hagood, Class of 1847, the South Carolina Legislature passed an act to reopen the college. The 1882 session began with an enrollment of 185 cadets.
Because Wikipedia can be a questionable source, I found a history of the the institution on The Citadel’s website. I don’t consider this source to necessarily be more reliable than Wikipedia, except perhaps for things that have more to do with details, but it is at least a second source.
On January 29, 1882, the Secretary of War ordered the commanding officer of the federal Military District of South Carolina to evacuate the Citadel, and on January 31, 1882, the South Carolina General Assembly passed “AN ACT to authorize the Re-opening of the South Carolina Military Academy.” After seventeen years, the Citadel was once again under the control of the State and the Board of Visitors.
On October 2, 1882 one hundred eighty-nine cadets reported to the reopened Citadel. Colonel John P. Thomas, Class of 1851, who had headed the Arsenal Academy during the Civil War, was appointed Superintendent.
Do you know what I feel? I feel a profound sense of shame. My ancestors lived in the North. They let this happen. Colonel John P. Thomas was a Confederate military leader, and the North just handed a military training school in the South over to him? In what world would that be a good idea? It amounts to rearming the very people you’ve just defeated in a bloody war.
Ah, but I know in what world that might seem like a good idea: a world in which white northerners care more about getting things back to normal than they do about making sure that freed blacks in the South have access to the rights they’ve been promised.
In case you’re curious about The Arsenal, which the article above notes Thomas commanded during the Civil War, I looked it up. It was founded during the antebellum period to put down slave rebellions, and was burned by General Sherman during the Civil War and never rebuilt. The Citadel, by the way, was also founded to put down slave rebellions.
That’s right. Military institutions that were founded to put down slave rebellions—military institutions that were used to fight the Union during the Civil War—were handed right back to the same people who made their careers fighting to prolong slavery and oppress black people.
Today, black Americans make up 30% of South Carolinians but only 7% of cadets at The Citadel. (The first African American cadet at The Citadel was admitted in 1966.) You can see how very white The Citadel still is by the pictures on the slider on its website’s main page.
So perhaps we have our answer. If U.S. military academies and installations in the South were turned over to Confederate veterans to run within decades of the war’s end, it’s unsurprising that the Confederate flag and other odes to the “Lost Cause” would pop up in these institutions.
And remember—the Confederate flag still flies in the chapel at The Citadel.
Why is the Marine Corps taking steps to remove these emblems now, specifically?
David Berger, Commandant General of the Marines, prioritized for “immediate execution” the banishment of objects representing the Confederacy in response to a congressional hearing on the rise of extremism in the military, according to Military.com.
A recent survey of active-duty troops by the independent Military Times found a significant rise in white supremacist and racist ideologies from 2018. In their responses, troops considered white supremacy a greater threat to national security than immigration or domestic terrorism with connections to Islam, the Military Times reported.
Huh. Funny how an emblem put in place by white supremacists might become a point of attraction for white supremacies. It’s almost like maybe—bear with me here—it’s almost like maybe we should have taken these symbols down decades ago. It’s almost like symbols created in hate are in fact symbols of hate, and as such should be taken seriously.
We have never fully grappled with the legacy of the Civil War, and its aftermath. And maybe we never will. But that doesn’t erase the fact that it is still with us.
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