THE FLAG AND THE WATCHMAN

Reading Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, by returning me to the world of the Alabama segregated South of the 1950's, gave me an instructive insight into one of the debates that recurred during the recent Confederate Battle Flag controversy. It has to do with the old argument as to whether the Civil War was fought over the institution of slavery or over the principle of states' rights, each side of which has strong and vehement proponents. I've come to the conclusion that the War was fought over both--and neither. The actual cause of the Civil War was Racism: specifically, a dispute between north and south over the degree of racism--racial distinction, prejudice, and discrimination, toward persons of African origins-- that could be tolerated in the United States of America in the latter nineteenth century. Both parts of the nation held deep racial prejudices, which were directed against Indians and Asians as well as Africans, though the Africans were the only ones being held in slavery. Both parts unabashedly considered European persons to be innately, and by divine intent, superior to other color varieties of humans. The racism was merely a matter of degree. The difference was that in the north, a preponderance of opinion was just forming that there must be a limit to the disparity in treatment of people of color by white people, and that the line fell at the point of actual ownership of one human being by another, with all its potential for violent and heart-wrenching abuses . Thus, Abraham Lincoln was correct when, upon meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, one of those who helped mold northern opinion, he said, "So you are the little woman who made this great war." Southerners were in too deep to be turned by Stowe and the abolitionists. There were too many slaves among them, and the social consequences of emancipation outweighed even the economic ones. For them, there could be no limits applied to their supremacy over blacks, specifically--Indians having already been driven out, and Asians not yet beginning to pour in. To protect themselves from horrors of being murdered in their beds by uprising slaves, or by vengeful freed slaves, nightmares they had brought upon themselves, they held strongly to their traditional position that black people, being inferior in every conceivable way, were made to be enslaved. Poor Southerners did not fight for the Confederacy because they dreamed they might someday be slave owners; they were not that stupid. They enlisted because they were every bit as much racially prejudiced as their betters, and they were every bit as much afraid of the consequences to them of the emancipation of slaves. Where would freed slaves live? Among them, not among the rich. With whom would freed slaves compete for land and jobs? With them, not with the rich. With whose daughters (always the daughters) might they want to intermarry? With theirs, not those of the rich. These were the fears whose flames were fanned not only during the war but for the century and more following. In some ways, poor whites and newly emancipated blacks might have formed an alliance for a more democratic and just South, but that was not to be, for fear, suspicion, and "otherness" combine so strongly to keep people apart. A great irony of the American Civil War, then, is that its conclusion brought an end to actual slavery in America, but not to the deep and abiding racism that brought both about. The conflict is therefore not really resolved, and cannot be, until all segments of American society recant, repent, and root out, all vestiges of racial prejudice and come to realize that there is but one race present on this earth, and it is called "human." That is why the controversy over the Battle Flag rages, and why it will never go away until it no longer matters to anyone.