Civil war history makes for complex conflicts and odd alliances

The intense and (unequivocal declarations to the contrary) anything but simple debate over the propriety of Confederate monuments and other symbols in public places has made for a pair of unlikely allies, although neither might be aware of it.

Democratic former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes and Republican Vice President Mike Pence recently weighed in on the issue with similar perspectives, if from somewhat different points of reference.

The vice president told “Fox & Friends” that we should not “erase parts of our history just in the name of some contemporary political cause.”

The former governor, in a column on his law firm’s website, likewise does not call for all Confederate symbols to be removed from the public arena. But a “complete history” of the Civil War must be told, and not in “the mythical terms of Gone With the Wind.” Slavery, Barnes writes, was “not benevolent and slaves were not extended members of the family. Slavery was a cruel, violent and demeaning institution, which is our national shame. And those who deny the Civil War was fought … to maintain slavery are spreading a myth which further distorts the true course of history.”

One can reasonably agree or disagree with those perspectives. Certainly the moral and historical integrity of Confederate iconography goes far beyond what Pence — who walked with John Lewis in Selma in 2010 in a civil rights commemoration — called a “contemporary political cause”: Americans have been debating it, with varying degrees of rancor, for a century and a half.

Barnes’ take on the issue likewise won’t satisfy absolutists on either side, but he can hardly be accused of moral cowardice on the subject: He wagered (and, many believe, lost) his political capital in 2002 by pushing to remove the Confederate battle flag from the Georgia state banner. He has also called for changing the name of Atlanta’s Confederate Avenue, because the state Department of Public Safety shouldn’t be “on a street associated with slavery and suppression.”

Historical context, as the Columbus mayor recently and rightly noted, is an important (if not ultimately deciding) factor. The flag Barnes moved to change, to cite an almost perfect example, was designed not by still-smoldering Georgians in a still-smoldering postwar Georgia, but in 1956 as an act of anti-integration backlash by one of the most racist state legislatures in 20th century history.

In any case, efforts to remove, alter or relocate Confederate-themed objects might run afoul of a 2001 state law protecting monuments to veterans. The Augusta Chronicle reports that state Sen. Harold Jones, D-Augusta, has suggested changing that law to allow local governments to make those decisions.

In any case, Barnes’ essay says, the warts-and-all context of historical monuments “should be a constant reminder that politicians appealing to passion laced with race can lead to disaster and scar a nation for generations. In the current state of politics no lesson could be needed more.”

Amen.

This story was originally published August 23, 2017 at 4:47 PM with the headline "Civil war history makes for complex conflicts and odd alliances."