![]() ![]() Captured colors, we admit, differ from soldiers’ monuments and the like, in being the civilized equivalent of scalps, but they are nevertheless things which every man who has served in the field and feels military traditions, prizes highly, and we think the part of wisdom would have been-as it has been the sober second thought of the President-to let the Confederate colors stay where they are a little longer, or until the reign of peace in the hearts of the “soldier element” in politics is somewhat more complete. But we fear the day has not come yet, and that in consenting to surrender them, without any special demand or occasion for it, the President has done more to supply the “bloody shirt” screamers with material for execrations than the Southerners with reasons for loving the restored Union. The day will surely come when Americans will cease to treasure memorials of the humiliation and defeat of a large body of their own countrymen, which is what captured rebel colors really are. The Nation, which had been founded by Republicans but led the “Mugwumps” in supporting Cleveland in 1884, wrote about “The Battle-Flag Flurry” in its main editorial in the issue of June 23, 1887: Realizing the political peril he had put himself and other Democrats in, Cleveland quickly rescinded the order. ![]() The head of the Grand Army of the Republic, the organization of Union vets, said of Cleveland’s order: “May God palsy the brain that conceived it, and may God palsy the tongue that dictated it!” (They were known as “bloody shirts,” i.e., those who hysterically invoke past martyrs to justify a current position-virtually a national pastime today.) The announcement that the Confederate battle flags would be returned to Southern states rendered Union partisans apopleptic. Cleveland was the first US president after the Civil War who did not serve-he, like Lincoln himself, hired a substitute to serve instead-and had already made a few plays for Southern support (in cabinet nominations, for one thing) that had won him the ire of fervent Union veterans and the Northern politicians who pandered to them. They were stored at the War Department in Washington, DC, for over two decades before President Grover Cleveland, assenting to the casual suggestion of an army official, ordered the flags returned to the respective Southern states whose regiments they represented. It followed the custom of the day that Union troops confiscated the enemy’s battle flags at the end of the Civil War. Actually, if you look at the history of the Confederate flag since the Civil War-as The Nation’s archive enables you to do-you realize that the presence of the flag at the Capitol today is a vestige not of 19th-century secessionism but of 20th-century segregationism. It is far from the case that the Confederate battle flag has flown over the South Carolina State Capitol since the day in April 1861 when Confederate troops within the state’s borders fired the first shots of the Civil War. ![]()
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