The Confederate States of America hasn’t been in operation for a century and a half. Nevertheless, after a photograph of mass murderer Dylann Roof holding a toy-sized Confederate flag flashed onto television and computer screens, “Take it down!” became the newest meme burning through social media. The trustees of The Citadel voted to remove a Confederate battle flag from the campus chapel. Walmart emptied its shelves of items featuring the most minute images of the flag. In Gettysburg, the battlefield’s on-site gift store announced that it “will no longer sell stand-alone items that solely feature the Confederate flag, including display and wearable items.”
I don’t have much personal investment in, or use for, the Confederate flag. I’m a Lincoln biographer and Civil War historian, from the town that gave the Confederacy its most serious defeat. The flag was the emblem of a regime based on what Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens called “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.” On those terms alone, the flag’s defenders ought to take the advice of the Confederacy’s most famous poet:
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