Removal of the Confederate battle flag from its honored position in front of the South Carolina state capitol has had an uplifting effect even beyond Columbia. A new optimism has been generated among advocates of civil rights, at least for a time. There is a sense that race relations are improving. Nonetheless, the erratic progress in equal rights raises the question about what were the real intentions of the Founding Fathers.
Since the 13th Amendment to the Constitution ended the legality of slavery in 1865, it is easy to forget that 41 of the 57 men who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 were slave holders. What were the slavers thinking when they confirmed with their signature that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal?”
They certainly did not intend for “all men” to include women as full participants in the body politic. The constitutional right for women to vote was not established until 1920. Also, in many states, only white men with property were formerly granted the franchise. Indeed, it was not expected then that slaves would be able to vote.
Representatives to the Continental Congress who signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, an event Americans celebrate every Fourth of July, were members of the colonial elite. About half of the European immigrants to America in the 17th and 18th century came as indentured servants, a class similar to slavery except that it ended after a term of years.
Whether or not they were slaves, or freed men, blacks were at the bottom of the social order. In the 1857 Dred Scott case, Roger B. Taney, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, expressed a common sentiment when he described blacks as “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” The citizenship denied by Taney was ultimately granted in 1868 to anyone born in the U.S. regardless of race or former condition of servitude.
Even after slavery was outlawed in 1865, and citizenship was granted in 1868, and the right to vote was constitutionally approved in 1870 by the 15th Amendment, the effort to demean African Americans never ceased. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation was lawful as long as conditions are separate but equal. This remained the law of the land until 1954 when it was overturned in the school desegregation case, Brown v. Board of Education.
South Carolina was a leader of the Dixiecrat secession. In fact, the Civil War began on Apr. 12, 1861 at Fort Sumter in that state. In the battles which followed, some with names now part of American history — Manassas, Bull Run, Antietam and Gettysburg — an estimated 490,309 Confederate soldiers lost their lives. Many impoverished Southern men died so that wealthy plantation owners would have the right to require slaves to work on their farms.
Civilized nations do not usually embrace the enslavement and persecution of racial groups as memorable elements of their heritage. Conservatives in South Carolina raised the Confederate battle flag from the Statehouse to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Civil War that was fought to preserve slavery and, according to some, to oppose the civil rights advances being made by African Americans.
The Confederate flag was removed in Columbia on July 10, 2015. At that time the wealth and income disparity in America was as great as during the Great Depression of the 1930s and, with their greater population, the number of white Americans living in poverty was almost twice the number of blacks. Let the fall of the flag mark the date when Americans of limited income began to work together for the general good.
