• @[email protected]
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    fedilink
    101 year ago

    It wasn’t even used as the actual flag of the Confederacy. This version of the flag is the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, which has sort of just come to represent the whole Confederacy now. The actual flag that was used by the Confederacy actually had quite a bit more white on it, which in the eyes of some at the time understood it to represent the “White race” (from Wikipedia):

    On April 23, 1863, the Savannah Morning News editor William Tappan Thompson, with assistance from William Ross Postell, a Confederate blockade runner, published an editorial championing a design featuring the battle flag on a white background he referred to later as “The White Man’s Flag,” a name which never caught on. In explaining the white background of his design, Thompson wrote, “As a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.”

    Their flag actually went through three versions between 1861–1865 (each with multiple variations), so they really didn’t have their shit together over the course of those 4 years even.