The Stars and Bars Are Not Forever

Too Many Roberts

The first Toombs, named William, came to the American colonies around 1650, settling in the area around Richmond, Virginia, future home of a then-unimaginable Confederacy. The first known Robert Toombs commanded a Virginia regiment during the Revolution and, for his services, was granted land in Georgia in 1783. It was there that his son, Robert Augustus Toombs, was born in 1810.

My great-great-something-or-other

He served as a U.S. Senator for eight years until resigning to become the first Secretary of State for the new Confederate States of America. (The story goes that he very nearly became President instead of Jefferson Davis, but liquor intervened.) My branch of the family had stayed quietly in Virginia, but the Georgia branch got famous. (Robert Augustus even gets name-checked in Gone With the Wind, when he is mentioned as one of the attendees of Ashley's birthday party.  Pretty weird reading that very famous book and suddenly seeing your own name in it.) When my great-grandfather was born in Richmond in 1895, he was named Robert, partly in honor of his famous relative, who had died only about ten years earlier, and Lee, in honor of the General.

That's why I am Robert Lee Toombs IV, bearer of a name that has continued unbroken since 1895. I am a Southerner whose roots go back a century before there was a United States, and when I travel in Georgia I can see my name on schools and streets and post offices, right there in Toombs County, where Vidalia sweet onions are grown.

One of the schools bearing the Toombs name.  I have
no idea who these people are.

In short: we Toombses have been around for a while. And I think I can say with some confidence that if you want to talk about Southern heritage, my claim to it is about as strong as most people you're likely to meet. The Confederate flag? That's my family's flag.

And yes: my ancestors, including Robert Augustus, owned slaves. And after the war he became the quintessential unreconstructed rebel. When he was urged to take an oath of allegiance to the United States after the conflict ended, he refused. When someone said that if he didn't take the oath he could not be forgiven, he bellowed, "But I have not forgiven you yet!"

So with all that said, with my Southern bona fides clearly established, let me be very clear: the Confederate flag should appear in museums and history books, and that's about it. But statehouses and parks and courts and schools and municipal buildings? Oh hell no.

(As I declare this, Robert Augustus surely rumbles in his grave. "Scalawag!" he murmurs, and he stuffs dirt in his ears.)

The Flag Itself

As has been reported widely, the flag we typically refer to these days as "the Confederate flag" was never the official flag of the Confederacy.  Rather, it was a battle flag used by the rebel army and navy.

The official Confederate flag, particularly the first, looked so much like the U.S. flag that it was confusing troops on the battlefield, so a separate battle flag was created with a design more easily distinguishable. This is probably the principal reason why the battle flag was chosen by white supremacist groups in the mid-20th century to be their symbol--it was a flag associated with combat, with armed insurrection. (Specifically, the States' Rights Democratic Party, or Dixiecrats, splintered from the Democratic Party in 1948 in protest over the Democrats' adoption of a civil-rights platform, and they opted to use the Confederate battle flag as their symbol. From there, it was picked up by the Klan, the Aryan Nation, and other white supremacist groups.)

A depiction of the Fort Pillow Massacre

It is also interesting to note that one of the generals who used the Confederate battle flag in Tennessee was Nathan Bedford Forrest and his Cavalry Corps. Because General Forrest is notorious for, among other things, the Fort Pillow Massacre, where black Union soldiers were shot down after they surrendered. He is also remembered for his membership in the Ku Klux Klan, of which he was supposedly the first Grand Wizard.

It seems clear to me that the "Confederate flag" is a representative of battle rather than civil authority, and that it was the combat standard employed by a general who has become emblematic of belligerent racism.  So emblematic, in fact, that in July the Memphis city council voted to dig up his body from a park downtown and move it elsewhere, and to take down the statue of him that stands in that park and sell it to whoever might want it.

The kicker, though, is that General Forrest may have had something of a conversion, not too long after the war ended.  He did join the first incarnation of the Klan, yes, but that was when the KKK was intended as a political organization dedicated to civil agitation; when it quickly started turning militant and violent, General Forrest got it disbanded in 1869.  (Unfortunately for us all, they came back around 1915.) And in 1875 he delivered a speech to an organization of black southerners in which he said, "I came to meet you as friends, and welcome you to the white people. I want you to come nearer to us. When I can serve you I will do so. We have but one flag, one country; let us stand together. We may differ in color, but not in sentiment. Use your best judgement in selecting men for office and vote as you think right."  As a sentiment it's a little condescending, yes, but not as rabidly racist as one might think from his reputation. Might it be possible that the wellspring of racist Southern pride experienced a conversion late in life that left him less racist? Why isn't that part of his story celebrated?

Also: why does the South, an entire region, get its own flag? New England doesn't have a banner, nor does the Midwest, and you certainly don't see us west-of-the-Rockies liberals clamoring for a Left Coast flag. So why should the South be represented by one flag?

Sounds a little separationist to me. Or segregationist.

"Southern Heritage"

I am, happily, not alone in calling for the flag to come down. In a speech that quickly went viral, South Carolina's Rep. Jenny Horne, a lineal descendant of Jefferson Davis, helped to break a deadlock (68 amendments to the bill!) and get the Confederate battle flag removed from the statehouse grounds. "I have heard enough about heritage," she said through tears.

The claim has long been that celebrating the Confederate battle flag isn't about racism, it's about Southern pride, Southern heritage. Lots of folks in the South, who aren't racist at all, fully subscribe to this heritage theory. There is, for instance, an organization called Southern Heritage 411 that was formed by H.K. Edgerton, "a black Confederate activist who works tirelessly to bring the real truth of our heritage to people of all races," according to their website. But it's interesting to note that in the About section of the site, presumably written by Mr. Edgerton or at least written pursuant to his direction, the first thing discussed is the "War for Southern Independence," asserting that "The ancestors of most blacks living in the United States today supported the Confederacy and have a right to be proud of their ancestor's [sic] service to the South. The Confederate Battle Flag is their flag also." It makes me wonder: is the seemingly-generic phrase "Southern Heritage" only about the Confederacy and the War? Isn't there a lot more to the South than that? What about the near-century of Southern history before the war, or the century-plus since then?

NFL player Doug Baldwin, a self-described Southerner who was raised in Florida, asked the same question: "The only relevant 'heritage' I could find in history not pertaining to civil war was associated with racism and segregation. Is this the heritage and pride you speak of? ... Is it the sweet tea and hospitality? Or is this a sense of pride for the rebellious actions against a national government who had the audacity to say that secession was unconstitutional and slavery was wrong?"

If "Southern Heritage" is about the war, and the Confederate cause, then the cause was rooted in slavery. Ta-Nehisi Coates laid out the damning evidence in an Atlantic article, citing directly from the seceding states' Articles of Secession. The whole chilling piece is worth reading in its entirety, but for now, suffice it to say that this one, from Mississippi, is typical:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin…

This position was corroborated by the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens (who happened to be a lifelong friend and ally of Robert Augustus Toombs), who said in his infamous Cornerstone Speech on March 12, 1861, "Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon 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."

There's our heritage right there, in the words of "Little Alec," my ancestor's best friend.

Where Should the Flag Fly, Then?

The historical significance of the battle flag, and all the flags of the Confederacy, is obvious and not to be denied. It certainly belongs in museums, no question. But what about at Fort Sumter?

It's a historical site that is definitely also a museum, but it's also federal parkland, as are many Civil War battlefields. And what about another symbol of the Confederacy, the enormous bas relief carved into the side of Stone Mountain near Atlanta? I spent some summers up there when I was a boy and knew it well--learned to ride horses in a camp nearby. Should that, as some have suggested, be sand-blasted from the stone of Stone Mountain? Or what about the exhumed body of General Forrest? Is it being removed because of political correctness gone mad? Or is it, as suggested by one city councilor, really linked to a $500 million expansion of the University of Tennessee that wanted the land?

I say, let the dead rest in peace. Let their works speak for themselves. The sculpture that gallops across the mountainside should stand for the same reason we shouldn't allow shopping malls at Gettysburg. It is our real heritage, with all the horror that represents, and we're better off having it looming above our heads than sandblasted from existence.

I can remember sitting on a horse, maybe seven years old, and looking out at Stone Mountain, asking, "Who are those guys?" And when someone explained who they were, my next thought was "Well that's a funny place to put 'em."

But those questions are valuable, and they helped lead me down a road where I learned exactly who those men were, and why they had been given such an enormous memorial. Better to have those reminders, and to ask those questions, than to never know anything about it and to think that Southern heritage is only about "sweet tea and hospitality."

And since free speech is still paramount, if any individual wants to fly the Confederate flag on their property, fine. If they want to wear it on a t-shirt, fine. If they want to paint it on top of their car and do donuts in the parking lot while practicing their rebel yell, that's fine too.  It's in incredibly bad taste, but they've got every right to do it. (Oh, if only I could ban bad taste!) I'm talking strictly about institutional displays: the flag flying on the grounds of the South Carolina state capitol, the incorporation of the symbol in the state flags of Mississippi and Alabama, and so forth.  Those should go.  All of them.

You may well ask, what about places that bear the name Toombs?  Would I sing a different tune if they wanted to rename Toombs County?

That's fine with me. Here's my blessing. The county was so named in 1905 and that century-plus of homage is plenty of memorial to a man whom I honor and respect, but who was deeply and completely wrong on the central issue of his time.

"I'm Glad We Lost the War"

It's an interesting challenge having a family heritage on the losing side of a major conflict. I can remember a kid in junior high coming up and saying "Are you related to that Robert Toombs guy? We read about him in class. Our teacher said he was insane!" And there are rather a lot of African-Americans whose last name is Toombs, almost certainly because my family once owned their family. I almost ran into one when he auditioned at a theatre in Chicago where I was an artist-in-residence. Which is why I've always felt a certain special responsibility on questions of race. My family is as guilty as anyone's of the atrocities of the slave trade. I obviously never owned a slave, but I feel a certain amount of that weight anyway. If I'm going to do genealogical research and take pride in the accomplishments of various ancestors, well, then I've got to grapple fully, and honestly, with the less savory parts of that heritage as well. (I'm looking at you, Ben Affleck.)

In an interview that appeared in Slate on July 14th, Ta-Nehisi Coates said, "We [Americans] have no humility. We believe we are exceptional. That’s fine. But if that is the standard, then I have the right to hold you to that standard."

That seems completely fair to me. If America is the exceptional nation that so many people proclaim it to be, then we must do exceptional things. We must be exceptionally rigorous in our examination of our own history, and exceptionally fair about what that history means. And sometimes, in unexpected moments, I find traces of exactly that.

A fine Louisiana gentleman I know read Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, most of which took place right there in Louisiana near where he lives. He read it with his eyes open, and it stuck with him. So when he heard that I'd never read it he recommended it to me, and, leaning close, he then said to me, quietly, "Robert, after reading that, I'm glad we lost the war."

Me too. Thank God we lost. Maybe my family might have prospered more, as leaders of a victorious campaign, but I don't care. Thank God we lost.

Because the Confederate battle flag represents a bloody, horrifying attempt to make sure that slavery would continue far, far into the future. And when you read about what slavery was really like, when you struggle through a book like Twelve Years a Slave, when you really look at it with your eyes open, it seems unimaginable that anyone ever thought slavery was a good idea, let alone that they would risk their lives to protect it.

It's time to take down the flag and set it under glass in a museum.  Time to put the grey coats on mannequins and leave them there.  Time to let Robert Augustus Toombs rest in his grave, and stop trying to speak for him because he really is my heritage and I'm saying that the man was wrong and we all need to let it go.