Local History

A local controversy has arisen concerning Maryville High School’s Confederate Battle Flag as a school symbol and efforts to stop using that flag and the name “Rebel” for its sports teams and mascot.

There are some very passionate, but also very articulate, apologists for the flag. These defenders claim that the flag is merely a symbol of the South and a celebration of Southern heritage, and has lost any racial overtones it might once have had. Now, a more-than-cursory glance at history reveals that this symbol was not the original national flag used by the Confederate States of America, but that it was incorporated into subsequent national flags of the Confederacy. In my opinion, the evidence is lacking that the Civil War was fought primarily over tariffs, as some such apologists claim. Certainly the North didn’t think that was the reason for the war. The North was motivated by a desire not only to keep the union together, but by the political powerful and morally compelling arguments of anti-slavery abolitionists. The North won, the South lost, and winners get to write the history books.

Regardless, in the modern era the flag has been a source of controversy. Whatever it might have meant or symbolized at one time, it has been appropriated by various hate groups and other unseemly sorts with whom I personally would not want to be identified. Fortunately, Tennessee's flag does not make any significant allusions to this symbol, so I need not (and do not) feel any particular state identification with it. In fact, East Tennessee was largely pro-Union during the Civil War era.

With the benefit of at least five generations’ worth of historical perspective between 1865 and 2005, the idea that “Southern Pride” is what is at stake lacks weight. Modern celebration of this flag represents a modern affirmation that what the south was fighting for was right. I do not doubt that many Confederate soldiers thought they were fighting for the side that was in the moral right, and I will (reluctantly) concede that at the time of the war, what was morally right may not have been very clear -- at least, not to everyone involved.

But things are much clearer now. Slavery was morally obnoxious and it is a terrible stain on this nation’s moral history that it happened at all here. Slavery was an integral part of the economic foundations of the early nineteenth century in the mostly-agrarian South, and Southern politicians were in the moral wrong to defend it. Even taking the Confederate apologists’ claims at face value that the Civil War was not about slavery but rather about economics and the struggle to be free from the heavy hand of government telling the individual what to do, the manner in which Southerners sought to express and exercise this so-called “freedom” was by enslaving fellow human beings. This bizarre form of "freedom" was wrong then and it’s wrong now.

To say that such “freedom” is worth fighting and dying for is an insult to the very concept of freedom – an insult born of ignorance and specious reasoning, perhaps, but an insult all the same. Many other symbols exist which better express the political sentiment of freedom from an oppressive government.

So I hope that the Blount County Board of Education follows through and changes the symbols for what appears to be an otherwise outstanding high school.