Sebesta's entry for April 15 is about the Confederate flag. There were actually several Confederate flags. The controversial one today is known as the Confederate battle flag, or the St. Andrew's Cross flag.
This is mainly significant in the controversies over neo-Confederate nonsense because Confederate flag advocates today swear up and down that it never had anything to do with race. But Sebesta's April 15 entry shows that the flag was always discussed in part in terms of the needs for a "White Man's Flag."
I'll mention in connection with this another section of the online documents collection to which I referred in the entry for April 13. It's the Library of Southern Literature which is part of the Documenting the American South Web site at the University of North Carolina. This collection includes two prewar works by one of the South's foremost defenders and advocates for slavery, George Fitzhugh, both from 1857. One of them is called Sociology of the South, or, The Failure of a Free Society. By "free society" in the title, he meant a society without slavery.
One of the features of prewar polemics was that the Southern defenders of slavery, while dishonestly representing the operation of the slave economy, liked to hold up the evils of industrial capitalism in the North. The result may sometimes read like a militant socialist denouncing the evils of capitalism. But the George Fitzhughs of the world were coming from a radically different place. Here's a sample from that work:
In free society none but the selfish virtues are in repute, because none other help a man in the race of competition. In such society virtue loses all her loveliness, because of her selfish aims. Good men and bad men have the same end in view: self-promotion, self-elevation. The good man is prudent, cautious, and cunning of fence; he knows well, the arts (the virtues, if you please) which enable him to advance his fortunes at the expense of those with whom he deals; he does not "cut too deep"; he does not cheat and swindle, he only makes good bargains and excellent profits. He gets more subjects by this course; everybody comes to him to be bled. He bides his time; takes advantage of the follies, the improvidence and vices of others, and makes his fortune out of the follies and weaknesses of his fellow-men. The bad man is rash, hasty, unskilful and impolitic. He is equally selfish, but not half so prudent and cunning. Selfishness is almost the only motive of human conduct in free society, where every man is taught that it is his first duty to change and better his pecuniary situation.
But it was only in the deluded eyes of Southern partisans that the slave system promoted more Christian charity and selfless generosity that did Northern capitalism.
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