Controversy : Captain Confederacy

I bought one issue it was in black and white got lost in a move... Kate Williams the black woman part of the Dixie Dou is Captain Confederacy's wife that is a twist a mixed couple who are also the Confederacy's first super heros
this would be an interesting movie

OK... As a born and raised southerner I'm going to put in my two cents, God help me.

Would it start talk and controversy? Oh, no doubt. Should it spark talk and controversy? Absolutely. As a southerner I’ve seen and heard and think I understand both sides of the debate about the emotions the Confederate Battle flag, also called “The Stars and Bars” “the Stainless Banner" "Beauregard's flag" "Southern Cross”, and “Ol’ Dixie” embodies.

The problem lies in the duality with which it is seen. The fact the meaning of the flag and what it stands for to the United States as a whole verses the way it is seen here in the Southern US is by no means uniform, nor is its view uniformly to we southerners, nor should it be. It means many things all of them correct in the way it has been used and misused over the near century and a half since it was unfurled in December 1861. Note: The Battle Flag is not and the National Flag of the Confederacy, it is the flag the troops followed in battle, much like the National Flag of Japan and their Rising Sun war flag. The reason; the actual original Confederate National flag looked so much like the US Stars and Stripes and was easily confused at a glance in the heat of battle this caused many deaths on both sides at the First Battle of Manassas (Bull Run), Virginia early in the war as the Union and Confederate troops ran accidently into enemy lines in the smoke mistaking their correct rally points.

To many its main meaning is one of hate, segregation, slavery, and the antithesis of all the things America stands for. This is true. As a Southerner I must admit it has been used for all these less than favorable and downright horrible things, there is no denying it; it has. It continues to be waved at rallies organized by dubious groups from the Ku Klux Klan to the Aryan Nation to the most historically inept Skin Head to push their agenda of racism and hate, and to any number of ignorant redneck trying to deliberately piss off any of the South’s recent wave of Yankee immigrants to our fair region. And boy does it ever.

For all this and all that the flag stood to accomplish had the Confederacy won the US Civil War: The continuation of slavery and the evils it held, any decent Southerner is ashamed. We should be. We were wrong for those reasons; morally, ethically, humanely, we were wrong. There is no defense.

Why do we Southerners hold on to this thing? I’ll tell you a true story. In my home town in our historic cemetery we have a little area off to itself and in that plot is the bodies of sixty-some Confederate soldiers who arrived here as wounded prisoners of the forces of General Sherman after he torched Atlanta, they were brought to my home town as there was little left of Atlanta and mine was one of the first towns along Sherman’s March to the Savannah. The men finally died of their wounds here and were buried by the Union troops with full military honors. We fly a Confederate flag amongst them to this day. When I was 10 (1989) my Great grandfather, then 91 years old, and I were going to see the grave of his wife. There in the cemetery was middle aged man, new to town and we learned later was from New Jersey, he had tugged the flag down from its pole and was trying to rip it. My Great Grandfather walked quietly up to this man and stared angrily until the man realized he was there. The man looked up and was about to say something when my grandfather slapped him full in the face. Not hit, not punched, but open handedly slapped this grown man as one might a petulant child. The man was dumbfounded and stood there shocked that this little old man had slapped him so. Poppa then took the flag from the man’s hand and walked to the pole and flew the flag again. The man simply walked away, cursing and saying he’d call the police. I had no idea what I had just seen. I walked up to my great grandfather and asked, “Why did you do that?” He looked at me and said. “You see that third grave from the end on the second to the last row?” I did it was a stone like any other there. The name was not my own. What did it matter? “That man is my great uncle Thomas.” His grandmother’s brother. Poppa had never met him, or his sister for that matter. But he was blood.

One thing to remember when you wonder why we hold that flag in esteem here despite all the negativity it represents and then claim we mean no evil by it is just that: blood. Few families who have lived in the south for generations ever owned slaves, mine didn’t, but nearly all whose families were here during the Civil War lost kin. 620,000 dead. 258,000 of those Confederate. You may say, but the Union lost more… Yep they did, by several thousand, but the Northern States had six times the population of the south at the time. An entire generation of Southern men was decimated. Most of them poor share croppers and craftsmen, not slave owners the rich (slave holders) as always find ways to avoid joining the horror that is war.

So why did these men fight? There was no federal power in the south for the most part in that time. Your state was your country. You paid taxes to the state, to the county, to the city. Most regular people had never even thought more about the federal government than one does the elections in Sri Lanka matter to us today. It was this amorphous thing that everyone knew was out there, but only in the most tenuous sense and for the most part the federal government had done nothing to or for the south since the country’s formation. We were allowed to simply be, so long as we churned out our cotton and crops and textiles. Slaves were sequestered on Plantations and the general public never thought about the horror that was the institution of keeping a person in bondage, they were tools to farm the cotton. An unseen unthought of commodity that kept the gears of industry going. This was wrong. This was evil, a good man who does nothing to stop an evil is just as guilty as a man who commits the sin. But these were simple men, who only saw a great thing that had left them be all this time rising to basically destroy the only way of life they had ever known and they were going to be damned before they let that happen. Does this excuse the cause for which they fought; no. It cannot, but these men were fathers and sons, brothers and uncles, nephews and grandsons, all left family behind as they trudged off to war. Their deaths amounted to nearly half of the entire Confederate Army and nearly seventy percent of the entire population of Southern men between the ages of 16 to 40. There was hardly a family who didn’t lose someone.

To the modern Southerner we cannot forget that. The loss. The upending of everything one knew. Why did the racism persist in the south? I have only a theory on that; all that suffering turned to pain and hurt and anger. That anger had to go somewhere and sadly it was aimed at those who had no power. Not at the one’s who owned slaves and ran the industry that needed them and cried the loudest for secession and war because those same people still owned the factories and the land on which the poorest whites worked, but at the former slaves who had the least ability and recourse to fight back against them. It was the poor verses the poorer. It was a wrong committed by one generation and compounded by three others that followed and we may never live it down. It is in the nature of the southerner to be stubborn, to be unyielding, and to be defiant. We are an amiable people, but not ones that can be told what to do easily if we do not respect the source that orders us and we will fight at the drop of a hat if we feel threatened, or cornered, it is a spirit born of the predominantly Scot, Scotch/Irish, Welsh, and Anglo blood that runs in our veins.

So why do we honor these men that died for all the wrong reasons? Because to you the greater Yankee and Mid Western, and Western citizens of the US and our foreign readers they were the enemy, misguided and wrong. To us they were blood and here you cannot forget blood. You cannot abandon blood. No matter what. To those men, long dead, that flag was their symbol, they died for it just as our boys die today for the Stars and Stripes. It was draped over their bodies, held dear to them in battle, and was the symbol in which they found some form of purpose. They died for it. Right or wrong. The least we can do is fly it for them, for their identity, their memory, and their collective sin.

It took a long time to come to terms with that flag and what it means to us and everyone else. In the past we flew it to show our spirit, our resentment of our defeat, our breaking. The wrongness never even occurred to many. Today, as Southerners, we still get a swell of confused pride at the sight of it. It holds an odd place for us, somewhere between admiration and shame. But it means something unique to us. Is it flown in hate by some? Yes. Is it a symbol of a darker time of misguided causes and greed feeding on ignorance? Yes. Is it ours, a representation of what we were and the blood we shed? Yes. Is it wrong? Yes. But it is there, it is a symbol of something we as a people should never forget: the evil of Slavery, the breaking of a nation, the results of hubris, the fact that our union is not a perfect one, the misuse of power, and how easily human life can be devalued. It reminds us of these things all, lest we forget.

@nerosday
Very perspective I had ancestors who fought with the South hence my screen name Georgia49th the regiment that my ancestor and his two brothers inlisted in.
One died from wounds received at Chanclorsville.
yes I'm proud of them as for the battle flag to remind me of slavery , No it doesn't for me it reminds me of the men who fought for what they believed to be right.
As something to remind me of slavery all you have to do his look at the stars and stripes that alone reminds me of slavery,oppression and damn near genocide of an entire people. but I love my country I love my flag but I honor the flag my ancestors fought for .
That being out of the way, great story

I just found this blog. I have seen ads for Capt. Confederacy and even read a few panels of the original story. I didn't know much about the alternate history aspect, but I have always found it a fascinating subject. It seems really interesting that there are many times where some small, seemingly insignificant event determines the course of history. I might have even collected this title, if it weren't for my aversion to b&w comics.
I live in Mississippi and have for most of my life. I never understood the racism, and I think many of us felt the same way throughout our lives. Thankfully, things have changed. Oh, you will still run into pockets of population clinging to the old ways, but I think the internet and a generally better educated populace will in time wipe it out. I have seen and heard of racism all over the US though, so I get a bit indignant when people act like this problem only exists in the south.
Nero spoke well and true. It seems really odd to me that people think southerners were fighting for slavery, and that this is the common perception. As Nero said, upwards of 90% of our ancestors never owned a slave. Most people in the south were dirt poor themselves, sharecroppers or just simple farmers a bare step above slaves ourselves.
As for the flag, I have always felt that certain undesirable elements have laid claim to the flag and want it to stand for the deplorable things they espouse, but I don't think that the flag was ever intended to encompass those ideas, and even if it did in some way, we need to embrace it as symbolizing the epitome of the utmost of our ideals, claiming it for the positive and denying extremists that claim it as theirs. It is a state flag, after all, so let it represent the ideals of our state, not some hate group. A flag can stand for whatever we want it to.

I look forward to perusing this comic and I bet that the author is moral enough to portray any racism as the bad thing we all know it is, but I also hope that northerners who read it don't think we are all racist, and remember those states that are racist against native americans, asians, hispanics or whatever race was determined to be inferior in their region.