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Flag Culture and the Confederacy: Bloodshed and National Identity

The heated debate over the use of the Confederate flag has revived again recently, playing a prominent role in the 2002 Georgia gubernatorial election. The publication of Robert Bonner’s Colors and Blood, an original, fascinating, and thought-provoking study of flags in the Confederate South, is thus especially timely. What makes Bonner’s work so valuable, however, is not just what it tells us about the origins and meaning of the Confederate flag. Although its focus is flags, the book is about much more than that. Employing the concept of “flag culture,” Bonner analyzes a whole range of practices and values associated with Confederate flags. Through this analysis, Bonner makes an important contribution not only to our understanding of flag culture, but also to our understanding of Confederate nationalism, for he persuasively argues that flags played a crucial role in the creation and development of Confederate nationalism. According to Bonner, flags possessed a unique emotional power that turned them into important unifying symbols for the Confederacy. In explaining how flags both reflected and inspired an intensely emotional form of popular patriotism, Bonner seeks to demonstrate the vitality and depth of Confederate nationalism. Bonner argues that flag culture was so powerful because of its ability to evoke the passions associated with war and bloodshed. For Bonner, then, war was a crucial element in Confederate nationalism, and this quality both contributed to the intensity of Confederate nationalism and limited its breadth. Because of their martial associations, flags were extremely effective in inspiring Confederates to fight during the war. At the same time, however, the martial character of flag culture made it difficult to sustain Confederate nationalism once the war was over. As Bonner sums up, “a flag culture that during wartime nurtured a far richer Confederate patriotism than most have appreciated proved incapable of sustaining southern separatism after 1865” (p. 7).