The Sons of Confederate Veterans' long wait at the Texas DMV may be over soon.

Almost legal.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans seem a giant step closer to winning their fight with the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles over whether the state of Texas should issue specialty license plates displaying the Confederate battle flag.  The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Texas's appeal of the Fifth Circuit's Court of Appeal's decision overturning, on First Amendment grounds, a U.S. District Court's decision that the DMV was within its rights to decide not to issue the plates for the specific reason it gave at the time.

The issue on appeal relates to the Texas state law that says the DMV can reject any application for a specialty license plate if that plate's design "might be offensive to any member of the public."  Plenty of Texans testified to the DMV board that they were in fact offended by the proposed SCV plate's design, because they recognize the Confederate battle flag to be both a historical symbol of hate and a contemporary tool of racial intimidation, and the board voted the SCV's application down for that reason.

But there is nothing in the Constitution granting the right to go through life unoffended.  To the contrary, the First Amendment requires us to pretty much suck it up and get over it if someone chooses to use his or her individual right of free speech to offend us.  The question the Court has agreed to decide is whether a specialty license plate is part of an individual's private speech, in which case the Texas law against offensiveness is clearly unconstitutional, or if it is part of the state's speech, in which case the First Amendment does not apply and the Texas DMV is free to choose not to offend people.

There seems to be no firm legal category to contain the possibility that a specialty license plate is in fact a hybrid of private and state speech:  the individual requests the specialty plate because he or she supports the specialty content, and the state endorses the specialty content by manufacturing and distributing the plates.  Both the individual and the state seem to have spoken.

The one dissenting Fifth Circuit judge argued for just such a category:

A fundamental error in the majority opinion is describing the government-speech doctrine as presenting a binary choice:  government or private speech. . . . Texas does not prevent SCV from engaging in speech on its or its members' cars in the same way that speech has traditionally been made:  by license plate frames, bumper stickers, window stickers, window flags, or even painting cars with the Confederate flag.  If SCV and its members can do all of those things, why is it seeking an order from a court compelling Texas to sell Confederate plates? The answer is the same answer in Summum [a precedent case involving a monument a religious group had attempted to donate to a municipal park]:  SCV seeks the kind of "adoption" and "embrace" that comes with being on Texas license plates, with appearing next to the state's flag, name, and likeness, and being given the kind of validation that follows from appearing on a state-issued license plate.  It is precisely the reason that SCV wants to force Texas to produce these plates that it should be denied a court order doing so.  Texas, like Pleasant Grove [the municipality in Summum], cannot be forced to associate with messages it does not prefer.

The analogy applies in another important respect.  Unlike pamphleteering, speeches, marches, picketing, and bumper stickers--all of which unquestionably involve private speech, even if they occur on government-owned property--erecting monuments and manufacturing specialty license plates both require the government's assistance and complicity.  That distinction, yet again, makes specialty plates more like park monuments and less like leafleting and bumper stickers.

Because of Texas's dumb law, it may be too late for the DMV to reject the plates for the right reason:  because they would honor men who took up arms against the United States.  Part of the SCV's argument for the plates is that Texas already issues specialty plates honoring Korean War veterans, Vietnam veterans, buffalo soldiers, women veterans, and other such groups; therefore that its refusal to issue plates for Confederate veterans amounts to viewpoint discrimination.   Texas failed to make

Over 3500 Union soldiers are buried at Gettysburg National Cemetery.
It should be needless to point out they were killed by Confederate soldiers.

the obvious response:  the veterans it recognizes on specialty plates are all veterans of the U. S. armed forces, which Confederate soldiers were not.  Surely the government, even of a former Confederate state, should be able to honor those who fought to defend the United States without becoming obliged to embrace honoring those who attacked it.

Confederate soldiers insisted they weren't Americans and considered themselves the army of a foreign nation, and denying them tribute on specialty license plates is viewpoint discrimination only if Texas issues such plates honoring veterans of the Viet Cong or the Luftwaffe.  If the fact that the Confederates were nonetheless of domestic vintage is considered relevant, then Confederate soldiers deserve specialty plate recognition the same day other failed violent domestic groups such as the Weather Underground, FALN, and the Symbionese Liberation Army do so.  As long as Texas would be within its rights to deny applications for specialty plates to any of those veterans, it should be able to deny the SCV application.

"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth." --Voltaire

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, the group behind the ongoing attempt to get the Confederate battle flag displayed on specialty license plates in Texas, is one of the groups responsible for desecrating the grave of Silas Chandler, a former slave, with Confederate paraphernalia.  The group also figures in Confederates in the Attic, one of our Civil War Project shows, and is one of the prime movers behind the Big Lie about the war:  that the Confederacy was not a deeply racist slavocracy which went to war to protect its financial interest in human chattel.

To you, Sons of Confederate Veterans, we submit 

the vindication of the Cause for which we fought; 

to your strength will be given the defense of the Confederate soldier's good name, 

the guardianship of his history, 

the emulation of his virtues, 

the perpetuation of those principles he loved 

and which made him glorious 

and which you also cherish. 

Remember, it is your duty to see that the true history of the South is presented to future generations.

 

Lt. General Stephen Dill Lee, C.S.A.
April 25, 1906

The Sons date from 1896 and is one of several organizations of the period founded for the perfectly respectable reason of honoring the group's actual fathers who had served valiantly in the Confederate army, risking (and many of them giving) their lives.  Even today much of their work involves the upkeep of gravesites and assistance with genealogy research and so on.  The more visible part of their work, however, is insidious:  to bring into the mainstream and make respectable the false idea that the Confederacy itself deserves to be honored.

Much of this work depends on minimizing the Confederacy's commitment to slavery as a foundation of its existence.  So we are told that Robert E. Lee hated slavery: he didn't; he saw it as a necessary evil that the white race had to bear in order to do God's work benefiting the black race.  We are told that thousands of blacks enlisted in and fought for the Confederate Army: of course they didn't; not only did Confederate law prohibit this until the CSA was gasping its last, the Confederate army refused to recognize even captured black Union troops as legitimate POWs but instead executed some of them as rebellious slaves.  The fact that the Emancipation Proclamation, as a product of Lincoln's war powers, could only free slaves where the rebellion existed, while emancipation in the loyal states had to wait for the Thirteenth Amendment, is twisted so that we can be told, hey, slavery was abolished in the South before it was in the North!--as if emancipation at the point of a Union bayonet is a credit to the Confederate slaveowner.

The license plate controversy represents another aspect of their work: to (1) get the Confederate flag displayed in official auspices of any sort, and (2) equate Confederate soldiers in the general mind with the soldiers who fought at Normandy and Khe Sanh and Lexington, as well as with the soldiers they fired upon at Antietam and Shiloh and Gettysburg.  "These veterans need to be honored too," a Sons spokesman testified to the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles Board before the Board voted 8-0 against allowing specialty plates displaying the Sons logo, which features the Confederate battle flag.  The Sons have said they plan to appeal, and in fact have won such appeals in a number of other states.

A number of years ago the Civil War documentarian Ken Burns, himself descended from Confederate veterans, caused a furor in neo-Confederate circles when he discussed the eternal Civil War paradox of American respect and affection--North and South--for the valiant men who tried to destroy the country. ''I said it was interesting to note that a man held responsible for more loyal American deaths than Tojo or Hitler became our most cherished general,'' Burns recounted later.  For this statement of verifiable fact concerning Robert E. Lee, he ended up stripped of the CSV membership the organization had bestowed on him.  Verifiable facts are not the friends of neo-Confederates.



Alexander Stephens T-shirt, available in four styles

  Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea;

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.

This, our new government,

is the first in the history of the world

based upon this great

physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

Alexander Stephens

Vice-President, Confederate States of  America

March 21, 1861

"I think I have no prejudice against the Southern people," Lincoln said in 1854.  "They are just what we would be in their situation."  True enough now as then, and if our beloved ancestors had been on the wrong side of the two great moral questions of the age, slavery and treason, we would not be eager to acknowledge the fact either.

That said, a tribute built on lies is no tribute at all, and the neo-Confederate disinformation campaign does the Confederate dead no honor.  Most Southerners might not choose U.S. Grant as the eulogist for the Confederate army, but his recollection of  Lee and his men at Appomattox Court House has more truth, and more tribute, in it than any part of the tissue of lies put forth by neo-Confederates:

Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us. 

The last word here goes to Rev. George V. Clark, testifying before the Texas DMV Board on November 10:



Black Confederates? Not so much.

Elizabeth Margolius, who is directing Opus 1861 for us this spring, and I are in a workshop this week for the show, listening to an amazingly good bunch of singers and musicians play through the songs we've chosen in the structure we've tried to build, and talking about the songs and their context and so on.  One thing that's come up is the ongoing disinformation campaign to convince us all that there were black Confederate soldiers fighting for the South.  Thousands of them.

One of the singers recently saw an episode of Antiques Roadshow from 2009 that featured a Civil War tintype showing the above picture of a white man and a black man together, both armed and in Confederate uniforms.  The white's family history related that they were friends who served together.  Both men had the last name Chandler:  Andrew Chandler had owned Silas Chandler, but had freed him a year before the war, and both had enlisted in a Mississippi regiment of the Confederate army.

I don't doubt that Andrew Chandler's family historians are sincere, but the claim that Silas was an enlisted Confederate soldier is clearly preposterous.  The picture is more plausibly explained by the fact that many Confederates brought slaves along with them into their units, and frequently had them dress in uniforms like mascots.  Posing with his mascot, and letting the mascot hold arms like he's a real soldier, was apparently a diversion Andrew Chandler had time for.

The Confederacy outlawed using blacks as soldiers, until the Confederate Congress legalized it in an act of sheer desperation eighteen days before Lee surrendered.  Of course they wouldn't want black soldiers.  The South feared a widespread slave uprising, which was why John Brown's raid had galvanized them so.  Why on earth would they want to train thousands of blacks to use weapons and organize themselves into fighting units?  What happens after the South wins the war and then wants all these armed warriors to go back to picking cotton?

It turns out another PBS show, History Detectives, aired a segment about the Chandler tintype just last week and destroyed Andrew Chandler's descendants' version of things.  Andrew could not have freed Silas in 1860, because the Mississippi constitution at the time outlawed freeing slaves; it couldn't be done.  The 1860 census recorded zero free blacks living in the county where Silas resided.  The application Silas filed in 1916 for a Confederate pension when he was indigent and too infirm to work was on the form given to those freedmen who, while enslaved, had been used as servants by their enlisted masters ("What was the number of the regiment or name of the vessel in which your master served?").  And the roster for the regiment in question still exists; it lists Andrew as serving, but not Silas.  As for the weapons Silas holds in the photo, the Atlanta expert in Confederate photos consulted by History Detectives pronounced them "a photographer's prop."

The tintype is an unimportant curio, except that it's being used to further the agenda of Confederate apologists.  The Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy have placed on his grave a Confederate Iron Cross and a Confederate battle flag in order to claim him as a Confederate soldier.  This is just plain ugly.  The groups are part of a movement among "neo-Confederates" to establish the myth of black Confederates as history.  Their object, of course, is to make slavery seem to be not the main cause of the war:  if the South were fighting to preserve and extend slavery, would so many blacks have enlisted to help it?  So the movement spreads as fact, among other lies, the howler that Stonewall Jackson commanded two black battalions.

Their disinformation campaign has been conducted mostly on the internet, but briefly crept into actual print last year, when a fourth-grade history textbook used in Virginia schools repeated the Stonewall Jackson falsehood as fact.  The book's author, Joy Masoff, is not a neo-Confederate, merely an ignoramus (her book also got the number of Confederate states, and the year the U.S. entered World War One, both wrong).  After a public outcry, school officials pulled the book.  Its publishers say that from now on they are going to start having people who actually know things read their books before they send them out. 

As for Silas Chandler, in 2008 fifty-two of his descendants signed a petition to get the Confederate paraphernalia removed from his grave.  An excerpt from a letter explaining their position:

In a cynical attempt to further their political objectives, the descendants of Silas’ oppressors have decided  to place an iron cross and a confederate flag on Silas’ grave.  This is equivalent to the descendants of the Gestapo placing a swastika on the grave of a Holocaust victim.  The placing of the confederate flag on Silas’ grave is a gross affront to the memory of Silas, and nothing more than  an attempt to rewrite history.

 On October 3 of this year, eighteen days ago, Myra Chandler Sampson, one of Silas's great-granddaughters, posted the following reply when a commenter on an article about Silas asked if they had received an answer from either the Sons of Confederate Veterans or the United Daughters of the Confederacy:

Not yet.