Thoughts on the Confederate flag and America's "Original Sin"

There was never any doubt that slavery – aptly identified by President Obama in his Charleston eulogy as America's "Original Sin" – was the cause of the Civil War and that Confederate flags are the symbol of support for that Sin. This was brought home to me recently in reading a soon-to-be-published biography of Henry Clay (thanks to Janet Gallant for giving me an advance copy). The facts laid out in that book demonstrate that the central issue of American political life in the first half of the 19th Century was slavery. Clay engineered a series of compromises from 1820 to 1851 to forestall collapse of the Union over slavery. But the collapse was inevitable, and it took the Civil War to resolve the issue of de jure slavery – although the War did not eliminate the racist culture with which we have struggled for 150 years after emancipation.

Clay was a Kentucky slave-owner who benefited from that ultimate "White Privilege." But he knew that slavery was untenable in the long run. His proposed solution was to "repatriate" all Blacks back to Africa. Otherwise, Clay asserted, "A contest would inevitably ensue between the two races – civil war, carnage, conflagration, devastation. Nothing is more certain."

And here is an irony. The war for emancipation was not a civil war between "the two races." Rather, it was a civil war within White America. (There were Black soldiers, but due to the pervasive racism of the time, they were a small percentage of the combatants.) The number of war dead is estimated to be about 750,000, or nearly 3% of the entire population of the country. That was a lot of dead White people.

As President Lincoln said in his Second Inaugural Address, while the Civil War was still raging, "if God wills that [the War] continues until all the wealth piled by the bondsmen's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so it still must be said, 'The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

One of the great – if not the greatest – stories of American History is the Civil Rights Movement of the second half of the 20th Century, which resolved some (but by no means all) of the horrible legacy of slavery without the “carnage, conflagration, devastation” predicted by Clay. In a macro sense, White America should be far more grateful to Black America than visa versa. This was shown once again in Charleston. Can White America meet the challenges so clearly before it?