My ancestors were actual heroes of the Confederacy.

They hosted Conf.Pres. Jefferson Davis at their home on multiple occasions, both during and after the Civil War, as well as giving aid and comfort to Troops of Southern soldiers during the War.

One of my ancestors, Capt. John Henry Freligh, was so entrusted by Davis that he was put in charge of printing much of the Confederate currency.
His wife, Susan Rebecca (Ruland) Freligh, was a spy who smuggled medicine (hidden in the puffy buttons of her dress) and information across Union lines. She was captured at one point, and NAGGED her way out of captivity. (Seriously.)

I have letters that Captain Freligh wrote and copies of the magazines he published in defense of the Southern pro-slavery positions. I have articles about the work he did printing the currency, and printing books & magazines for Southern causes.

It was my attempts to understand why he took a pro-slavery position that have inspired me most in beginning my Genealogical interests.

Genealogy as taught me that history should be learned from & remembered…

…In books. In family stories. In museums. In classrooms.

But NEVER revered & poised heroically in public parks, or waving on flagpoles as if they’re still the symbol of our government.

A majority of the Confederate monuments were erected long AFTER any of the people who fought in that terrible War had died. Almost all were not erected as memorials by those who fought, but as symbols to the populace that the Segregationist Jim Crow laws were the Law of the Land.

They were used to communicate to the public– both Black and White– that anyone who wanted to petition the government, to help them stand up against those racist laws or against ANY of the racist & violent oppressive (hooded & unhooded) mobs that lynched men in public squares, burned down homes wontonly, and raped women without fear of consequences… would be safer to not speak out or complain. They were statements that the victims of these racially based crimes that they would have no recourse for justice, so they would only be seen as “troublemakers” if they tried to stand up for themselves.

https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederate-monuments

Also:
https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues-were-built-to-further-a-white-supremacist-future

Yes, my ancestors were “heroes of the Confederacy.”

They were also traitors. They were enemies of the United States of America.

We don’t keep statues of Benedict Arnold or Aldrich Ames idolized in our public parks. We don’t idolize George III or Adolf Hitler in glorified statue form. The Confederates don’t belong that way, either.

As for the Confederate flag, it spent a few years flying over battlefields (plus a couple of years on the hood of a 1966 Dodge Charger, jumping over rivers and crashing into police cars in fictional Hazard County), but it spent most of its time–over 150 years– being used by racist groups like the KKK and by Jim Crow govts as a symbol of hate & oppression.

It doesn’t merely “offend” people. It sickens, infuriates, and terrifies them. “Keeping our history” is no longer a sufficient justification for throwing fear & hatred into the faces of people who have had it shoved in their faces for far too many DECADES as it is.

We can keep that history in our own ways, in the context of how it SHOULD be kept– in museums, in family histories, and in books.

We don’t fly Nazi Swastikas on flagpoles or wear huge Swastikas on our shirts or flying on Nascar poles as a way to “remember” WWII. We have no more reason to fly the Confederate flag those ways, either.

Almost all of the people who want to keep the Confederate statues & flags in public parks & on flagpoles can tell you NOTHING about the Battle of Memphis, the females who dressed up as male soldiers to be able to fight alongside the men, which of the small battles were truly decisive in the outcome of the War, or even simply how many men died in the course of battle or as a result of battle injury.

They can tell you little to nothing about how after the War, Clara Barton (the founder of the Red Cross) worked to locate & identify dead soldiers and return their remains to their families (or how this led to the invention of modern dog tags).

Most of them don’t even know that the commonly used Confederate flag is not the flag of the Confederacy, but one of the Confederate BATTLE flags.

But they are happy to complain that taking down the Confederate symbols means “attacking history.”

“History” only matters when you know what it means, and when you actually remember it accurately. Rewriting it & romanticizing it does no good for anyone. Neither does ignoring the 155 years of a symbol’s actual “history,” so you can hold onto the few years of what someone’s rewritten “history” THINKS it stood for.

It’s time that we not merely remember the brief history of the Confederacy, but that we also remember the decades of post-Civil War history that has been so hurtful and so demeaning to so many people. We need to do more than honor the dead of the Confederate armies. We need to honor the countless victims of Jim Crow “justice” and modern racist violence, by taking down the very symbols that have been used to protect the people perpetuating these injustices for so many, many years.

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Some of the sources for my Confederate ancestors:

https://www.spmc.org/journals/paper-money-vol-lv-no-6-whole-no-306-novemberdecember-2016

[“Hutton & Freligh” Confederate currency images courtesy of Washington University at St. Louis website.]
https://nnp.wustl.edu/library/searchwithterms?searchterm=freligh

https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Southern_Monthly.html?id=zxUbAAAAYAAJ