Dear Editor,

April is Confederate History and Heritage month, officially recognized by the Georgia General Assembly in 2009. The South and the Confederate States of America have been the victim of one of America’s most successful smear campaigns. They have been harshly discriminated against and positive historical facts have intentionally been suppressed. Biased Northern historians have unfairly caused Southern and Confederate history, and its heroes, monuments, memorials, and flags, to be regulated to a role of less importance than deserved. 

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson is quoted as saying “the role of slavery became the proclaimed cause of the Civil War because it was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war for independence into a war waged for the maintenance and extension of slavery.”

If slavery was all the Southern states wanted, they could have kept it without a war or firing a shot. The North offered the South the Corwin Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in March 1861 that would have made slavery permanently legal in America if they would rejoin the union. The South refused and the Constitution of the Confederate States of America banned the international slave trade. Most educated Southerners were in favor of gradual, orderly emancipation, which was occurring and would have prevented segregation and Jim Crow laws which were based on Northern black codes.

The Confederate flag represents honor, faith, courage, dignity, integrity, chivalry, respect for womanhood, strong family ties, patriotism, self-reliance, belief in the free enterprise system and the same values and principles as the original U.S. Betsy Ross Flag — limited constitutional federal government, states rights, resistance to tyranny, Christian values and principles and government of the people, by the people and for the people. Liberals have falsely indoctrinated many Americans to believe that it represents racism, bigotry and a painful reminder of slavery.

The Confederate battle flag is an internationally recognized symbol of resistance to tyranny. It was chosen by Poland in 1981 as the symbol of the Solidarity movement against Russian Communism, and it was flying over the Berlin Wall when it was being torn down in 1989. This fact has not been lost upon the Marxist Socialist, Communist, liberal left and that is why they have spent inordinate amounts of money and energy trying to suppress this powerful symbol of freedom.

Tommy Callaway

LaGrange