Donna Ladd

Journalist and Editor

‘Suck It Up, Buttercup’: A Mississippi History Teacher Defends the Rebel Flag

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Larry McCluney Jr., a history teacher in Greenwood and a national officer in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, poses in what photographer Kate Medley calls a “Confederate Man Cave.” Every man we interviewed had one. Photo by Donna Ladd

History teacher Larry McCluney Jr., a national officer in the Sons of Confederate Veterans, was one of the more fascinating Mississippians we interviewed about the Confederate flag. We also talked, or listened, to him the longest because he really likes to talk about Confederate history as he teaches it. Because I could get such a small amount of what he said into my Guardian article, I’m pasting some sections below that can help clarify the official arguments of the SCV—which I would describe as being framed to defend soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War and to demonize the North, especially Abraham Lincoln. I find that you spend a lot of time in conversations with people who support the flag listening to them explain what was wrong with the North and Lincoln, leaving me wishing we could just stipulate that few were perfect back then and go deeper into the substance of why my home region seceded and fired on Fort Sumter.

But here are some excerpts. This post is a bit long, but I encourage reading to the end for a fuller understanding of SCV’s arguments, and for my short responses. By the way, McCluney prefers to call it the “War for Southern Independence.” And don’t miss his comments below about Trump to a black student upset about his election to the presidency.

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McCluney: (People) think about the cause being slavery.

Me: Do you agree with that?

Slavery didn’t cause the war.

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Flag supporter: ‘That’s what states’ rights was about: protecting slavery’

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Teacher Kevin Davis honors the Confederate flag because 13 of his ancestors fought for the South in the Civil War, with three of them killed. He is clear, though, that the war was fought over the state’s rights to own slaves. Here he points to photos of soldiers he descends from. Photo by Donna Ladd

By the time Kate Medley and I found Kevin Davis, on the second day of our whirlwind visits with Mississippi Confederate flag fans, we were moving fast, especially as a storm was threatening to move in from the Gulf. (We had memories of Hurricane Katrina moving toward Mississippi as we bolted out of Natchez during our earlier Klan series a decade earlier.)

Like Larry McCluney Jr., Davis is a history teacher and an on-again-off-again member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans due to descending from numerous southern soldiers, some of them killed in the war. His views on the history around the flag and the war did not exactly match up with McCluney’s, either, especially on his easy admission that slavery caused the war.

Davis also articulates an important point that McCluney touched on: southerners fought the war (to maintain their rights to slavery) to honor their ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War. To the South, as historian Chandra Manning explains in her book, “What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery and the Civil War,” the war another vital step in declaring independence from a greedy overlord. The North, though, also fought to honor the Revolutionary War legacy—by keeping the union together.

Here is an excerpt of Davis’ comments, much of which did not make it into the Guardian article:

Me: Do you fly a Confederate flag?

Davis: No, since I am a teacher. Now, I teach at a private school, but I did teach at a public school for most of my career. I go to SCV meetings, and I have a car tag that has a Confederate flag on it.

How do you teach the Civil War, and what caused it?

When I teach it, I teach that it was two causes: slavery and states’ rights. I’m not naïve enough to say that if there had’t been slavery—we wouldn’t ever had a Civil War had there not been slavery. Once it got started, that’s not necessarily what the average soldier was fighting for anyway. Half of them didn’t have slaves anyway. They were living in the society where maybe one day they hoped they’d be rich enough to have one, but I mean most of them didn’t. So once it got started, it was more about defending your home and the cause of governing yourself and all that stuff that’s connected to states’ rights.

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Did South face a ‘harsh’ Reconstruction?

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After my Guardian feature published this morning on why eight Mississippians like (or don’t mind) the Confederate flag, several people questioned my use of the word “harsh” in this sentence near the top of the story: “After the north won, it imposed a harsh Reconstruction on the south that still fuels white resentment today.” Those people clearly thought I was judging Reconstruction as “too harsh.” Had I meant to say that, I would have said it more directly, but that is not what I meant. I was using the word in a more general way, meaning rough or uncomfortable, as in a “harsh” winter when I should have said something like, “white southerners believed Reconstruction was too harsh and still resent it,” with links. My strongest opinions about Reconstruction have always been about the way it ended with white southerners regaining the ability to have free rein to re-create deep structural inequality and horrendous conditions for African Americans in my state and beyond at a time when the South should have been turning a new direction.

However, I do get their point of why my word choice was misleading and can give the wrong impression and see it as fair criticism. Today, “harsh” is often used to imply that something is too extreme—as in “harsh discipline”—and my intention wasn’t to insert a misleading value judgment there. My purpose in this story, as assigned and as I envisioned it, was to talk to people who like the Confederate flag to hear why they still fly or support it, in their own words and not in a debate (as I have done many times with flag supporters over the years). I then factchecked their historic references and reasoning and asked black Mississippians to respond to their statements.

But the concerns create an opportunity to talk more about Reconstruction and share sources for those who wish to read more (and you’re welcome to provide more links or thoughts in the comments or to me on Twitter @donnerkay). This story was meant as a learning journey, and I hope to continue it however possible. I appreciate those who have brought this up, as well as provided some links they recommend about Reconstruction when I suggested it.

I’ll start close to home for historic grounding with the Mississippi Archives and History post on Reconstruction, which divides it into “Presidential Reconstruction” and “Radical Reconstruction” (it also talks about the Black Codes, so click the link if you’re not familiar):

Being the center of slavery and cotton culture, heavily agricultural places such as Mississippi seceded first and returned to the Union last. Planters, who had produced cotton for the world market, emerged from the Civil War in a state of shock. They had enslaved their workforce for generations. After emancipation and Confederate defeat, many white Mississippians still thought they had been right to own slaves and secede from the Union. This position, within a state where the population was 55 percent black, foreshadowed a difficult Reconstruction.

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