Dead Confederates, A Civil War Era Blog

Quick updates on two Confederate flag cases covered previously here:

Update, March 28: This story from the Courthouse News Service provides much more background on the Candice Hardwick case than I’ve seen in other news reports. Disputes with the school over her flag attire go back to early 2003, at least three years before the suspension that resulted in the lawsuit, when she insisted on wearing a “Southern Chicks” shirt with a Confederate Battle Flag. In middle school. Subsequent attire included the legends, “Offended by School Censorship of Southern Heritage,” “Daddy’s Little Redneck,” “Jesus and the Confederate Battle Flag: Banned from Our Schools, but Forever in Our Hearts,” a black Confederates shirt, and one with a picture of the U.S. flag with the caption, “Flew over legalized slavery for 90 years!” This is less a case of a naive kid wanting to honor her ancestors, than a deliberate and years-long intent to force a showdown. And she got it.

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A brief ceremony was held on Saturday morning in Galveston to recognize the memory of two Confederate soldiers who died here 149 years ago this month. Privates Wyatt and John Vaughan were father and son, respectively, serving with a regiment of state troops stationed here during the latter part of the war. Both contract typhoid fever. Eighteen-year-old John died on March 25, 1864; his 44-year-old father died three days later. Both were buried in graves in the city’s old potter’s field, which lies about 100 yards west of the site of today’s ceremony.

The old UCV plot where the Vaughans’ memorial stones were placed today contains several modern stones, but as far as I know none of the men so memorialized are actually interred there. At least one, H. R. Ostermeyer, survived the war, only to die in the hurricane that swept Galveston in September 1900.

Today’s service was sponsored by the Veuve Jefferson Davis Chapter No. 7 of the UDC, with support and assistance by the John Bell Hood Camp of the SCV, which also provided the color guard. Several Vaughan descendants attended the event.

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Updated renders of C.S.S. Virginia (formerly U.S.S. Merrimack), showing revisions done last year for an illustration in the Civil War Monitor magazine. Special thanks to Anna Holloway of the Mariners Museum for providing guidance on the model. Full-sized renders on Flickr.

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My colleague Ed Cotham shares the latest issue of the Sabine Pass Beacon (PDF), the newsletter of the Friends of Sabine Pass Battleground. This issue includes important information about sesquicentennial events planned for September, and the recent installation at the park of the walking beam (above) from the Union gunboat U.S.S. Clifton.

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Not sure how I missed this, but Lexington Mayor Mimi Elrod was re-elected to another four-year term last November with a vigorous 63% of the vote. That was Elrod’s second electoral win against her opponent, Council Member Mary Harvey-Halseth, whom she defeated for mayor in 2008, with 59%. (Harvey-Halseth’s term on council is staggered with the mayor’s, so she retains her council seat.) Harvey-Halseth voted against the ordinance barring non-governmental flags on city-owned poles back in 2011, but I don’t get the impression that the dispute over the Confederate flag played much of a role in the 2012 mayoral race. There seems to be much more focus on efforts to revitalize the downtown area of Lexington.

“Boot Elrod” has been a watchword of the Flaggers practically since the flag ordinance was passed in 2011; even then, a change in the composition of the city government offered the best hope for reversing the ordinance. A court challenge has always been a long shot, as Susan Hathaway acknowledged at the time. But I’ve never been convinced that the ordinance has been a particularly important issue for more than a handful of Lexingtonians, and the results of November’s city election there seem to bear that out.

After the election, Billy Bearden complained that the “Boot Elrod Campaign so gloriously began was allowed to die an inglorious death by the people in and around Lexington that should have kept it alive.” My guess is that “the people in and around Lexington,” as a whole, aren’t nearly so torqued about Confederate flags as Bearden, Hathaway and others think they ought to be. The make-believe Confederates should know better; the News-Gazette noted at the time of the ordinance vote that opposition to it came overwhelmingly from people — like Bearden, Hathaway, and peripatetic Confederate beard H. K. Edgerton — who don’t actually live in Lexington:

One factor in Elrod’s re-election may be that things are looking up economically in Lexington, as in most other parts of the country. Unemployment remains high compared to the state and national averages, at 9.8% in December 2012, but still lower than at the time of the ordinance in September 2011 (11.3%), and well below its Great Recession peak of 14.0% in June 2010.

By contrast, the Flaggers have been working against economic recovery in Lexington, in a way that undoubtedly caught the attention of many residents. Along with the “Boot Elrod” campaign, Hathaway, Bearden, and folks like local SCV leader Brandon Dorsey have been pushing a campaign to boycott Lexington businesses, in the hopes of pressuring them to get the city council to reverse its position. That effort, too, appears to have accomplished little or nothing. The City of Lexington recently released its financial report for FY 2012, covering the period from July 1, 2011 to June 30, 2012, ten months of which fell after the adoption of the flag ordinance and during the period of the boycott. In the three categories of city revenue that directly reflect business activity and tourism — sales taxes, restaurant taxes and hotel/motel taxes — revenues all increased:

From the City of Lexington’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for FY2011, p. 32:

And from the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for FY2012, p. 32:

And in summary:

Last month I contacted Lexington’s Director of Finance, who confirmed that the rates in these categories did not change from FY2011 to FY2012, meaning that these numbers reflect an actual increase in relevant business activity. These are strong numbers — substantially stronger than current national GDP, which is dragging along at an anemic 2% annual growth rate. Business in Lexington is looking up. To be sure, not every business in Lexington is doing well — some businesses will go bust, even in boom years — but overall, local business activity in Lexington is trending up, not down.

The Flaggers aren’t likely to give up their boycott or the campaign to “Boot Elrod” anytime soon, and that’s their prerogative. But it’s hard to see any substantive effect of either initiative, any more than they’ve restored the flags to the exterior of the Pelham Chapel. They’ll continue to stir the pot — “Are YOU mad enough yet? RISE UP, VIRGINIA!”, etc., etc. — and keep the faith.

After all, November 2016 is just around the corner!

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UPDATE, March 20: I almost forgot — a big thank-you goes out to Billy Bearden, who was the first to point me to the city’s annual financial report as a source of economic data for Lexington. Couldn’t have done this post without you, my friend!

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