Many well educated people believe the Confederate Battle flag symbolizes slavery and I understand and respect that argument but don't agree with it. It's true the Confederate Constitution had provisions of keeping slavery intact and the United States Constitution evaded the issue prior to the war. Yet slavery existed not only in the South but as well as in many non traditional southern states. Slavery existed for 89 years under the United States flag and less than 3 years when the Confederate Battle flag flew during battle. States such as Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri each had Union governors and representatives to the United States Congress and Senate and kept slavery shortly after the war ended at Appomattox.

Ironically the Confederate Battle flag could be viewed as the flag that ended slavery after all if there had not been a war how long would slavery still have existed under the flag of the United States? When terrorist groups such as the klan starting using the Confederate Battle flag for their own agenda many white people turned their heads. As Shelby Foote once said and I shall paraphrase, those yahoos should not be using that flag. Many people still have vided memories of racist violence concerning the Confederate Battle flag and we should take their feelings into account but not at the expense of rewriting history and forgetting about the men who gave their lives in a cause they felt justified in. The Confederate soldier did not go to war to preserve slavery and the Union soldier did not go to war to end slavery. Some of the slaves during the war were fiercely loyal to their owners not because they had no other place to go but because they too felt they were being invaded. A good example of this is in cemetery in Dawson, Georgia. There is a monument to the former slaves who are buried there and remained loyal throughout the war. Dawson was not occupied during the war and there was nothing stopping any slave from leaving the area especially late in the war yet they stayed with the women of Dawson and helped contribute to the war by doing their daily work while many of the men were fighting the war.

Andrew Jackson Riddle took some photographs of the Union dead being buried at Camp Sumter, aka Andersonville. He made the trip from his studio in Macon as I recall during the summer of 1864. I suppose it depended upon the color of your politics looking through the lens.