We have been taught in recent years to view the confederate battle flag as a symbol of oppression similar to the NAZI flag of Germany. I grew to manhood in a different era. we did not view the flag as a cause lost or as a symbol of oppression to blacks or any other American. In the modern era the confederate battle flag has been demeaned by dumb asses and Nazis and the KKK but at one time it had the following meaning.
I wanted to share it so folks from the north and west might better understand the sentiments of our southern Grandfathers as they talked to us kids. BTW before anyone blows a fuse, while I had several relatives in the southern army my mothers grandfatehr was a union scout hung by the virginia 5th Virginia Milita cavalry when they caught him acting as a scout for union forces.
BT

Dr. McKim also gave the following oration to the SCV in 1904 in Nashville.

"We salute yonder flag - the banner of the stars and stripes - as the symbol of our reunited
country, at the same moment that we .... do homage to the Stars and Bars. We still love our
old battle flag, with the southern cross upon its fiery folds!
We have wrapped it around our hearts!
We have enshrined it in the sacred ark of our love, and we will honor it and cherish it
evermore -- not now as a political symbol, but as the consecrated emblem of an heroic epoch;
as the sacred memento of a day that is dead; as embodiment of memories that will be tender
and holy as long as life shall last.

If Daniel Webster could say that the Bunker Hill monument was not created 'to perpetuate
hostility to Great Britain,' MUCH MORE can we say that the monuments we have erected
and will yet erect in our Southland, to the memory of our dead heroes, are not intended (to be
hostile.)

The people that forgets its heroic dead is already dying at the heart; and we believe it will
make for the strength and glory of the United States if the sentiments that animate us today
shall be perpetuated, generation after generation.

The Battle Flag, ironically should be LESS POLITICAL than the First National or other flags
of the Confederacy - for it is not a country's flag, per se, it was the emblem of the SOLDIER!

The quote is originally from a book: A Soldiers Recollections - Leaves from a
Diary of a Young Confederate.
Published in 1910 by Longmans,Green and Co. Reprinted by Time-Life in 1984.