The post-war white south embraced the Confederate battle flag, making it their sentimental symbol of the “lost cause” of the war. After the north won, it imposed a harsh Reconstruction on the south that still fuels white resentment today.
The flag’s history is fraught and complicated, as was the bloody civil war that erupted in 1861 between the US south – where America’s slave trade had relocated and expanded by the mid-1800s – and the north.
Lindy and Ira Isonhood walk along Deer Hollow, their property in Copiah County, Mississippi.
