A culture war is rapidly heating up. Ordinary citizens have become increasingly concerned about the cost of illegal immigration, the rise of the welfare state, and multiculturalism enforced by liberal elites.

Things have gotten so hot that the Economist magazine (one of the world’s best-known journals of leftist opinion) published a recent article explaining “the culture war” in this place as a crude reaction to a laudable effort by liberals to “redraw national identity” and to “make amends for past wrongs to indigenous peoples.”

Rejecting the policies of the left and reconnecting with their ancestors, ordinary citizens are now displaying their traditional flag whenever they can: at political gatherings, public places, private homes and wherever people gather. Meanwhile, leftist policy makers are, of course, deeply concerned about such displays of militant nostalgia and have proposed that the old flag be redesigned to something more acceptable in the modern world. Sound familiar? Where do you think this is happening? Georgia? Mississippi? Alabama? South Carolina?

Well, yes. There too. But the set of facts outlined above describe what’s happening today in Australia.The good people Down Under are fed up with militant modernism and the Labor Party’s relentless drive to destroy all tradition. And the Australian flag has become a symbol of renewed pride for ordinary citizens and a link to their ancestors, whose lives and sacrifices they refuse to trivialize or to discredit in the false name of progress.

American Southerners understand. Consider for example recent events in Georgia. Herculean efforts were made by secular progressives to eradicate the 1956 Georgia flag which included the Confederate battle flag design. As you may recall, a committee of soulless boosters attempted to replace the flag with a horrendously bland banner—the Barnes flag— which was replaced with another design after Governor Roy Barnes was defeated.

Mississippi found a better way. The same leftist legions agitated for years to replace the state flag and to strip away its Confederate symbolism. But Mississippi politicians were clever enough to allow the issue to be decided by public referendum.

In South Carolina, the state flag has so far escaped attack because its traditional design is merely a lone palmetto tree with a crescent moon, and the heathens are not well enough informed to understand its Confederate roots. So, instead they attacked the easier target: the Confederate battle flag which flew atop the capitol dome.

In 1996, there was a public referendum on the GOP primary ballot in South Carolina asking voters whether the battle flag should continue flying atop the statehouse.

The flag won with a whopping 76%, attracting the largest primary voter turnout in state history. Still, four years later, the South Carolina legislature voted to move the flag from the dome to a Confederate soldiers’ monument on statehouse grounds, where it still flies and where the attack on its existence continues unabated.

In 2000, when the South Carolina Senate was debating removing the Confederate flag, Sen. Harvey Peeler warned his colleagues that if that one flag came down from the dome a thousand would go up across the state.

They didn’t care. After all, they claimed flags on private property were of no concern to them, as long as that particular one wasn’t in “a place of sovereignty.”

Sen. Peeler was right, of course, as the Confederate flag is more visible and displayed more frequently than ever by ordinary South Carolinians. My sense is that the same is true of the ’56 Flag in Georgia, and generally true throughout the South.

An interesting byproduct of the Confederate flag debate here in South Carolina is the prominence of the state emblem: the Palmetto Flag. Little more than a decade ago, it was rare to ever see the state flag outside an official setting. Now, however, the Palmetto emblem is everywhere: on cars, boats, clothing; and it seems that just about every third business has it in its logo.

One cannot help but conclude that this newfound affection for the symbol of South Carolina is a direct result of the attack on the state’s Southern heritage.

Flags and symbols have power, and ordinary folk everywhere are turning to traditional symbols as a way of resisting the Left’s relentless drive to eradicate or redefine history. There is a cultural war and it is being fought in spots all across America and around the world. It is a war waged by socalled progressives against those who honor the past and respect tradition.

Southerners, like our distant cousins Down Under, instinctively cling to their flags as symbols of their country and their heritage; as heraldic devices, resplendent with the symbols of a precious cultural inheritance.

Just as instinctive, however, is the spirit that motivates those who see the South’s unique culture as something to be feared and fought against, who see the Confederate flag and her vexillological offspring as obstacles to a society uniform in thought and action.

These enemies of our heritage do not want the Confederate flag—or any of these state flags, for that matter—in any place of prominence or honor. Nor do they want them on bumpers, doorframes, t-shirts or anywhere else.

Their goal is simple: they want them gone. But the more they try to rub out Southern identity, the more tenaciously people display the symbol of their revered ancestors, the symbol of which those very ancestors were so justifiably proud.

Confederate Sergeant Barry Benson described it thusly:

“Oh how it thrilled the heart of a soldier, when he had long been away from the army, to catch sight again of his red battle flag, upheld on its staff of pine, its tatters snapping in the wind.

“‘A red rag,’ there will be those who will say. ‘A red rag tied to a stick, and that is all!’

“And yet that red rag, crossed with blue, white stars sprinkling the cross within, tied to a slim, barked sapling with leather
thongs cut from a soldier’s shoe.

“This red rag my soul loved with a lover’s love.”

In 1825, John Caldwell Calhoun and his wife, Floride Bonneau, moved into a modest plantation home in the upper South Carolina piedmont near present day Clemson. Having risen to prominence as a local lawyer in nearby Abbeville, Calhoun had by this time served in the South Carolina General Assembly (1808-1810), the United States Congress (1811-1817), and as Secretary of War in the administration of James Monroe.

Located in Pickens County, South Carolina, and originally called Clergy Hall, Fort Hill was constructed as a four-room cottage in 1803 by Dr. James McElhenney, the second pastor of the historic Old Stone Church. Built in the upcountry vernacular style with three Greek Revival columned piazzas, the home would grow to ten rooms (and 14 fireplaces) to accommodate their ten children.

While lacking the lofty scale of a Monticello, Fort Hill had a simple grandeur elegantly framed by magnificent views of the Blue Ridge Mountain range to the north and the Seneca River to the south. Although only about 450 acres of the estate’s approximately 1,100 were cultivated during Calhoun’s life, it was a vibrant and active home for such a large family and about seventy slaves.

Although its modern setting is surrounded by the sprawling campus of Clemson University, which is the house’s custodian by the terms of the will, a visitor in Calhoun’s day would have come up along a cedar-lined drive to the main house, along with an exterior office and kitchen with a vegetable garden on one side and on the other “Cornelia’s Garden,” a playground for one of Calhoun’s daughters, born lame.

While Fort Hill provided Calhoun with a retreat from the hullabaloo of official Washington, he was never removed from the issues of the day. Here Calhoun would pen some of the works that would establish him as the preeminent political philosopher of the American Republic. His famous Fort Hill Address: On the Relation which the States and General Government Bear to Each Other, which set forth the doctrine of nullification, was written on his desk in the office. As further reminders of the larger world, two trees on the grounds were presents from his Congressional colleagues: a cypress from Henry Clay and a hemlock from Daniel Webster.

History abounds inside Fort Hill as well. Unlike many other historic homes, most of the furnishings never left and others were donated by family members in the 20th century. A chair located in the parlor was presented to Calhoun’s son-in-law (and subsequent owner of the house) while he was an emissary to Belgium. There is a mahogany sideboard made from wood once used in the USS Constitution, as well as a Windsor chair once belonging to George Washington.

After Calhoun’s death in 1850, the property passed to his widow and daughter Anna Maria Calhoun. Anna Maria had married Thomas Green Clemson of Philadelphia. Educated in Paris, Clemson served as Charge d’Affaires to Belgium until 1852 and as United States Superintendent of Agriculture until the firing on Fort Sumter.

When the War started, Clemson, who was fifty-four at the time, joined the Confederate Army and served in Arkansas and Texas, administering mining operations and developing more efficient explosives. At the end of the War he was paroled at Shreveport, Louisiana.

His son, Captain John Calhoun Clemson, CSA, fared worse, spending two hellish years as a Yankee prisoner at Johnson’s Island, in Lake Erie, Ohio.

The elder Clemson died in 1888—outliving his wife and children—and bequeathed more than 814 acres of the Fort Hill estate to the state of South Carolina for an agricultural college with a stipulation that the dwelling house “shall never be torn down or altered; but shall be kept in repair with all articles of furniture and vesture … and shall always be open for the inspection of visitors.” Clemson University has operated Fort Hill as a museum ever since.

Designated a National Historic Landmark in 1960, Fort Hill fell on hard times and at one point was designated to the Department of the Interior, National Historic Landmarks Program, as a “Threatened and Endangered” landmark in need of restoration based on continued deterioration.

Since Clemson was required by the will to maintain the property, they finally began a major renovation project in 1997 and concluded in time for the bicentennial in 2003. Clemson University’s restoration, funded partly by a $1.2 million grant from the South Carolina legislature, included structural stabilization, the installation of climate control, upgrade of fire suppression and electrical systems, as well as restoration of Calhoun’s office.

The second phase of restoration focused on the inside of the home. It included painting and plaster repair and the reproduction of missing architectural features such as doors. It also included the painstaking reproduction of wall coverings. Fort Hill was named a national treasure by the Save America’s Treasures program, and now its artifacts are currently undergoing a comprehensive conservation program funded by this federal grant and matching funds.

Photos by Michael Givens