The second Confederate national flag also symbolized white supremacy. In April, 1863, the Savannah Morning News proposed a new flag, all white except the Confederate Battle Flag in the top corner next to the pole. The editor explained, “We are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.” Republished with approval in Richmond newspapers, his thinking carried the day.

White supremacy was Confederate national policy from the top down. In November, 1862, for example, Confederates seized four African Americans in U.S. uniforms on a South Carolina island and asked Richmond what to do with them. President Davis and his secretary of war approved their “summary execution,” which was and is a war crime. When President Lincoln released the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, Jefferson Davis called it “the most execrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man.” He proposed to his Congress that white officers of black troops be delivered to state authorities to be “dealt with in accordance with the laws … providing for the punishment of criminals engaged in exciting servile insurrection” — again, execution. The Confederate Congress responded that the C.S.A. should use its own military courts to have such persons “put to death or be otherwise punished.”