Maryland News of the Weird

The Washington Post story on Confederate pride in Cumberland, Maryland was one of the strangest stories I've read in awhile.

As when I taught in South Carolina, defending one's "heritage" is apparently the cri de coeur of those who would wear or fly the Confederate flag in Cumberland:

Deana Bryant allowed her 16-year-old son to wear a shirt emblazoned with the flag to school one day last week in open defiance of the ban. Speaking from behind the grocery counter where she works, Bryant said the flag is not about racism.

"It's his heritage," she said, her blue eyes flashing.

Except that it's most certainly not the heritage of Cumberland. Western Maryland was a hotbed of Union sympathy during the Civil War. During the debate over secession, he rump Maryland legislature reconvened in Frederick, located east of Cumberland in Western Maryland, and wisely voted to stay in the Union--after pro-Confederate legislators had been arrested--precisely because this was Union territory.

Cumberland, after all, lies right on the Maryland border with West Virginia--a state formed because it refused to join the rest of Virginia in secession. Like West Virginia, there were few slaves or free blacks in Allegheny, so going to war under the banner of "States Rights" to protect the "peculiar institution" of slavery sensibly lacked appeal in this part of the world.

Appalachia was a hotbed of Union sympathy not just in Maryland and West Virginia but all the way down the mountain chain. Even the foothills in Alabama and Mississippi were the most pro-Union portions of these states. Ever wonder why western Maryland votes so Republican? It is the region's "heritage" dating back to its staunch support for the Union in the Civil War.