Slowly, new attitudes taking root across America’s Old South

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In the early hours of April 12, 1861, shots rang out over the harbour of Charleston, S.C. The bombardment of Fort Sumter, the federal stronghold on a man-made island, signalled the start of the bloodiest conflict in American history: the Civil War.

On June 17 of this year, another set of shots rang out in Charleston. A young white man walked into a historic black church, sat with parishioners during an hour of Bible study, then opened fire with a handgun, killing six women and three men. The individual accused of the murders had posted racist materials online and posed with a Confederate flag.

Within days, a campaign was under way to take down the flag from official sites and remove flag merchandise from store shelves. Suddenly, Southerners were talking not just about the flag but about the meaning of a conflict that has been over for a century and a half.

In the aftermath of the Charleston murders, I travelled the back roads of the southern United States, asking everyone I met for their views on the flag and on Southern history.

In the course of a 1,500-kilometre trip through five states, I paused at gas bars and tobacco stores, car-wash joints and antique sellers, little thrift shops and giant Wal-Marts. I talked to pastors and policewomen, beauticians and antique dealers, judges and historians.

I saw a South that often seems a caricature of itself, with holy-rolling preachers blasting from the radio, tobacco-chewing farmers cursing the name of Abraham Lincoln and flag-worshipping loyalists of the Confederate side insisting that the Lost Cause was a just cause. But I also found a new South, a place of changing demographics and evolving attitudes that is trying to face up to its poisoned past.

As an outsider, I had always thought that the history of the Civil War was essentially settled. The South tried to break away from the North when the election of Lincoln heightened its fear of losing the institution that supported its economy and way of life: slavery. In the titanic struggle that followed, the South was defeated and slavery ended.

In the South, it is not quite so simple. Talk to white Southerners and a good number of them, young and old, will tell you that the Civil War was not about slavery at all. Or, as a fall-back position, not just about slavery. It was about money. It was about the North imposing taxes and tariffs that were sucking the life from the South. It was about "states' rights" against an overbearing federal government.

Those beliefs remain surprisingly strong, despite the volume of evidence on the war – more than 60,000 books have been written on the subject.

At the Museum and Library of Confederate History in Greenville, S.C., retired teacher Rossie Meadows, 58, led me through the fusty exhibits dressed in full Confederate regalia: grey battle cap, grey tunic and kilt. Only a minority of Southerners owned slaves, he said, and some slaveowners treated their slaves as family. "I'm not saying it was a bed of roses for the blacks," he said, straight-faced. "I'm not saying they weren't mistreated. But it was tough times for everyone. The Irish caught heck, too."

Up the road in the town of Travelers Rest, I stopped at Dixie Republic, a roadside store selling Confederate merchandise, from bumper stickers and coffee cups to bikinis and boxer shorts. The store even carries DVDs of The Birth of a Nation, the groundbreaking 1915 D.W. Griffith film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan, and copies of The Story of Little Black Sambo, the children's book long vanished from most libraries.

Dalton Simpson, a 22-year-old from Tennessee's Morgan County, paid about $40 for a Confederate hoodie, lighter, mouse pad and sticker. "God bless those men who chose to defend our freedom," he said. If ever a time came again when the states were up against an oppressive Washington, he said, "I believe we should pull that flag out again and fight big government."

Attitudes like that spring from deep roots. The Civil War raged from 1861 to 1865 and claimed the lives of about 2 per cent of the U.S. population. Most of the battles were fought on Southern soil. The war ended in a catastrophic defeat for the Confederacy. "That is not something that you quickly forget," says Tony Horwitz, author of the 1998 book Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.

In the century that followed, the South remained a region apart, guarding its distinctiveness and nursing its grievances. Monuments to Southern heroes such as general Robert E. Lee and president Jefferson Davis arose all over the region. Organizations such as Sons of Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy tended Confederate graves and watched over Confederate museums.

Even Northerners were drawn to the romance of the South, especially after the success of the Civil War classic Gone with the Wind. "The South lost the war but won the memory of it," Mr. Horwitz said. "Former Confederates created this ideology that really whitewashed the Confederacy and made the war seem a noble defeat in pursuit of freedom."

Because the South absorbed fewer immigrants than the North, a large proportion of its white population could trace its roots to soldiers who fought and bled for the South. "Their pictures are on our walls. Their names are in our Bibles. Their DNA is in us," an official with the Sons of Confederate Veterans, Randy Burbage, told me.

But the DNA of the South is mutating. A robust Southern economy has attracted millions of newcomers: Latinos, South Asians, Americans from other regions in search of jobs or a sunny retirement.

You can see the change in Greenville, a hub of South Carolina's new economy. Most of the textile mills that used to supply jobs and money are gone, victims of international competition. In their place have come big global companies such as Michelin and BMW, which has an enormous campus at nearby Greer.

When I arrived in Greenville to look in on the Confederate museum, visitors and locals were crowding into the spruced-up downtown, which is anchored by a magnificent riverside park. On the bridge that spans that river, families and couples who reflected the growing diversity of the South were buying cupcakes and ice cream from mobile stands. A mixed-race couple – black man, white woman – strolled with their three kids. A dad with pierced ears and tattooed arms pushed a stroller.

At the Army Store, owner Jeff Zaglin was hawking surplus helmets, knives, boots and other military paraphernalia – even Confederate flags, if his supplier could keep up with demand. His grandfather, the first rabbi in Greenville, once ran a popular meat market nearby. Jews were a curiosity in town in those days. Today, said Mr. Zaglin, "Nobody bats an eye if a mixed couple walks down the street or an Indian guy owns the 7-Eleven."

Things are changing so fast, he said, that he almost felt sorry for the Old South true believers who cling to the flag. "They feel squeezed," he said. "You've got a changing population here and they see stuff their daddy would never have imagined."

Daddy would certainly have never imagined a place like Los Dos Hermanos (The Two Brothers), a convenience store in Greer run by a family from Honduras. When I stopped in, Elmer Lemus, 18, a soccer-loving high school senior in a Chicago Bulls ball cap, was behind the cash listening to reggaeton, a mix of Latin American, Jamaican and hip-hop influences. He said he wanted to study to be a sports physiotherapist. Just across the street stood a yellow clapboard house with folding chairs on the lawn and a rebel flag flying from a tall pole. It is pretty clear which place represents the future of the region.

Not that living Southern stereotypes are entirely a thing of the past. Beside the main street in Richton, Miss., I met a 77-year-old watermelon seller who really did spit a brown stream of tobacco juice into the sand at the mention of Lincoln's name. He felt the same way about that "OH-bama," reminisced about the days when black people "knew their place" and said anyone who tried to take down the flag "ought to be shot."

But people of that ilk seem more and more like relics. For a more current version of the South, listen to Agee Broughton. I spoke to him in Perdue Hill, a tiny place in southern Alabama. The proprietor of a family general store that sells everything from postage stamps to cold beer to crickets for fish bait, Mr. Broughton knows a thing or two about Southern heritage. When he is buried in an old cemetery down the road, he will be the seventh on one side of the family to lie there. His great-grandfather started the business in the late 1800s. Six of his ancestors fought in the Civil War. Three came home; three did not.

"I'm not ashamed [of] it. I'm proud of it in a lot of ways," he said. "But that flag has become a symbol of hate and it has got to go." Race relations have improved since he grew up, he said, "and I think in time it's going to become better. We all have to live together and we have to figure out a way to do that and do it peacefully. Fighting over a flag is a not very productive way to spend our time."

Inside the store, Marcus Rivers, 37, was of the same mind. The rebel flag "don't bother me," he said. "If you want it to make you angry, I guess it will." He agreed that race relations in the community were generally good. Though he is one of only two blacks among the 40 men in his work unit at the local pulp mill, he said everyone got along fine, even hunting and fishing together.

Most of the black Southerners I talked to felt strongly that the Confederate flag should come down, at least from official sites such as the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse (where it was lowered for good on July 10). The flag, after all, was raised there as a symbol of Southern defiance when civil-rights leaders were struggling to end segregation. Hate groups brandished it, too.

In Greeleyville, S.C., I asked retired guidance counsellor Marva Session, 72, what she thought of the argument that the Confederate flag was about "heritage not hate," a favourite slogan of flag defenders. She was blunt: "The heritage is hanging black people. You look at that flag and you just think of your great-grandfather hanging from a tree."

But quite a few black Southerners also took a page from Rhett Butler and said that, frankly, they don't give a damn about any old flag. That, too, may be a sign of progress.

On my final stop, the Whitney Plantation just outside New Orleans, I met John Cummings. A wealthy white lawyer, he bought the place in 1998 as a real-estate investment, then started reading up on the history of the lives of the slaves who worked there. He opened it in December as the first restored plantation dedicated entirely to the slave experience. Visitors get a guided tour of the site, with its big white mansion house, little slave cabins and grim iron slave jail. I found Mr. Cummings greeting visitors from a golf cart, sounding and looking very much the Southern gentleman in his white beard and white shirt.

"In Germany," he said, "they have 200 memorials and museums that are dedicated to the Holocaust. They were built by the children and grandchildren and the great-grandchildren of Nazis who swore to kill every Jew and participated in the death of another 15 million people, and yet the German people have embraced their history. They own it. They're not proud of it, but they own it. It's their history, and this is our history and we have not embraced it and we have not been educated on it."

It seemed a fitting place to end. Mr. Cummings is part of a new movement to give an honest accounting of Southern history, with its horrors as well as its glories. To match all those Confederate monuments and museums, a host of new memorials have gone up in recent years, these to honour civil-rights heroes and document the toll of slavery.

More are planned. In Charleston, Joe Riley, the long-time mayor of the city, is leading an effort to build an African-American museum telling the story of the millions of slaves who came to the United States through Charleston. The museum is to rise near the site of an old wharf where ships unloaded their slave cargo. Just steps away, visitors board a parks-service vessel that takes them to Fort Sumter, where the war that ended slavery began with a volley of shots on that long-ago day.