The opening shots of the American Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter outside Charleston, South Carolina, in 1861 when troops of the secessionist Confederacy bombarded Union defenders.

When the centenary of the outbreak of this fratricidal conflict — which retains the dubious distinction of claiming more lives than all of the other wars America has participated in combined — was marked in 1961, there was a massive resurgence of popular interest in the War Between the States.

Battlefields such as Gettysburg once again became places of mass pilgrimage.

The slaughter which took place outside this small Pennsylvania village in 1863 allowed the North to decisively gain the upper hand against the breakaway slave-holding Southern states.

This watershed engagement led President Lincoln to redefine the aim of the war, proclaiming it was not just an effort to preserve the Union but to advance human ideals. Lincoln said those who died at Gettysburg had sacrificed their lives to ensure America would enjoy a “new birth of freedom”.

It proved to be a difficult and extremely protracted birth.

Hard as it may be to accept from our vantage point in history, the freedoms we take for granted today did not begin to become the norm until the 19th century.

While enlightened ideas about the betterment of society and advancing the human condition were in increasingly common currency during the 17th and 18th centuries, they were not widely put into practice until the Victorian Age.

Only the most embryonic social consciences existed in most western countries before then; and force — as in the case of the Civil War — was often required to safeguard and extend liberties against fierce and often vicious entrenched opposition.

By specifically associating the cause of black freedom with the preservation of the Union, Lincoln went well beyond the cowardly half-measures and evasive rhetoric of most of his contemporaries.

Out of the carnage, brutality and suffering of the first modern, industrialised war, the president resolved that not so much a preserved but reinvented Union had to emerge — one which did indeed live up to its founding ideals, one where “all persons shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free” and enjoy the full protection of the law and the full rights and benefits of citizenship.

Lincoln was, of course, murdered for his commitment to such transcendent principles.

A century later, as America reflected on its divided past and contemplated horrific scenes of ongoing divisiveness based on intolerance and racial hatred, President Kennedy ruefully remarked that his martyred predecessor’s work remained unfinished.

He conceded that what was primarily a moral issue — one “ as old as the Scriptures and [as] clear as the American Constitution” — remained unresolved largely due to foot-dragging and vestigial racism in the former Confederate states.

“One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free,” Kennedy said in a televised address. “They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”

In the old Confederacy, where one of its most famous sons said “the past is never dead — it’s never even past”, the Civil War centenary celebrations had coincided with a new struggle pitting North against South, brother against brother, progress against stasis.

It was against this turbulent backdrop that the old battle flag of General Robert E Lee’s Army of North Virginia was being taken out of mothballs and unfurled again.

Featuring a blue St Andrew’s Cross dotted with 13 stars representing the secessionist states against a blood-red backdrop, the flag quickly became a symbol of defiance against the new enemy — the Civil Rights movement and its political supporters.

Operating in a white-hot haze of resentment and fired by an unyielding sense of entitlement, the segregationists who wrapped themselves in the battle flag consciously adopted it as an emblem of hate.

Until the 1960s the flag had never been widely associated with Southern heritage. Indeed, most of those living in the former Confederacy had entirely forgotten its existence until the short-lived Dixiecrat bloc of rebel Democrats used it as their battle standard to protest Harry Truman’s desegregation of the US armed forces in 1948.

In the modern era it was deliberately employed as a banner of scorn rather than regional pride; it was intended to be synonomous with the South’s ongoing rejection of the freedoms Lincoln had articulated almost one hundred years earlier.

Indeed, it became a type of vivid and provocative visual short-hand for just such obstructionism, an instantly recognisable symbol in the iconography of hatred.

As The Atlantic reported at the weekend: “The flag was waved at Klan rallies, at White Citizens’ Council meetings, and by those committing horrifying acts of violence … as a political symbol, it offered little ambiguity.

“Georgia inserted the battle flag into its state flag in 1956 ... and then, on the centennial of the day South Carolina opened fire on Fort Sumter came in 1961, it hoisted the battle flag above its Capitol.

“The flag [proclaimed] that South Carolina might have lost the war, but that it was determined not to surrender its opposition to racial equality.”

It was at this juncture that Bermuda, attempting to capitalise on the tourism potential generated by the Civil War centenary and willfully blind to the significance the battle flag was already assuming in the Civil Rights era, blundered on to the scene.

As a consequence, the Island underwent its own small-scale debate as to whether displaying the Confederate banner was a legitimate reflection of our past — a past inextricably linked to the American Civil War — or a powerful, if silent rebuke, to those still struggling to advance the causes of racial and social justice both in Bermuda and the US.

• Concluded tomorrow