It's a commonplace to say things like, "There are atrocities on both sides," and many bring up the bloody guerrilla warfare in Kansas as evidence that Northern troops were far from innocent. But the fighting in the Kansas theatre was in large part a continuation of the internecine conflict before the war, going back over a decade and involving local factions and grudges with little connection to the overall conflict.

The Southern attitude toward Black soldiers was an unvarnished atrocity. Their regard of Blacks as sub-human (even as Southern men frequently raped Black women under their power, who had no realistic ability to resist) is a stain on their conduct as a military and as human beings in general. Beyond the massacre at Fort Pillow, Confederate troops as a rule became enraged whenever they found Black soldiers fighting against them, often refusing to give quarter, and on the occasions when they did accept surrender, it was only to send those soldiers into slavery (many of whom were actually free men from the North who had never been enslaved to begin with). And their refusal to include captured Black soldiers in prisoner exchanges led directly to the barbarous conditions at prison camps like Andersonville, where POWs died in squalor, disease and starvation.

The refusal of Southern Whites- indeed, of White people from whatever region- to admit that this is what the Confederate flag stood for, is an act of willful ignorance. They would not fly the Nazi flag (mostly, anyway, although even that isn't a sure bet anymore), but they display this banner as a sign of "heritage". Yet they refuse to face the fact that it is a heritage of racism and slaughter.