As America observed the centenary of the outbreak of its Civil War in 1961, the Bermuda Historical Monuments Trust — predecessor to the National Trust — opened The Confederate Museum in St George’s Globe Hotel.

The Island, because of geography, history and economic necessity, had played a substantive supporting role in the war which fissured America between 1861 and 1865.

The new museum’s sole focus was on Bermuda’s role as a shipping transit point between the Confederacy and a neutral Great Britain which, while maintaining diplomatic and trading ties with the Union, had also coveted the South’s cotton and tobacco.

Bermuda did indeed offer sanctuary to blockade runners and privateers serving Southern commercial and military interests.

Throughout the war St George’s harbour was crammed with the sleek steam-ships which slipped the Union naval blockade of Southern ports, carrying plantation produce across the Atlantic while returning to the Confederacy laden with European guns and other ordnance.

The agent representing the South’s interests in Bermuda, the odious if indefatigable Major Norman Walker, had made his home at the Globe Hotel. There he had a Confederate Naval Jack installed as the canopy over his wife’s bed so even though their son “could not be born in the South, he would still be born under the Confederate flag”.

But exclusively identifying Bermuda’s Civil War museum with the Confederacy was both impolitic as well as a gross distortion of the historical record, suggesting an entirely one-sided local affinity for the South’s “Lost Cause.”

The museum was opened just two years after the 1959 Theatre Boycott led to the collapse of the system of petit apartheid then operative in Bermuda and well prior to the dismantling of the more pernicious manifestations of structural racism found in employment, housing and education.

In a majority black community contending with complex and uncompleted racial business of its own, to rip Bermuda’s part in the Civil War out of its broader cultural context in a bid to pander to those American visitors who thought Gone With The Wind was a work of history was short-sighted at best – bone-headedly stupid and terminally insensitive at worst.

And the museum’s studiously genteel take on “The Late Unpleasantness” did indeed owe more to Margaret Mitchell’s romanticised and largely sanitised version of the Old South than it did to the grim reality of a slave-holding feudal aristocracy.

At the time of the museum’s opening, one usually perceptive local writer – in a staggering demonstration of cultural myopia – said “these two leisurely ‘Old World’ areas (Bermuda and the Confederacy) were unutterably opposed to the progressive, industrial North ...”

Selectively reading the Island’s past, entirely oblivious to an unsettled present, its supporters saw nothing provocative or potentially offensive in displaying the banners of the Confederacy outside a museum uncritically celebrating our association with the South.

This at the very time when, as has been said, Ku Klux Klan members “were adopting (the Confederate battle flag) as the symbol of their hate … When it was waved proudly as a banner for segregationists … When it became identified with burning crosses, white hoods and ropes thrown over magnolia trees looped around lifeless brown necks.”

This at the very time Bermudians were also pursuing their own peaceful struggle for full equality.

Our association with the Confederacy is certainly a part of our history – but only one part. And by choosing to ignore Bermuda’s entirely more complex role in the Civil War period, the museum made a mockery of our heritage rather than illuminating it.

Public opinion in Bermuda had been sharply divided during the Civil War. While some in the Island’s mercantile elite did favour the South, the common man’s sympathies were overwhelmingly with the North – hardly surprising in an Island with a large black population which itself had only abolished slavery 30 years earlier.

In any event, whatever reservoir of good will existed for the Confederacy here at the beginning of the war entirely evaporated when the macabre Yellow Fever plot was uncovered in 1865. This was an attempt led by a fanatical Southern doctor to spread an epidemic to Northern cities which had killed fully five percent of Bermuda’s population in 1864 using the soiled clothing and dressings of local plague victims. The conspiracy had failed because of a lack of proper scientific understanding of how Yellow Fever is transmitted. But when details of the plot emerged during a number of well-publicised trials, even the Confederate leadership was said to be shaken by the depraved lengths to which its more zealous supporters were prepared to go.

Not only that but Union military vessels had routinely patrolled the Island’s waters throughout the conflict, chasing down blockade-runners departing Bermuda. Their successes were often a consequence of the dangerous clandestine work undertaken by Charles M. Allen, the implacably stoic US consul general on the Island during the Civil War.

Publicly set upon more than once by local Confederate sympathisers, Allen, an untrained civilian possessed of “seemingly limitless pluck and determination”, had complemented his diplomatic activities here with cloak-and-dagger intelligence gathering on Bermuda-based blockade-running activities.

Assisted by a network of Bermudian informants, one admiring biographer noted how he tirelessly compiled data on “the comings and goings of named [ships], the physical descriptions of these vessels and the types and value of their cargo …all in the hopes that US warships would one day intercept the blockade runners.”

Bermuda also sheltered one-time American slave Joseph Rainey who went on to become the first black person to serve in the US House of Representatives. Fleeing here after balking at being called upon to build up the defences of Charleston at the outbreak of the Civil War, his time on the Island is commemorated in the name of Barber’s Alley – where he pursued that trade in St. George’s.

Writing in 1953 when there were “still among us those whose fathers were shaved or had their hair trimmed” by Joseph Rainey, Bermuda historian John Stow said the future Congressman had been “invariably courteous to everyone [on the Island], a good listener, a hard worker and possessed a strength of character which carried him from a slave’s cradle to a position of national importance in Washington, DC.”

Bermudians of both races fought in the Civil War, mainly serving aboard Union warships. But it was Robert Simmons of St. George’s, a “young man of more than ordinary abilities who had learned the science of war in the British Army” contingent garrisoned on the Island, who was to win lasting renown as a soldier in the legendary 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment.

One of the first largely black military units raised in the wake of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation, the Bermudian volunteer was appointed a Sergeant in the new regiment and quickly distinguished himself for his valiant conduct.

Grievously wounded during the 1864 assault on Fort Wagner near Charleston, Sgt Simmons was captured by the Confederates – who found him to be “a brave man and of good education”. While he eventually succumbed to his injuries, a contemporaneous Southern newspaper account reported his “bearing impressed even his captors” during his time as a prisoner.

When the Bermuda National Trust inherited the Confederate Museum along with other properties from the old Bermuda Historical Trust, it took an entirely more enlightened and historically informed view of the Island’s Civil War epoch.

Because, understandably enough, there had been what a Trust official -- in a masterpiece of understatement -- described as “a lot of fuss about Confederate flags” from Bermudians and visitors alike, the Confederate Museum was eventually closed.

The old Globe Hotel name was restored. A new exhibit was installed providing a more balanced and representative overview of Bermuda’s multi-faced role – and split loyalties – during the Civil War. And Confederate flags ended up inside the museum rather than being flown in front of it, exactly where such historical relics belong (they are now displayed alongside Union banners from the same period).

One hundred and fifty years after the Confederacy surrendered what’s been accurately described as a flag “created by an army raised to kill in defence of slavery, revived by a movement that killed in defence of segregation, and now flaunted by a man who killed nine innocents in defence of white supremacy” in Charleston last week is finally coming down throughout the South. These banners will end up in museums too – also where they belong.

The South, in large measure, is no longer a hotbed of racism and reactionary thinking. Those who have come of age in the post-Civil Rights era recognise they are obliged to “shoulder the burden of Southern history”, as historian C. Vann Woodward put it (just as very few white Bermudians born after 1960 entertain exculpatory rationalisations for the darker chapters in our history).

In ever increasing numbers Southerners accept a past largely defined by slavery and segregation is something to be overcome, not fêted. And a flag which was the emblem of proudly unreconstructed bigots in the 1950s and ‘60s had become an embarrassment and a blight on the region’s reputation to many in the South long before last week’s tragedy in Charleston.

It’s regrettable the shedding of innocent blood had to provide the final impetus for removing what to many was an all-too conspicuous symbol of hate, division and repression from public places in the South. But if the Charleston massacre has caused the states of the old Confederacy to revisit and re-examine the full burden of their history, then at least some measure of good will come out of the Emanuel AME Church atrocity. Considerable progress has been made – and continues to be made – in terms of racial and social justice both in Bermuda and the American South.

But mothballing the most entrenched racist attitudes which still manifest themselves here and there will never be as straightforward as consigning anachronistic pieces of cloth to museum display cases. And there still are stubborn pockets of such racism, resistant to all reason and morality. As James Baldwin remarked in 1956 when the Civil Rights movement was beginning to gather momentum: “It is easy to proclaim all souls equal in the sight of God; it is hard to make men equal on earth in the sight of men.”