As each Southern state emerged from Reconstruction (political and economic retribution), the people adopted new state constitutions that tended to resemble the Confederate Constitution. The Texas Constitution of 1876 is a very good example. Shelby Foote made the following observation regarding the intent of our ancestors, education and the CBF.

“The flag is a symbol my great grandfather fought under and in defense of. I am for flying it anywhere anybody wants to fly it. I do know perfectly well what pain it causes my black friends, but I think that pain is not necessary if they would read the Confederate constitution and knew what the Confederacy really stood for. This country has two grievous sins on its hands. One of them is slavery – whether we’ll ever be cured of it, I don’t know. The other one is emancipation – they told 4 million people, you’re free, hit the road, and they drifted back into a form of peonage that in some ways is worse than slavery. These things have got to be understood before they’re condemned. They’re condemned on the face of it because they take that flag to represent what those yahoos represent as – in their protest against civil rights things. But the people who knew what that flag really stood for should have stopped those yahoos from using it as a symbol of what they stood for. But we didn’t – and now you had this problem of the Confederate flag being identified as sort of a roughneck thing, which it is not.”