The lowering of Confederate battle flags across the South is not a victory. It's a correction, a small one, and to treat it like a victory is wrong and divisive given the example in Charleston, South Carolina, where the forgiving grace of nine families in funeral corteges is a continuing miracle that makes the head bow with humility.

What good is it to lower flags if it leads to chins raised in defensiveness, defaced statues and suppression of speech? To desentimentalize the Confederate banner and to insist on its removal from statehouse grounds should not mean the wholesale effacement of history. The least attractive feature of the Confederacy, beyond its inherent brutality, was its intolerance of dissent and determination to hijack the story of the war.

For too long, popular conceptions of the Civil War overwhelmed the truth that it was a war for white supremacy. But overcompensation is not helpful either, and commentators are right to complain of excess when monuments to the long dead are spray-painted and Washington National Cathedral considers breaking its own windows simply because they contain flag imagery that was meant to be conciliatory. The cure, if there is one, is to look with clearer eyes at Civil War history, not to wipe history out. How to find the right line between whitewash and backlash, so the flags are properly furled?

In 1868, Union general George Thomas described better than any modern commentator why the retelling of the Civil War became so contested and how a symbol of racist tyranny like the Confederate battle flag could be romanticized and tolerated at statehouses in the first place:

"The greatest efforts made by the defeated insurgents since the close of the war have been to promulgate the idea that the cause of liberty. . . suffered violence and wrong when the effort for Southern independence failed," he wrote. "This is, of course, intended as a species of political cant, whereby the crime of treason might be covered with a counterfeit varnish of patriotism, so that the precipitators of the rebellion might go down in history hand-in-hand with the defenders of the Government, thus wiping out with their own hands their own stains."

It was a form of self-forgiveness, Thomas said. And Northerners colluded, partly from lack of will, and partly because the nation was weary of strife and carnage.

In reality, Jefferson Davis ran what was essentially a totalitarian state: He imposed martial law on Richmond in 1862, and citizens who harbored Union sentiments or who refused to volunteer for regiments were clapped in irons and had their homes burned. Yet it is Abraham Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus we dwell on.

The tension between who and what to commemorate or condemn is constant. There are no fewer than five heroic biographies of J.E.B. Stuart and innumerable cinematic depictions. But why should we know so much more about Stuart than we do about Union cavalryman Charles Russell Lowell III? The scion of a great Boston family, he enlisted with U.S. cavalry regulars, and when asked why he didn't join a company of gentlemen elites, he responded that he didn't want to serve with dandies and "drivers of gigs." When he was shot in the chest at Cedar Creek, he refused to move to the rear, instead insisting his men help him remount for a counterattack. He was shot down again, fatally.

Lowell's death equally devastated Boston society, which had just lost his brother-in-law Robert Gould Shaw, and the hard-bitten Army. George Custer wept and Phillip Sheridan said, "I do not think there was a quality which I could have added to Lowell." Yet there was just one short book written about him, in 1907, until Carol Bundy rescued him in 2005 with a biography titled "The Nature of Sacrifice."

I've compared the Confederate battle flag to a swastika. This is not meant to call Southerners Nazis or advance a hateful sentiment but simply to be truthful about the fact that the Confederacy was a regime dedicated to racial purity.

What to take down, and what to leave up? Flags in public spaces that seem to give racism ongoing state sanction? Lower them, yes. But windows in churches that commemorate the terrible national mural that was the war, statues in parks where battles were fought, artwork or busts in the Capitol, which is itself a museum of history? Leave them there for everyone to contemplate and learn about.

Sally Jenkins is a sports columnist for The Washington Post and co-author with John Stauffer of "The State of Jones," about Unionists in Mississippi during the Civil War.