text: I appreciate Steve Heimel's thoughtful letter.  The Confederate flag rouses no warm feelings in me; not because of slavery, but because the people who had it plastered on their trucks when I lived in Virginia decades ago were trash, always armed and often drunk.  They gave me trouble a few times when I was quietly, legally fishing rural trout streams.  But the after-history of the Civil War is one of America's historical treasures.  No reprisals, no prolonged exclusion of the Confederate states from full resumption of political rights.  Slavery was ended and Negroes made citizens.  Reconstruction forced the participation of Negroes in Southern political life--often successfully--until they were excluded from it by abusive laws after Reconstruction ended.  The chapter that followed--over a century of segregation and black oppression--was a political failure of the whole nation.  But it was not some kind of extension of slavery; the Civil War survivors had little to do with it.