Uncommon Commentary #468: A Substandard Standard?

I wonder how many persons who have been defacing monuments to heroes of the Confederate States of America, or proscribing the battle flag of that polity, have heard of Lord Dunmore's Proclamation. (They would have if they had read MM #51, but, if they read the Doman Domain, they wouldn't be defacing monuments and proscribing flags.) In this, which was issued in 1775, Virginia's royal governor freed all slaves held by participants in the incipient US Revolutionary War; since the US Declaration of Independence, in its list of grievances against King George, alludes to this emancipation by charging that the monarch had "excited domestic insurrections" among those colonists who were in insurrection, one might argue that the Stars-and-Stripes is just as "racist" as the Stars-and-Bars allegedly is.  I am not saying that the banner that represents the USA is actually an emblem of hate; I'm saying that the Confederate version is not one either, and that to abolish it in a knee-jerk reaction, as South Carolina has just done, is to hand a victory to the willfully ignorant (see UC #340) and to the totalitarian.