Confederate Statues, Honor, and a Common Narrative

Why should statues of Confederate generals be brought down? Are they merely public displays of a fraught historical legacy in the South or are they beacons of racism, bigotry, and treason? Setting aside the slippery-slope constructs being offered by the President and his supporters, the question that is at the heart of this conflict is who are we? Are we a nation that takes pride in its previous ignorance or wishes to relegate the failed perspectives of the past to the trash-heap of history? What narrative do we wish to construct for ourselves about ourselves? This has been, and will continue to be, the prevailing problem in the United States. In order to address this question, it is beneficial to turn back to the origins of the United States. Even though Lincoln spoke of America being “born in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” — paralleling, with necessary political variation, the birth and dedication of a Christian baby in the 19th century — the United States was never born; it was forged.

It took the 1760’s to construct enough distaste for the Crown to turn a fringe conception of self-rule into an isolated rebellion in Massachusetts in 1775 into a revolution in 1776 and a free country in 1783. No birth transpired. The best that can be said is that the internal political structures of the colonies, fed by the Whig theories of individual liberty and eternal vigilance against an absolutist state, precipitated across the multicultural colonies and united enough of them to resist the most powerful empire in the world (with some help from Britain’s competition, namely France and Spain). There was no singular birth of the American nation; fragmented it began, and fragmented it remained. The adoption of the Constitution in 1787 and 1788 took this fragmented path, and, fundamentally, is why the United States was a federalized Republic instead of a centralized one. The colonies had existed as independent units under the co-dependent umbrella (and actual rule) of the Crown. With the removal of the Crown, the colonies still remained and their idiosyncratic nature endured the rebellion turned revolution, the Articles of Confederation, and the adoption of the Constitution. The historical reality is that the United States were a unification of the several states, a plural entity, until the Civil War. Antebellum America was a place where state identification trumped national identification; that when the common interest of all aligned with the particular interest of a piece, there was harmony. But this conflict of interests is part of what fueled the development of the tensions between the North and the South with fragmentation lines running across cultural, economic, political, sociological, and familial bonds. The Civil War was not just a war about slavery, about states rights, about preserving the Union. It also was about the conception of these States United. Its consequence was a transformation into the United States. In order to do so, a new set of myths had to be constructed, a new national historical legacy had to be inculcated, and a new national religion was required.

This is, perhaps above all else, why Lincoln competes with Washington as the greatest president in American history. It was Lincoln, and his construction of a new civil religion, which moved America away from the political system described by Madison in Federalist 39 as a combination of both federal and national systems into a national system with federal distribution centers. The fallout of the Civil War took the supremacy clause of the United States Constitution and clarified it in practice via the 14th Amendment. No longer would the United States endure as a plural entity but as a singular one. But this transformation could not be understood as a new event, as a breaking away from the tradition. Lincoln knew that it must be understood as a restitution, a rehabilitation, a rebirth of the original principles of the United States. But for there to be a rebirth, there must first be a birth. Lincoln, tracing the United States to the Declaration of Independence instead of to the Constitution or the Articles of Confederation, found in the Declaration the principles necessary to forge a new, national identity. In it, he found a way to conceive of America’s conception, of America being “brought forth” in a glorious birth of humanitarian, Enlightenment principles; such principles he considered to be the only ones upon which a free government could be built. From this imaginary birth, Lincoln masterfully reforges the narrative of America (if not its purpose) and creates a new national myth which has dominated the American landscape ever since. That America, of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth — as long as we hold true to the principles of our glorious Founding.

This was remarkable then. It is mostly commonplace now. But the mastery must be noted because Lincoln, in Machiavellian style, re-purposed not only the historical narrative of America but also, via the new civil religion, re-oriented what the public is to honor. What we honor, fundamentally, is connected to the values we propagate. Aristotle argued that politics is, at its core, the arena of what is to be honored; we debate on what is right and wrong, what is just and unjust, and we come to honor those things we find right and just and dishonor those we find wrong and unjust. If you can control the things which are honored, you will control the unfurling of politics. The new narrative, the narrative which would become Americana and Americanization, is the narrative of America in the 20th century. Because of this, in the early days of the 21st century, we all live, more than any other figure of the 18th or 19th centuries, in Lincoln’s America. It is why people across the political spectrum wish to claim him as their visionary. The fact that he modeled himself politically after Henry Clay, informed himself of political leadership on both George Washington and Andrew Jackson, and deified the language of Thomas Jefferson, grounds Lincoln into the political fabric of the nation while his mythic political religion soars into the heavens of history. Even his monument in DC looks back to the Spire of Washington, but also beyond it, toward Capitol Hill, overseeing the actions of the city. He sits at the edge of the reflecting pool, it filled with the undulating image of the American Zeus keeping a watchful eye over his America.

As is the case with all myths, within it there is very little room for competing narratives. This is why so many people enter the university and have their preconceived notions of what America is, what is stands for, and how it has endured, completely shattered resulting in a cynicism that masquerades as enlightenment. The myth requires certain self-evident truths, certain inherent propositions to be true, in order for it to permeate the consciousness. The Gettysburg Address, the first national hymn of the civil religion, gives us new self-evident truths. What was once self-evident in the Declaration, the equality of men in their rights of life, liberty, and to pursue happiness, has now become a proposition in need of testing. What is now our self-evident truth is that we were “brought forth” when we were “conceived in Liberty” and that our form of government is “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” To what end is that government directed? Testing the proposition to which we are dedicated: equality. Echoing the Second Inaugural, the first liturgy of Lincoln’s America, the transgressions of the Fathers were being rectified with the blood of the Sons — every drop of blood drawn by the lash was being repaid with blood drawn by the sword. Why? To save the Union. What is the Union? Lincoln’s America.

Where do we find ourselves today? Still dedicated to that proposition. Still fighting to uphold the mythic nature of America; still trying to rectify the inequality of reality with the equality of our ideals. But those ideals are suspect. As we have propagated more information that undermines Lincoln’s myth of America, without the requisite understanding that the myth is essential for holding the United States together as a singular entity lest it fall merely on the coercive power of the national government, challenges to the myth arose. Of course the original challenge was the Confederacy itself. It wished to preserve the fragmented nature of the States United. The argument that the Civil War was merely a fight between the righteous North engaging in a war of liberation against the heathen South is not merely a simplification of history, it is a myth itself. There is no way to discuss the Civil War without the ‘peculiar institution’ (and abomination) of slavery. But it cannot be reduced to it. Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural, asserts that somehow everyone knew that the war, at its heart, was over slavery. But such a simplification is in service to the larger myth construction of the new America — the one dedicated to the proposition of equality. Slavery is its antithesis and, therefore, the war from which the new America is to emerge is centered around the abomination of slavery and its death. The Confederacy, because it falls outside of that myth, has become known merely as the heathen slave owners. But this is historically inaccurate. Approximately 30% of the Southern population owned slaves. 7 out of 10 did not. Most Southerners were poor subsistence farmers who were as economically threatened by slavery as the Northern industrialists were. The racism of the South is undeniable, and the white supremacy of the Southern culture is without question, but these are things derived from an institution that, while more widespread than the capital investments of today, was still not ubiquitous. The narrative that the war was merely about preserving slavery is a necessary one in constructing a myth but it is not an holistically accurate one. Slavery endured, for example, in several border states in the Union until the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Claiming the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery is as inaccurate as saying the war was fought to liberate slaves; but both inaccuracies serve a mythic function even with their inaccuracies.

With Lee’s surrender at Appomattox and Lincoln’s assassination mere days later, the Civil War may have formerly ended on the battlefield. But it never fully ended in the culture. Part of this is derived from the Constitution itself and the federalized Republic it creates. Federalism was not abandoned after the Civil War but merely transformed into a new instrument of political utility. The legacy of the Confederacy slid into lower recesses of the South with the accompanying shame after the loss in the war and the devastation which raged across much of the Deep South from Sherman’s march to the Atlantic. Lincoln’s America came to the South at the end of a bayonet and stayed there until political corruption ended reconstruction in 1877. The South was allowed, without Lincoln’s civil religion taking hold in the consciousness therein, to tolerate the repugnant rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the reign of terror that blanketed black families for generations. While not every Southerner approved of, nor supported, the Confederacy, the culture that developed in the South tolerated the most vile parts of it: racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. The Confederacy failed to instantiate a viable political system because it failed, fundamentally, to win the war. Its failure to win the war did not guarantee that Southern culture (and its intellectual assumptions) was eradicated, however. What the North failed to do was transform the Southern culture; it failed to convert the former Sanhedrin of the States United into the apostles of the United States. This failure, combined with the political realities of federalism and the rapid evolution of the Northern economic and sociological systems, is vital for understanding the rise of Confederate statues in the United States.

The legacy of “Southern Heritage” emerges from multiple sources ranging from the “Lost Cause" narrative emerging in the 1910s through the rise of identity politics emerging in the 1960’s. Across the South, monuments were erected to celebrate the heroic nature of Confederate generals who stood up for the ideas of the States United, or in the horribly misleading term “states’ rights”, and with it, the culture of the Southern gentleman. Such a culture was predicated upon a rigid, semi-medieval hierarchy of power, wealth, prestige and (unlike the Medieval system) race. Those systems are bound, inherently, together. But as the American culture began to fray and fragment in the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s, particularly with the rise of soft relativistic thinking and the disastrous increase of partial education of the past in the masses, Lincoln’s America was picked up by those who advocated for the national government to enforce civil rights protections across America. Martin Luther King, Jr., not haphazardly, preaches a new dream for America in front of the Lincoln Memorial. King’s new American myth is one that does not overthrow Lincoln’s America but calls upon it to live its creed, not merely preach it. To live the tested proposition every day; not to rely on the bayonets and canon fire of the past to preserve the present. His new American myth calls for the final refutation of Antebellum America. Lincoln’s America now had its New Testament: King’s America.

But, just as in the case of Lincoln, King’s American myth never became ubiquitous. Instead, the great sin of the Civil War was the inability to eliminate the archaic intellectual and ethical systems within the Antebellum Southern culture. And that great sin endured. It manifest itself in “Southern Pride” and “Southern Heritage” and from it came the resurgence of the Confederate flag and the rewriting of historical narrative to fit the new myth of the age. Statues were erected in honor of this new myth and it has become so pervasive that people see these statues as monuments of history instead of markers of an insurgent culture. Removing those statues is now seen as removing history because what is actually in conflict is two different mythic stories about America. The Civil War ended, but the myths it constructed did not. The myth of the South has become so pervasive, so tethered to the identity politics of the age, that the silly notion that statues tell our history has become a dominant talking point.

Statues do not tell history. Statues honor those that constructed our historical myth. This is why Aristotle’s comment is so important — what a people honors is what that people values and, at its core, what a people values displays the character of that people. So why is there a growing outcry to destroy Confederate statues and a counter-cry to preserve them? It is a conflict of values, a conflict of myths, a conflict of what we will honor. Will we honor the myth of Lincoln and the New Testament of King? Or will we honor those who reject Lincoln’s myth and wish to see an America of States United?

The danger that lies ahead is three-fold. The first is the continued notion that historical accuracy and historical myth cannot both be true. In the desire to be accurate to historical events, we forget that history is both past and present; the past must be perpetually reconstructed and the present must live in light of that reconstruction. Historical accuracy is critical so that we may address the errors of the past as we construct a new present. But historical myths are just as essential but for a vastly different reason. Myths are connected to how we identify ourselves. The rationalism of the Enlightenment wished to supplant the Christian mythic structure with a rationalistic one and, ultimately, failed. Its only remnant lingers in modern science. The error was not in trying to elevate the rational but in assuming that man’s rational nature is enough to construct his identity. In so doing, you make yourself susceptible to the wheel of intellectual fortune — the science of your age justifies your depravity and your deportment.

Myths are necessary to educate our irrational condition. They are necessary for constructing systems of identity that exist beyond the empirical. They are vital for developing any sense of being an “American.” That term, that identity, is not tethered to birth, to race, to status, to prestige, to wealth, to ethnicity, to religion, or to any other of the systems used to construct identities across the human experience. Instead, it is attached to political ideas that transcend particular biological, sociological, or economic traits. But because of this, the identity of America is perpetually thin and reliant upon myths that exist beyond any particular tribal condition. Lincoln’s myth, reforging the origin (and perhaps the purpose) of America, understood this condition. Our rationalism must direct us toward the rule of law, not the expression of our passions, but that in order for us to believe in that rule of law, we must have a common set of beliefs drawn from a common mythic structure. Lincoln’s account of the Founding is historically inaccurate. But the necessity of his account is essential for preserving a coherent and cohesive national identity. As accuracy and myth are put more and more in conflict, with little wisdom to understand the necessity of both, the latter is weakened by the former but the former lacks the necessary capacity to construct a meaningful identity.

The second issue is the conflict between myths themselves. The argument that says believing in something gives that belief legitimacy is intellectual heresy. The myths of Lincoln and of the Confederacy are not morally equal. One is predicated on the principles of self-governance, republicanism, and the political equality of man. The other is predicated on the principles of paternalism, political inequality, and racial supremacy. But, in our age where all beliefs are considered of equal merit, the only recourse in debate is not to morality, but, at best, to empirical data or, at worst, to mere sentiment. As outlined in issue one, the mythic system exists beyond empiricism and as such, is relegated to the lower condition of sentiment. But this is disastrous. The value of myth is not tethered to empirical verification but in greater goods of solidarity, common purpose, and moral goodness. Myths must be evaluated against a higher Truth than empirical data. But in an ever relativistic and absolute empirical intellectual culture, competing myths are all handled subjectively. But, in so doing, it turns political and social cracks into political and social fissures based on sentiment.It designates people based on the myths they believe in, tolerating the existence of multiple myth systems, undermining the capacity for their to be a shared identity. The statues of Confederate generals rile the passions because of this phenomenon. This is not the realm of the rational. Vigilantism (both legal and political) rises in the vacuum of belief in the rule of law; one must believe in the reasonableness of a rational system in order to actively participate and perpetuate that system. By rendering all belief systems as merely subjective and relative to the lived experience of the individual, our arsenal to fight an irrational conflict has been waylaid.

The third issue is honor. Fundamentally, the existence of Confederate statues is honors the legacy of the “South” to those who wish to believe this myth. Outside of those individuals, those statues are seen as in poor taste, at best, or as tools of oppression, at worst. This conflict is centered around what we honor. But we cannot have that conversation because we cannot disconnect ourselves from the foolish notion that beliefs are only subjective. No system can internally justify its own first principles; they can only be assumed. So why would this not be true of politics? It is. But our contemporary self-evident truths are relativism and a denial of the ability to construct belief systems that are objectively true without being empirically verifiable. Science cannot explain everything. It certainly cannot point out appropriate behaviors compared to others. Its tools might be useful once certain axiomatic assumptions about human life are established, but it is worthless in constructing those axiomatic conditions. It can do nothing for us when asked which to honor: the valor of men or the ideas for which those men fought. Is the action itself the object to be praised or is it the intention behind it? Perhaps it is both? But if so, how are we to differentiate between someone who does something for a noble reason but in an ignoble way as opposed to someone who is noble in their actions and ignoble in their desire? We make evaluations like this perpetually. Most rely on “common sense” namely by affirming a person’s sense of justice. But how are we to move beyond the subjective “common sense” into an objective sense of justice in order to provide a justification for honor? This is, perhaps, the central problem facing a multicultural, multiracial, multi-linguistic, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, economically fragmented country. And it is one that we are nearly incapable of debating in the public arena because of our dogmatic beliefs in subjective reality, moral relativism, and absolute egalitarianism.

What we honor is who we are. What we honor is derived from what we value. What we value is derived from what we believe in. What we believe in is derived either from rational induction/deduction or from irrational habituation. We subsume both under the auspice of “education.” But our education is weighted heavily to the former. What our culture, and our country, is currently enduring is a crisis of the latter. The inability to preserve Lincoln’s America, or to transcend into King’s New Testament of America, is why the insipid, morally inferior myths and culture of the Confederacy have re-emerged in the national consciousness. We have been primed for this rebirth since the stillbirth of Reconstruction, and in our age of moral and ethical apathy, the conflict surrounding the statues of Confederate generals is now laced with a debate over the nature of America itself. The crisis shall pass — we do not stand upon the precipice of a second Civil War. The statues will also come down. But the crisis shall return, again and again, as long as we fail to instantiate a myth of America which does not have space for the ignorance of the Confederate myth. Jefferson wished for the institutions of man, and man’s traditions, to go hand-in-hand with the progress of the human mind. We continue to leave Jefferson wishing for, Lincoln eulogizing the idea of, and King dreaming about a better America. And we will do so as long as we do not take seriously the underlying irrational nature of our being and the necessary myths we must habituate within ourselves in order to bring forth a country worthy of such wishing, eulogizing, and dreaming.