CITY STREETS / LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
The Confederate Monument of Louisville, Kentucky
The Forgotten Confederate History of Louisville
On the bright summer day of July 30th, 1849, a crowd of thousands gathered on Louisville’s 3rd Street, near an area known as Millionaire’s Row. They were there to celebrate the official dedication of a 70-foot-tall Confederate monument with a soldier on top. The City of Louisville had declared an official half-day holiday to encourage everyone to attend this event. Louisville’s influential Courier-Journal newspaper had been preeminent in raising funds for the monument and urging citizens to participate in this event.
Located close to the University of Louisville’s Belknap Campus, the monument resulted from nearly a decade of fundraising by the Kentucky Women’s Confederate Monument Association (KWCMA). The official dedication was decidedly an all-Confederate event. A band played Dixie, followed by 200 ex-Confederate soldiers. A “Confederate choir” sang songs, and all speakers were ex-Confederates or with strong connections to the Confederacy.
The monument was an anachronism in the once heavily-Unionist Louisville for many reasons; Civil War had ended nearly three decades previously. As a border state, Kentucky had started neutral in the war but later joined the Union. Louisville had served as a central supply depot for the Union armies. During the Civil War, Kentucky contributed between 66,000 and 76,000 troops to the Union cause. But only half as many — 25,000 to 40,000 — joined the Confederate armies.
However, in the years after the Civil War, Kentuckians elected five governors who had fought for or had connections with the Confederacy. People of this Commonwealth celebrated in the streets when Federal troops left the South in 1877, ending all Reconstruction hopes. Kentuckians published sectional periodicals, participated in historical societies and veterans’ organizations, and produced literature that painted Kentucky as Confederate. In all, Kentucky raised 72 monuments to the Confederates and only 2 for the Union soldiers. The Commonwealth had decidedly taken a turn away from Union and towards Confederacy, but only after the war.
As the scholar E. Merton Coulter writes, Kentucky “waited until after the war to secede.”
Broken Promises:
When called upon by Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War to join the Union, Kentucky had stridently remained neutral. However, events during the conflict had forced the Commonwealth to join the Federal cause. Nevertheless, Kentucky had remained against the idea of the emancipation of enslaved people. Lincoln badly needed the Border State of Kentucky to stay on his side and not join the Confederacy. “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game,” Lincoln had written in 1861.
Kentucky was OK with the Union cause, but it was also committed to slavery. In an 1850 census, 385 Kentuckians, or 28% of white families, owned slaves. As appeasement, in July 1862, Lincoln had offered $300 to slaveowners of the state for each slave they freed. Perhaps because emancipation was not an original goal of the Civil War, Kentuckians came to see the Federal Government as an institution that would possibly protect the institution of slavery — as misguided as that may seem in retrospect.
In January 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Kentuckians had a rude awakening. Though the president had made the Commonwealth exempt for both Emancipation and Reconstruction, it was easy to see that the end of slavery was near. Kentuckians felt betrayed. Even to the committed Unionists of the state, it came as a shocking disappointment.
Worse still was that white Kentuckians were fast losing their enslaved labor force. By the summer of 1864, over 57 percent of military age black men from Kentucky enlisted in the Union army — far higher than any other state. Nearly seventy percent of Kentucky’s enslaved people ended their servitude by joining the U.S army or marrying someone who did. People of the state’s small towns found themselves guarded by armed African-American soldiers — people they had held as enslaved laborers only a few months ago.
However, this still left 70,000 enslaved people in a Twilight Zone of a state where slavery was neither dead nor alive.
A Confederate Louisville:
Some historians have painted Louisville’s postbellum shift to Confederacy as a purely economic decision. The argument goes that Louisville being a center of trade and business, wanted to capture the Southern markets. However, this argument is unable to account for Louisville’s dedicated passion for the Confederate cause. (As a counter-argument, one could wonder why Louisville ignored the Northern markets, which were just as ripe for capturing. )
As one example, one could look at the life of Henry Watterson, one of the notable Louisvillian of his time. He was an ex-Confederate who ran the enormously influential Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper, and he consistently promoted the Confederacy cause. Watterson coined the slogan for Louisville as being the “Gateway to the South.” The Courier-Journal had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the country outside of New York, and it was considered the paper of record for not just Kentucky, but all of South.
Louisville actively lobbied to invite numerous Confederate conventions to the city. No such love existed in Louisvillians’ heart for former Union soldiers.
The Confederacy’s value rose high in Kentucky, to a level not explicable by economic rationalizations. Military titles such as a Major or Colonel came back into vogue and were never assumed to be of Union origin. It became a requirement to have Confederate credentials to win nearly any election. Historian Lowell Harrison states, “If you wanted to be elected, it was by far best to be an ex-Confederate. If you had lost one or two limbs, for public display, you were almost a shoo-in.” Many Unionists got ahead, but only after disavowing their cause during the Civil War. According to the scholar Anne F. Marshall, “Men who were on the winning side of the war had become pariahs after the war, persecuted by those whom they had defeated on the battlefield.”
The Myth of “The Lost Cause”:
“The Lost Cause” is the term generally used to describe the revisionist southern memory of the Civil War and the attendant rituals created to further this memory. Central to this idea was promoting the so-called legality of secession and issues of states’ rights — and not slavery, to the onset of the Civil War. The Lost Cause celebrated the nobility of the Confederate soldiers and blamed the South’s defeat on nothing more than the overwhelming numbers of the Northern armies, and not see the surrender as a reflection on the moral superiority of the Southern cause, which yet awaited divine vindication in the future. The motto on the seal of the Confederate States of America is “Deo Vindici,” which translates roughly to “God is Our Vindicator” or “God Will Vindicate.”
The Lost Cause was pure propaganda and utterly ignored the overwhelming evidence that the root cause of the Civil War was Southern slavery. In furthering this revisionist view, Southerners conveniently ignored their secession documents. These spoke openly of the superiority of the white race, the central desire to retain the institution of slavery, and declared, “…that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
The myth of the Lost Cause has been so powerful and lasting that as late as 2011, 48 percent of Americans in a Pew Research center survey cited states’ rights as the reason for the Civil War, compared to 38 percent mentioning slavery.
In promoting the Lost Cause, white Southern women played a critical role through memorial construction, revisionist textbooks, and indoctrinating youth. Numerous organizations vied to keep the Lost Cause alive. United Daughters of Confederacy was one of the largest and the most active of these groups.
One of the Lost Cause’s manifestations was a large number of Confederate memorials, which started as bereavement commemorations in cemeteries and grew to large, imposing monuments in front of courthouses and civic plazas. In a telling sign of their purpose, organizations, such as the United Daughters of Confederacy, erected the largest number of monuments during the Jim Crow era, 45 years after the Civil War.
The Confederate Monument of Louisville:
In 1894, the Kentucky Woman’s’ Confederate Monument Association (KCMA) held a design competition for a monument to honor Louisville’s Confederate soldiers who had died in the Civil War. KCMA initially rewarded the commission to the notable local sculptor Enid Yandell, who had made a name for herself as a gifted artist despite being a woman in that era. However, after a heated controversy — some say it was because she was a woman, while others point to her mother’s position on the KCMA board — Muldoon Monuments of Louisville received the contract. (Muldoon Monuments is still in existence on East Broadway.) Yandell had to console herself with being able to design the wrought-iron lamp-holders placed around the monument.
Muldoon Monuments created the granite pillar, while Munich-based artist Ferdinand von Miller provided the ready-made bronze Confederate soldiers. Plaques on the north and south side carry inscriptions about the “Confederate Dead” and “Tribute to the rank and file to the Armies of the South…”. The monument’s design was generic and ready-made, one that Muldoon Monuments had provided to other locations around the country. A copy of Louisville’s monument still stands in front of the courthouse in Raleigh, North Carolina.
The timing of the official dedication of the monument coincided with some critical milestones in race relations. The year 1895 was three years after Kentucky created the separate coach law that brought Kentucky’s Jim Crow government in line with other southern states. It was also one year before the Supreme Court’s Plessy v Ferguson decision that made segregation legal as long as African-Americans’ facilities were equal — in essence, the basis for the “separate but equal” era.
Over the years, there were numerous discussions for the relocation of the monument, but only in the context of it being a traffic hazard. Even then, passions ran high. Attorney Charles Farnsley, commander of the Andrew Broaddus Camp №361 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who served from 1948–53 as one of Louisville’s most celebrated mayors, stood guard over the monument in 1948 carrying his rifle as the issue of the monument’s relocation was being discussed. In its April 5th, 1948 issue, Life magazine covered the event in a story titled “Louisville Gets A Strange New Mayor.”
Controversy:
The calls for removing the monument as an offensive symbol did not begin until as late as 1989 when it was part of a list of demands made by University of Louisville’s newly formed Black Student’s Alliance (BSA) to address racism on campus. National dialog concerning the display of Confederate monuments in public spaces first emerged in 1990, and then later in the early 2000s.
In October of 2002, the University of Louisville’s trustees decided to build a new dormitory and tear down some of the Victorian homes utilized by various fraternities and sororities. These homes were located adjacent to the monument in an area known as Confederate Place — later renamed Unity Place. The trustees envisioned a new community park around the space occupied by the Belknap Playhouse building. With lobbying from the Pan African Studies Department, the trustees decided that the park was to be named Freedom Park. This new park’s idea was to convey a message that would “counterbalance” that of the Confederate monument. This approach was referred to by the trustees as the “dual heritage strategy.” The design did not challenge the monument itself, or the mythologies it carried.
Reverend Louis Coleman, executive director of the Justice Resource Center (JRC), was the first to challenge the retention of the monument by the city. He expressed his views in a letter to Mayor Jerry Abramson, in February of 2005. He wrote, “A statue of this nature does not belong in the middle of a roadway that connects to a college that boasts on its diversity.” Until Rev. Coleman’s letter, the discussion regarding the monument had stayed polite and calm. But his call for the outright removal of the memorial provoked a quick and fiery backlash.
In response, Mayor Jerry Abramson stayed silent on the issue.
The Removal of Louisville’s Confederate Monument:
By 2008, the University of Louisville had raised the $2 million needed for the creation of Freedom Park. The park’s design took into account the co-existence of the Confederate monument. In 2008, despite a few calls for the monument’s removal, no one had yet foreseen the monument-removal movement’s passion and magnitude, which emerged after the 2015 mass killing of nine African-Americans at the Mother Immanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. The shooter was a neo-Confederate and had sported symbols of Confederacy in his social media posts.
It was not until April of 2016 that Louisville’s Mayor Greg Fischer and U of L President James Ramsey announced the plans to relocate the Confederate monument. Immediately the arguments and counter-arguments began, including a temporary restraining order in place due to a lawsuit filed by the local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. After testimony in the Jefferson County Circuit Court, Judge Judith Mcdonald-Burkman lifted the order, clearing the way for the removal.
The committee appointed by Mayor Fischer considered numerous options for the relocation. In the end, the City of Brandenburg, Kentucky, was chosen. The move cost $400,000, most of which was paid by the University of Louisville Foundation.
On Memorial Day in 2017, the town of Brandenburg, Kentucky, officially unveiled the Confederate monument in Riverfront Park, witnessed by a crowd of 400 people. Some men dressed up as Confederate soldiers, and a band played Dixie, all in all not much different than 1895, except for the crowd’s size.
A woman asked Mayor Ronnie Joyner about how the African Americans of Brandenburg felt about the relocation. Joyner replied, “We don’t have an African American community as such.”
