The Real History Behind Confederate Statues
The Civil War ended with the victory of the Union over the Confederates on May 9, 1865.
152 years have passed since then and in that period of time over 1,503 public symbols have been dedicated to honor the losing side of that war. With conservative estimates, the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified 718 cases of these dedications as statues or monuments. These numbers make it clear that the Confederacy has an unhealthy lasting effect on the modern world — an effect that must be remedied. Overall, the continued existence of Confederate statues and other Dixie glorifications demonstrates the ignorance of the past along with the racial undertones of America that attempt to set a precedent of who to honor.
In order to fully grasp this situation, one must first clearly define what statues and monuments are, especially in the context of public display. The term “statue” itself is derived from the word “status”, which already connects it to the moral and social standings of the person being depicted, while the terms “monument” and “monumental” are associated with such words as “awesome” and “great”. Every term revolving around these monuments, from “status” to “great”, along with the words “monument” and “statue” themselves, give off a direct positive connotation, which makes all the more sense when these objects are put on public display — after all, why exhibit a person or concept for all to view in such a positive medium if they aren’t endorsed as such by the people they are being viewed by? Along with that, a common pattern in statue display is their existence in front of government buildings, which even further adds to the positive association of whatever they depict. When they’re depicting traitors of the government itself who violently defended their extremely bigoted ideology, however, this overall connotation becomes a problem and reaches a point of contradiction.
Many people have claimed that the continued public display of Confederate statues work as reminders of the past and that their loss would mean a loss for history. Major news sources have also claimed this, including Fox News who hosted articles boldly claiming that the political left is actively waging a “war on history” by pushing for removal of these monuments. There are two major problems with this argument, and the first is that these statues don’t actually teach history. In fact, if one unfamiliar with US history would take a walk down Monument Avenue in Richmond, they could be entirely convinced that the Confederacy won the Civil War.
The Avenue contains 5 large statues and monuments of major Confederate generals directly in public display of the many pedestrians and drivers passing through the heart of the capital of Virginia — or the capital of the Confederacy as it would be known to the uninformed who view the landmarks. The sheer prominence of these statues in the public eye mean they fail their supposed purpose of teaching history. Meanwhile, a statue at Richmond’s battlefield park depicts Abraham Lincoln sitting on a bench with his son Tad. Contradicting the Confederates that outnumber him who stand in victorious poses surrounded by intricate designs and Latin writing, Lincoln is sat humbly, cast in copper, with the only intricacies being his solemn facial expressions and the only writing being a short quote — “TO BIND UP THE NATION’S WOUNDS”.
This is a statue that tells history, sharing the legacy of our 16th president’s noble cause of keeping a nation together, not the poison of racist and traitorous ideologies. Besides, even the removal of every statue depicting a Confederate on Earth would not simply remove them from our history — if this is true, no one would remember Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, or Saddam Hussein. Hundreds of years of books, and more recently websites and other databases, carry on the real history of the Civil War through the ages. The advocates for the removal of these statues aren’t attempting to change history — that job was duly fulfilled by the monument builders, who glorified the traitorous and racist side which started a war that killed thousands of Americans in the name of defending the institution of slavery.
The second problem with the “war on history” argument is that these statues are barely historical. In truth, a massive majority of these Confederate dedications took place in periodic bursts, in eras such as the 1900s-1910s, the late 1920s, and the late 1950s-1960s. It is not coincidental that these dates align with the most important and prominent eras of Civil Rights in the United States. With the early 1900s being one of the largest spikes in the appearance of Confederate monuments, one might suggest that this could be because Civil War veterans were dying at the time and their families wanted to honor them. Noting the ages of Civil War soldiers and life expectancies, this is simply not true. The average Civil War participant was around 26 years old, meaning they would have been born around 1839. Life expectancy rates in America at the time, referred to as the Antebellum era, was around 37 at birth. This would mean that the average Confederate soldier who survived the war would have died in the late 1870s, and even with the very liberal estimate of living to 50, these soldiers would have died by the 1880s. With the death of average veterans obviously not causing these upticks in dedications, it could be then argued that the death of “honorable” Confederate generals and officials inspired this. Taking Richmond’s aforementioned Monument Avenue as an example, this theory also isn’t true. 5 prominent Confederates have statues of themselves displayed here, including Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Matthew Maury. Moving through the list, Lee died in 1870 whilst his statue was erected in 1890, Davis died in 1889 with his statue being unveiled in 1907, Maury’s death occurred 56 years before being honored on the Avenue in 1929, and finally, Stuart and Jackson, who didn’t even survive the war in the 1860s, were depicted in stone by 1907 and 1919 respectfully. The clear answer to what inspired these creations is the growing Civil Rights issue. Following the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, the first and most massive of the spikes in Confederate depictions began. This was an era of infamous Jim Crow laws. Erected in order to show African Americans their place in segregated society, these monuments are symbols of oppression more than anything. As Jim Crow laws ramped up in 1900, a year that saw creation of 11 new Confederate dedications, the response of African Americans to stand up to abuse by protesting and voting to exercise their rights led to an exponential growth in the creation Confederate symbology. At the height of this spike in 1911, 2 years after the NAACP was founded, over 50 new statues and monuments were placed in public display. After the Red Summer and Tulsa race riots in 1919 and 1921, another spike in monument dedication was witnessed. Finally, the late 50s and 60s, famous for their Civil Rights achievements but infamous for the intense racist response, hosted another major spike in Confederate glorifications being boldly displayed in public, including in front of government buildings.
The largest Confederate sculpture in the world at Stone Mountain, Georgia, carved at the site of a 1915 KKK cross burning ceremony, was completed in this era, with construction being restarted in 1958 after originally beginning in 1922. These are clear cases of an attempted racial intimidation — a message to African Americans that their Civil Rights were not welcome, especially in the South. It is no surprise that the Civil Rights leaders today continue their fight against these public displays, as many of them witnessed their parents and grandparents humiliated, beaten, and lynched in the shadow of these monuments.
Another point utilized by the pro-statue movement today that might convince others is their argument that these symbols honor Southern pride — the mystical ancestor of white Southerners. At this point, finding Southerners who exclude racism from their Southern pride seem few and far between, but they still exist. These people argue that the removal of Confederate monuments is a dishonor to their family and ancestors. The truth that they must understand is the aforementioned context of the time periods that these statues were unveiled in. The pride that the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Klu Klux Klan felt in the 1910s when they began their massive operations to fund the constructions of these Dixie glorifications was not in any way an innocent form of Southern pride. These were private organizations who aimed at indoctrinating the public by practically colonizing public space to spread their racist agendas. Southern pride finds its place in society only when it is accompanied, hand in hand, by African American pride. Lincoln aimed his Reconstruction plans at reconciling these two people groups, but 152 years have passed and the wounds still seem tender as ever, so a real effort must be made to right the wrongs of the past, and the removal of Confederate statues seems like an appropriate place to start.
Overall, it is clear the public display of these Confederate glorifications only extends racial tensions and acts as a symbol of oppression to many people groups — meaning the statues continue their intended effect. In order to undo the wrongs committed in the Civil Rights era, Confederate symbology must be confined to truly historical locations.
This means the massive Robert E. Lee statues towering over Main Street USA would be better fit for museums, where they can be viewed alongside contextual information instead of plaques that seem to ignore the wrongs that the Confederates believed in. If anything at all, these statues are immensely inappropriate for standing outside of the same government buildings and courthouses where African Americans continue to be disenfranchised to this day. Perhaps modern Confederate sympathizers can take a page from Robert E. Lee’s book — the true king of Southern pride. Though his morals are clearly in question after fighting a war focused objectively on the continuation of slavery, Lee had written that these statues would “keep open the sores of war” and that the United States should “follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered”. It seems to have been made clear by tension following events in Charlottesville, however, that many Confederate statue enthusiasts today follow the actual indoctrinated ideologies that the huge erections represent, not the people they depict. Either way, they do not deserve public display and glorification and their existence is an antithesis to the attempts at racial consolidation that continue to this day.
