Memorializing the Old South
The South has too bright a future to publicly glorify such a checkered past.
I am a midwesterner married to a southerner. I attended school in the South and liked it, and my wife, so much that we stayed. I love the food (all barbecue besides that of North Carolina, corn bread, sweet tea, even collard greens if I am being brave) and the trees adorned with Spanish moss. I love the people. I love visiting the battlefields of both the Revolutionary War and the American Civil War and all of the coastal cities rich with history. But it is a complex history, and it is here I must depart from a romantic view of a particular culture to how the South can successfully memorialize itself, while staying between the lanes of self-loathing and an idealized white-washing that avoids a clear-eyed view of its past.
The City of New Orleans recently revived the debate about Confederate memorials by removing a prominent one from its downtown. Now, the monument in question is called a “Confederate memorial” but it’s actually an inapt description. The City of New Orleans erected the Liberty Monument in 1891 (around the time Jim Crow laws began to be enacted) to honor the Battle of Liberty Square during the Uprising of 1874, an attempt by Democrats (southern whites) to overthrow the white governor and black lieutenant governor placed during Reconstruction. In 1932, an inscription was added:
“[Democrats] McEnery and Penn having been elected governor and lieutenant-governor by the white people, were duly installed by this overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored).
United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.”
The monument was moved in the 1970s with a disavowal of the 1932 language, but both the inscription and the monument remained until the present day. Now this is but one monument and one could argue, “Yes, but the rest are surely just honoring the dead like Confederate Memorial Day.” Right?
The Antietam National Battlefield, where nearly 23,000 soldiers were killed, is home to 96 separate monuments in memory to units and individuals. The site itself is beautiful and haunting. Rolling hills leading to tree lines, with ditches marking the site where thousands were slaughtered in battle. This is a memorial site- one passing no judgment on the people who fought and died there; it simply remembers.
Then there are Confederate memorial monuments in cities throughout the South — general war dead memorials, specific state units, and individuals and leaders of the Confederacy.
Are these just historical? It’s complicated.
All told there are approximately 700 monuments to the Confederacy, primarily found in the South (more than 200 in Virginia alone), according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Wikipedia has a list here. The timing of the monument construction also adds quite a bit of skepticism to their intent. This timeline from the SPLC tracks the monument development:
The two main spikes in both monument building and commemoration of other types (schools, confederate flag) center around 1900–1930 and the Civil Rights era (1954–1968). The period from 1900–1930, besides being the heart of the Jim Crow era, also happens to represent the height of the Ku Klux Klan, which totaled more than 4 million members in 1926.
It is difficult to look at this data and not come to the conclusion that the South was memorializing not only its war dead but the entire society that it had lost in the war. It was bathing in nostalgia but the times that it did so were awash in bigotry. One memorial in South Carolina, erected in 1902, bears an inscription that reads: “The world shall yet decide, in truth’s clear, far-off light, that the soldiers who wore the gray, and died with Lee, were in the right.” The monuments are tall and proud, often defiant even. A colonel sitting atop his trusty steed in the town center, or an armed soldier standing on top of a column reaching into the sky. Rarely are these monuments subdued affairs tucked away in the corner of a capitol building.
The Confederate Flag memorials are almost completely indefensible. The flags were erected by the Southern states or incorporated into their state flags predominantly during the Civil Rights era in defense of Jim Crow and segregation and a further defiance of the Federal government seeking to eradicate these arrangements.
We do not need to erase history but we ought not romanticize it either. Our text books, battlefield monuments, other historical preservation markers, and a veritable army of re-enactors tell the story of the Civil War. The Civil War, whatever the motivations of the individual combatants, was a war of insurrection over slavery. And the post-war Southern society went to war against its black population and fellow citizens. We need not require that modern cities concretize inviolate in their town squares the views of a wounded and nostalgic white majority from an earlier time. To do so is to ignore these monuments’ actual history and deny the present population their own choice on what to honor.
The South has too bright a future to publicly glorify such a checkered past.
