Encountering the Confederacy at the Capitol
Visiting the Capitol building, even in this time of great political discontent and vulgarity, remains a powerful pilgrimage and an impressive testament to the endurance of the American republic through obstacles small and large — at least for now. Why then, when I visited Washington over my spring break, did I see the statues of Confederate officials proudly displayed among all the others in National Statuary Hall, celebrating men who actively fought to put an end to the government the building houses?
The debate around Confederate monuments in places of public gathering has certainly gotten a lot of attention in recent years, erupting in fervent protest and bigoted violence in Charlottesville and elsewhere. Southern states possess a number of inhabitants who claim the statues represent a necessary part of Southern “heritage” and history — a view that reveals a fundamentally ignorant misunderstanding of Southern and American history.
If anything, as monuments to officers of the failed Confederate States of America, these statues remain solely and unequivocally monuments to the principles of slavery and white supremacy on which their subjects’ failed government was conceived. Don’t believe me? Ask Vice President of the Confederacy Alexander Stephens, who in his infamous Cornerstone Speech of 1861 defending the aims of Southern secession at the outbreak of the Civil War exclaimed for all history thereafter to hear, “[our government’s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
Leave these words unidentified and one with little knowledge of American history might think they came from Nazi Germany. And yet, to this day, Stephens reclines on a throne of white marble under the Capitol dome. The statue’s page on the Architect of the Capitol’s website describes Stephens as “a dedicated statesman, an effective leader, and a powerful orator, always seeking moderation and peace.” Yes, this is a government-sanctioned description of a man who helped facilitate a militant insurrection against the American government and sought to enslave African-Americans for eternity. This is 2018, and we have gone nowhere.
The truth of history remains eternal for those who seek it. The Civil War was fought for slavery, the Confederacy was built upon white supremacy, and the fact that these self-evident truths continue to be matters of public historiographical debate is absurd. The debate on Confederate monuments from a moral standpoint has a right side and a wrong side. That much is clear from even a cursory view of Civil War and Reconstruction history.
However, even when leaving behind the shameful legacy of racism and slavery that Confederate officials stand for, there is still the fact that what they committed was treason. They led an army of men in a vicious war to bring an end to the union, seeking to terminate the government of the United States and form their own explicitly built on the foundation of white supremacy and slavery. They withdrew from Congress, seceded from the Union, and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. It lands with the most bitter irony possible that these men continued to be honored in a building meant to house a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
It seems preposterous that a nation would honor men who had sought to undo it or dishonor its founding principles, and many other countries that experienced similarly shameful passages in their history seem to agree. Germany, to use a notable example, has a concept enumerated within its legal system known as volksverhetzung, translated into English as “incitement of hatred,” making it illegal to defame or otherwise intimidate members of a particular group in a manner reminiscent of Nazism. As the judicial legacy of the de-Nazification process undertaken in Germany after World War II, it is part of the reason why, as Joshua Zeitz writes in Politico, “In Germany, you won’t see neo-Nazis converging on a monument to Reinhard Heydrich or Adolf Hitler, because no such statues exist.” There are no Nazi monuments in the Reichstag Building, for logical reasons––so why should there be Confederate officials memorialized in the halls of the Capitol?
Columbia historian Eric Foner recently gave a lecture I attended titled “Remembering Reconstruction.” Foner, who in his decades-long career has sought to undo the racist Lost Cause mythology propagated by historians that portrays the Confederacy as engaging in a noble struggle against Northern oppression, had an interesting take on the debate surrounding Confederate monuments. Whereas one might have anticipated him from his endlessly critical view of pro-Confederate historians to call for the removal of all monuments celebrating Confederate military and political officials, he viewed there to be a “line” separating those that should be immediately removed from those of supposedly lesser concern. Among those individuals he singled out for de-memorialization in were Nathan Bedford Forrest, the brutally racist Confederate general and leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and John C. Calhoun, the antebellum-era Senator whose gross career-long defense of white supremacy recently led to Yale University renaming their residential college named after him. Neither of these figures, however, are among the traitorous subjects of Confederate statues at the Capitol.
When I asked him what he thought of the statues of Stephens, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee on display in the Capitol collection, he simply said that while he didn’t much care whether those statues still stood, more monuments ought to be erected to the largely forgotten figures of the Reconstruction period — former slaves who had fought for their freedom through endless toil and sacrifice, who as free men and women sought to correct the injustices that so viciously plagued Southern society. More black Reconstruction leaders should be commemorated, Foner told me, like John R. Lynch of Mississippi, who was part of the first generation of African-Americans to be elected to political office in the South in the Reconstruction era and through his writings worked to undermine the racist historical view of Reconstruction popular in the first half of the twentieth century.
While this introduced an important point about the necessity of memorializing those who had sought to build the nation up and enfranchise millions, there remains the necessity, in my view, of removing monuments to those who sought to break the nation down and disenfranchise the masses. Figures like Lynch shouldn’t be exhibited alongside Jefferson Davis for the sake of historical “balance.” Rather, Davis’ statue should be replaced with Lynch’s for the sake of historical justice.
There is often a concern expressed when this debate gains attention that replacements of this type allow people to pick and choose who is represented in history, highlighting certain voices more than others. To say that simply ignores the purpose of the monuments not to merely represent, but to honor those whom they depict. If there’s any worry that Davis and Stephens will be wiped from history, their legacy will certainly live on in the millions of nonwhite Americans who continue to face prejudice in our society. They will be remembered through scholarship that condemns their actions and confines them to history, rather than memorials that put them up on a pedestal.
In the wake of the Charlottesville violence last August and President Trump’s reprehensible response, Senator Cory Booker and Representative Barbara Lee introduced legislation to provide for the removal Confederate statues from the National Statuary Hall Collection — legislation that died in committee and did not even carry the support of more than 46 House Democrats. Though under current law, each state has the right to determine which two of its citizens are represented in the collection, and any of them can withdraw one of their statues from the Capitol at any point with the approval of the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress, the fact that no meaningful federal or state action has been taken to remove these monuments to treason and racism from our nation’s Capitol is inconceivably regrettable.
There must be a concerted activist effort to get former Confederate states to withdraw their statues in favor of ones truly representing the best their states have to offer, and not traitors who sought to build a society built off of white supremacy. Congress, which has jurisdiction over the halls of the Capitol, should also be pressured to remove them, though one can only guess how far that effort will get in this demoralizing political climate. Replacing statues alone will not make American society more equitable and less prejudiced, but it will at least allow us to honor those who deserve to be honored for the message of American endurance and justice they exemplified.
Even if folks arguing in favor of preserving monuments in Southern states cannot bear to concede one inch, if they cannot bring themselves to consider the viewpoint of their fellow citizens living under the racist terror that the statues recall — at least, at least, there shouldn’t be any statues of traitors in our Capitol building. Removing them is the right thing to do — end of story. Then, and only then, will the Capitol become a place that lives up to the aspirations our nation has to be a republican government for all people.
