Tag: Confederate memorials

Removing Confederate monuments erases history–or not

We were reading a great interview with Harvard Law School history professor Annette Gordon-Reed on the recent attacks made on statues of slaveholders, conquistadors, and Confederate soldiers. You can read it all here; we’ve pulled out a few highlights.

GAZETTE: What do you say to those who argue that the removal of such statues in prominent public settings dishonors the memory of those who died fighting for the Confederacy?

GORDON-REED: I would say there are other places for that — on battlefields and cemeteries. The Confederates lost the war, the rebellion. The victors, the thousands of soldiers — black and white — in the armed forces of the United States, died to protect this country. I think it dishonors them to celebrate the men who killed them and tried to kill off the American nation. The United States was far from perfect, but the values of the Confederacy, open and unrepentant white supremacy and total disregard for the humanity of black people, to the extent they still exist, have produced tragedy and discord. There is no path to a peaceful and prosperous country without challenging and rejecting that as a basis for our society.

–This is extremely well-put and we can add nothing of value to it. The BLM protests happening all over our country are based on the truth of the last sentence.

GAZETTE: Many believe that taking the statues down is an attempt to cover up or erase history. Do you agree?

GORDON-REED: No. I don’t. History will still be taught. We will know who Robert E. Lee was. Who Jefferson Davis was. Who Frederick Douglass was. Who Abraham Lincoln was. There are far more dangerous threats to history. Defunding the humanities, cutting history classes and departments. Those are the real threats to history.

–Here Gordon-Reed addresses the argument that always irritates us as historians. As if the main vehicle of learning about U.S. history were Confederate statues! Those statues are not preserved and defended in the name of the objective study of our national history. They are preserved and defended as evidence of the Lost Cause and meant to enforce a sense of alienation from the U.S. predicated on primary identification with “the South”.

GAZETTE: What about the slippery slope argument? Many of America’s founders — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson — owned slaves. Does removing statues of Columbus or Confederate officials pave the way for action against monuments honoring those who helped create the United States?

GORDON-REED: I suppose, if people want to, everything can pave the way to some other point. I’ve said it before: There is an important difference between helping to create the United States and trying to destroy it. Both Washington and Jefferson were critical to the formation of the country and to the shaping of it in its early years. …No one puts a monument up to Washington or Jefferson to promote slavery. The monuments go up because, without Washington, there likely would not have been an American nation.

–Again, perfectly stated, and in need of no confirmation from us. But we celebrate this truth-telling, and recommend it to all Americans.

Confederate monuments fall, America rises

It’s amazing that the sudden removal of so many Confederate war monuments is just a footnote in this Spring’s news. The long and awful battles to remove these monuments to slavery and hatred are suddenly resolved, and it seems like an afterthought.

But all Americans who love liberty and justice for all are happy to hear it. We will pull from two previous posts, Confederate Monuments and the cult of the Lost Cause, and Pro-Confederate is Anti-American to celebrate, and contribute momentum to, this moment.

First, from Confederate Monuments and the cult of the Lost Cause:

There’s a great article from Smithsonian, by New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, called “How I Learned About the Cult of the Lost Cause,” which delineates the real reason so many Confederate monuments were put up in this country, both just after the Civil War and in the 1950s and 60s. One application for federal funding to preserve three Confederate statues as historically important specifically states that the statues commemorate the Cult of the Lost Cause:

“The Cult of the Lost Cause had its roots in the Southern search for justification and the need to find a substitute for victory in the Civil War. In attempting to deal with defeat, Southerners created an image of the war as a great heroic epic. A major theme of the Cult of the Lost Cause was the clash of two civilizations, one inferior to the other. The North, “invigorated by constant struggle with nature, had become materialistic, grasping for wealth and power.” The South had a “more generous climate” which had led to a finer society based upon “veracity and honor in man, chastity and fidelity in women.” Like tragic heroes, Southerners had waged a noble but doomed struggle to preserve their superior civilization. There was an element of chivalry in the way the South had fought, achieving noteworthy victories against staggering odds. This was the “Lost Cause” as the late nineteenth century saw it, and a whole generation of Southerners set about glorifying and celebrating it.”

It’s very odd that this clear-eyed assessment of the Lost Cause as a cult and therefore a myth was successfully used to justify maintaining three Confederate statues in Louisiana. One would think that the goal of preserving acknowledged racist propaganda would be recognized as out of step with real American founding principles.

The only thing we would add is that Landrieu mentions the fact that Confederate memorials were put up in the North as well as the South. This is true; it happened directly after the war as part of an attempt to heal the breach and offer a socio-political olive branch to the South. But that misguided effort quickly died away in the North, while statues continued to go up regularly and in abundance in the former Confederacy.

 

And now from Pro-Confederate is Anti-American:

No need to do much more than to point you to James Loewen’s frank article: Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy?

But we will go ahead and also point you to our own posts on this topic: Amazing Fact: The Civil War was fought over slavery, What made the north and south different before the Civil War?, and Slavery leads to secession, secession leads to war.

The Confederate States of America were founded with the sole purpose of perpetuating black slavery. There is nothing heroic in that. The men who created the Confederacy did not care about states’ rights—they had repeatedly demanded that states’ rights be trampled by forcing northern states that had abolished slavery to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, by going into territories and voting that they enter the Union as slave states even though they were not residents of that territory, by terrorizing residents who wanted to vote anti-slavery, and by taking enslaved people into free states and forcing the free state residents to endure that slavery.

Soldiers of the Confederacy were not heroes. The old argument that most of them were poor and were not slaveholders is meaningless: they fought to protect their land and their governments, which meant protecting the slave system and the slave aristocracy that governed their land. If they won the war, those poor, non-slaveholding soldiers would have allowed slavery to keep going. They knew that. You can’t cherry-pick motives and focus on the heartwarming “they fought to keep their families safe” motive and ignore the chilling “the soldiers didn’t care if black Americans were enslaved as long as they kept their land” motive.

Secession was not allowed in the Constitution. There is no place in it that makes secession legal. So founding the Confederacy was the most anti-American action in our history.

It’s high time we became as tough on Confederacy worship as the Confederates were on America, democracy, and states’ rights.

 

 

Virtual visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice

There’s a great article on the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama that gives a full description and photos of this long-overdue addition to American memorials.

Known informally to most people as the lynching memorial, the NMPJ is part of an effort to officially commemorate and honor heroic actions of black Americans to gain their full civil rights as promised in the law. Here’s an excerpt of the article:

There are dozens of markers or monuments to the Confederacy in Montgomery, but it was not until the 1990s that the fuller picture of the state’s heritage was recognized, and even longer for some other Southern states.

“There was not a historic marker of where Rosa Parks was arrested,” says Lee Sentell, director of the Alabama Department of Tourism. “There was not a historic marker where John Lewis was beaten up as one of the Freedom Riders.”

Alabama now markets its civil rights trail, and Montgomery embraces a complicated story that can be summed up on a downtown block that has the site of a slave market, the department store where Rosa Parks got on the bus, and the building where the telegram was sent to instruct Confederate troops to fire on Fort Sumter.

“You’re talking about two of the most significant movements in American history literally a block apart,” says Sentell.

But he says no attraction has taken the point of view visitors will encounter at the National Peace and Justice Memorial.

“Most museums are somewhat objective and benign,” Sentell says. “This one is not. This is aggressive, political. … It’s a part of American history that has never been addressed as much in your face as this story is being told.”

George Washington had slaves

We depart from our long-held commitment to refusing to talk about black slavery in America in order to make a point and address a worryingly common argument.

When Trump said yesterday that the anti-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville were worse than the Nazis, he put it this way:

…there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee. …the following day it looked they had had some rough, bad people–neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you want to call them, but you had a lot of people in that group who were there to innocently protest…

So this week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder, is it George Washington next week? And is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?

This is the insidious poison of fascism: making false equivalences. We have to admit that when we first heard this, we thought that Trump was saying Lee and Jackson, Confederate generals, were heroes in the same way Washington was–military leaders, great Americans.

But it’s actually worse than that: he gives voice to the false equivalence that since Washington enslaved people, he and the Confederates had the same beliefs, the same goals, and the same impact on this nation.

This lie was ably debunked by Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, on NPR news:

SIEGEL: What clearly distinguishes a Robert E. Lee statue from a George Washington statue or a Thomas Jefferson statue since all those men owned slaves?

SOMIN: There are two big distinctions. One, nobody honors George Washington precisely for the fact that he owned slaves, whereas the Confederate leaders, when they’re honored, are honored almost entirely for their service to the Confederacy, which was created for a purpose of perpetuating and extending slavery.

Second, while I think it’s very much correct to criticize the Founding Fathers for owning slaves, those of them who did, they also had great achievements in other areas which do legitimately deserve honor. By contrast, the Confederate leaders – very few of them would be remembered today but for what they did in the Civil War to protect slavery.

When we honor Washington, we honor him for his selfless devotion and unceasing effort in the fight to establish democracy in this country. We honor his refusal to become king when it was offered to him. We honor his wise leadership.

The list of achievements accruing to Confederate leaders is quite different. They promoted slavery, first and foremost. They were traitors to their country. They helped create the de facto enslavement of black Americans in their states after the Civil War.

That’s why statues of these people should never have been allowed to stand in this country. Somin goes on to address this:

SIEGEL: One of the arguments that’s heard is that a statue of Robert E. Lee reminds us of a dark chapter in our past, that it’s part of our history. Removing it is akin to erasing history. Does that argument hold any water for you?

SOMIN: I don’t think so. We should definitely remember this period in our history. And in fact, nobody proposes that we forget. But there’s a big difference between remembering history and honoring people who fought in defense of slavery. And what these statues do is they honor these people. They don’t simply commemorate them. If the goal was just simply to remember what happened, that could be done with museums, or that could be done with more appropriate public monuments, ones that actually acknowledge the evil of slavery.

The statues of Lee, Jackson, and all the rest of them are not reminders of the past, they are loving tributes, often hysterical in their lamentations over the Lost Cause. The honor and courage of all Confederates are consistently vaunted, as on this memorial in Tampa, Florida:

confederate 2

Enough is enough. It’s time to end the myth that the Civil War was begun by the Confederacy for any other reason than to promote slavery, and to end all false equivalencies that would connect George Washington with men who had no qualms about enslaving their fellow Americans.