One of the most prominent Confederate monuments—the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia—is set to be removed by order of Gov. What is happening in many places is really a kind of iconoclasm. School names and flags may therefore evince a clearer racial motive in connection with Confederate iconography than the older statues, which were more closely intertwined with the politics of veterans’ commemorations and pensions. Are there union statues in … This is a list of Confederate monuments and memorials dedicated to the memory of those who served and died in service to the Confederate States during the American Civil War.. The second National Flag of the Confederacy was issued by the Confederate Congress on May 1, 1863. The Great Courses: One needs to, though, be in a position where you can afford ignorance. When I hear that, that poses a problem for me, because I decline to recognize a definition of American beyond citizenship. List of Union Civil War monuments and memorials - Wikipedia He’s not even thinking about poor white people in many respects. At that point, the whole idea of what particular individual it represents starts to get very vague it becomes a mass-produced thing, at which point specific means start to get very hard to pin on things. Is Louisiana in the same category as Florida? It’s very curious, because sometimes it means that the ideological origins of these protests don’t really have a whole lot to do with American culture at all. Probably even more than Confederates. That break occurs around the 1954 Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education, ordering the desegregation of public schools. The current debate over taking down Confederate monuments gives me a … With no small irony, these new targets include figures that several leading historians and journalistic outlets took pains to differentiate and insulate from the Confederate statue controversies only a few years ago. Does that make this particularly messy? This is not just a southern problem. They’re reaching points in their own personal life trajectory where perhaps they’ve accumulated assets. Clear racial overtones enter a second area of the Confederate memorialization debate, and do so in pronounced ways associated with later events of the civil rights movement. Iconoclasm is irreversible and often, doesn't age well. The Confederacy acted as a separate government until defeated in the spring of 1865. That’s I think a way that I would choose to situate it. While the Union’s text began with “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union […]” whereas Confederates deleted all references to “People of the United States” and replaced it with “We, the people of the Confederate States, each State acting in its sovereign and independent character […]”The willingness … Look at a state like Virginia or Georgia. In terms of memorials, one of the most exciting projects going on right now, which people might want to look into, is the Equal Justice Institute, which is an institute that does many things involving civil rights, and incarceration, and so forth, but one of the projects they started years ago was to document every single known lynching that took place in America from the end of the Civil War up to the 1960s. Today, do these meanings get down from their pedestals and walk around anymore? Part of the whole point about whether or not a Lee memorial was erected as a symbol of white supremacy or fondness for remembering what happened during the Civil War, there are a lot of people that look at that memorial today and say, “Americans have been taught for more than a century that the Civil War was about states’ rights and about honor, and had essentially nothing to do with slavery.”. If someone were to come to me today and propose erecting a statue to Robert E. Lee, I would probably say no. Ed O’Donnell: That raises some of the interesting options that some people have come up with. He discourages any attempts at trying to revive any kind of Southern independence. Someone who wants to either add to or subtract from that fundamental reality of citizen seems to me is starting to push things in directions that I’m not terribly happy to see us go in. By the way, it’s the same Virginia state flag as flies over the Virginia state capitol today. Do we take down the monuments of Grant? When someone looks at Robert E. Lee, they say, “A, he fought for a cause that was fundamentally designed to destroy the Union. Ed O’Donnell: That’s true to a large extent, but also, I think sometimes if we look at the timeline, we can learn a little bit more about what these monuments meant. The slave states were all in the southern US, giving them the name “the South”. Do we take down half of the monuments of Grant? Iconoclasm’s about image smashing. Another thing to think about is, when we talk about Southerners, it’s quite common when you refer to Southerners that it just means white people in the South. They came back maimed, or disinherited, or psychologically mauled, and in a way what they’re doing is they’re putting up monuments as last hoorahs to their own youth. Missouri was a slave state. It “proudly honors” the state’s 3,000 sons in blue and gray “who fought at Gettysburg in defense of the causes they held so dear” and “symbolizes the aftermath of that battle and the war. Union monuments vs Confederate monuments: the numbers. There’s a time in which, as each era evolves, where people look differently at things because of our changed understanding of history and our deepening understanding of history. The flag is based on battle flags used by a number of armies in the American civil war between Southern slave-owning states and the rest of the Union … No, it’s really neither one nor the other. Go back to the statue of the generic Confederate that was torn down in North Carolina. That even extends to Confederate emblems. Early Civil Rights: Washington or Du Bois? The economic history of Civil War monuments, rather than making issues of race sanitized and academic, can lead to understanding and real progress. The monuments can be categorized in several ways, but include: • Union State, Regiment, Battery and Brigade monuments • Confederate State, Regiment and Artillery monuments • Monuments to Individuals • Monuments representing Union headquarters • Monuments representing Confederate headquarters • Other, such as those recognizing field hospitals, the memorial to Civil War women, etc. Over the past year I have been working on a larger project (along with my co-author Frank Garmon Jr. and colleague Micha Gartz) to build a national database of monuments, memorials, place names, and other public commemorations of figures and events associated with the Civil War era. Private Messages: Contact the Profile Managers privately: Mary Richardson, Terri Rick, US Civil War Project WikiTree, and Nae X. They’re not really statements about power. They make no distinction between Confederate and Union, abolitionist and pro-slavery, 15th-century figures and 20th. The war is over. We are full, in our history, of people who took wrong turns. The light part of it is that he really becomes a major voice for reunifying the country. Phil Magness is a Senior Research Fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research. He said, “We have lost. To put a focus on the role of both parties during the Civil War, and the founding of the Confederacy, is to highlight the fact that the Republican party was founded specifically to abolish slavery and had six points in its first 9-plank platform that dealt with civil rights, equal rights, and voting rights for liberated slaves. I think it does reflect in the fact that in this case it’s white nationalist, whatever you want to call it, white supremacist, neo-Nazi ideology. Very, very illuminating. Confederate statues removed in Virginia, Kentucky following George Floyd's death. image caption Democrats have called for Confederate monuments to be removed from Capitol Hill in Washington The second wave came in the 1950-1960s, as … He is the author of numerous works on economic history, taxation, economic inequality, the history of slavery, and education policy in the United States. The Confederate flag and monuments to Confederate leaders need to be removed from public property. Notably, after a group defaced a Confederate Soldiers & Sailors Monument in a public park in Birmingham, the mayor ordered its removal. The monument in question, in the clip shown here, is the so-called standing soldier statue, a symbolic monument to local individuals who fought in the Civil War. Ed O’Donnell: It’s been a great conversation. At the present, these constructions outpace the trickle of new Union and Confederate markers that occasionally appear. Allen Guelzo, Ph.D. History is supposed to include the triumphs as well as the mistakes. That is, iconoclasm feels really good at the moment, but generally it doesn’t age well. The Confederacy dissolved and the country was reunited. Although this section of the database is still undergoing expansion, roughly 160 abolition-themed monuments and place names have been identified so far. It was 1948, ’49, ’54, because that’s when the civil rights movement was gaining traction and it was becoming a national political issue about endorsing civil rights. It’s not strictly speaking a monument to Robert E. Lee, although he is the main figure on the top of it. Confederate monuments soon dotted the South, and the battle flag was added to the state flag of Mississippi. Several clear trends emerge from the numbers of monuments over time. I think in other parts of our public sphere, we’re seeing some very interesting projects occurring that are all linked to the present. History’s not supposed to be a photo album. This is how messy it gets, and this is why the simplistic approach is liable to be the sort of thing that we wake up several years down the road wondering, “Why did we do that?”. If you read the documents, they’re pretty clear on that. They can now make contributions. All of that is being very substantially … That story, you can’t go there anymore and not be affected by those stories that are now being told. Longstanding calls on government officials to remove statues associated with pro-slavery figures have given way to protest-fueled iconoclasm–statues and monuments once protested are now defaced and toppled in convulsive anger. Ed O’Donnell:  Right. Look at something like Bacon’s Rebellion in 1675-76, and many, many upsurges. The growing support for public commemoration of abolitionists and anti-slavery causes therefore signifies a clear and continuing shift in attitudes that has largely gone unnoticed from the monuments debate. Union-named schools continue more or less apace of their earlier trends, with Lincoln remaining the most popular choice by far. They’re about making statements about who is in charge in the South. These are symbols of a particular version of the Civil War, a particular memory of a certain subset of Southerners in the Civil War, but very much not part of the memory and the meaning of the war that African-Americans would have for it. Get notified of new articles from Phillip W. Magness and AIER. Collaboration. It has statues of our brave boys and heroes of our area like George Rogers Clark and William Henry Harrison. Ed O’Donnell: There’s a certain endorsement. I'm not going to make you a super long list, but take Vicksburg National Military Park for example. We are now part of one country, and we have to live that way.”. New Orleans' … The course in public memorialization of anti-slavery figures and events is at long last moving in a positive direction. Once you’ve smashed things, they’re gone. It is not possible to capture every dimension of monument construction from a strictly empirical approach, as a detailed examination of specific monuments reveals. Angry mobs are tearing down and defacing monuments across America. What they really were, was a coalition of some very ideologically pointed people, democratic socialists, organizations of that sort, Triangle People’s Assembly, the Workers of the World Party. Learn More: Early Civil Rights: Washington or Du Bois? A black Confederate soldier is depicted marching in step with white Confederate soldiers. The values these monuments stood for, he says, included a “glorification of the cause of the Civil War.” White women were instrumental in raising funds to build these Confederate monuments. Monuments are expensive. Here in Indianapolis in the ce3nter of the circle downtown is the Soldier’s and Sailor’s Monument. Confederate monuments have always been symbols of white supremacy. Watch as 13,000 Civil War Monuments Fill the U.S. Map—and Read the Chilling Inscriptions. Likely explanations include the northern states being comparatively wealthier after the war and thus able to afford commemorations at earlier points, as well as the country’s coalescing around a reconciliationist narrative of how the war was remembered in the lifetimes of its participants. The Great Courses: How do you see this moment playing out over the next few years? Twenty slave-free states and five border states made up most of the Union. Whose heritage? The inscription at the bottom is, “To Virginia’s sons.” I haven’t got the words exactly, but it’s to the sons of Virginia, those who were from Virginia and fought at the Battle of Gettysburg. There is a sense in which a lot of these monuments really are about white supremacy. Southerners were outraged by the election of Lincoln, who opposed slavery in territories and new states. The Lee monument in Charlottesville, that went up in 1924, so that’s what has some people saying, “This is the apex of white supremacy in the South, and therefore it’s teaching people about white supremacy.”. This is a list of Confederate monuments and memorials that were established as public displays and symbols of the Confederate States of America (CSA), Confederate leaders, or Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War. Again, you’re back to trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle and get things into a complete definition, and they don’t yield very easily to the convenient definitions. One is to tear them down like they did in Durham not long ago. Baltimore — It has been 3½ years since Baltimore officials removed four Confederate monuments from public land. It never joined the Confederacy. It really made a mark in that effort. He refuses to join Southern exile groups abroad, even though they want very badly to recruit him to do so. Union monuments vs Confederate monuments: the numbers. These include not only Confederate military statues and markers, but also their less-discussed counterparts on the Union side as well as a separate database of monuments to abolitionists and anti-slavery figures. Sometimes we need what has happened in terms of evil to be there to remind us about how absolutely important it is to do the good, and how little we can expect the good to happen automatically. A great deal of what I have heard in the controversies centered around Charlottesville and around some of the other Confederate monuments, for instance Monument Avenue in Richmond, really cast these things in ideological terms. I think a lot of it has to do with larger factors that are taking place,the tremendous flux that our economy is in, driven by all kinds of factors. That Virginia monument at Gettysburg has a flag on display, but it’s not a Confederate flag. That is what time tends to do to these things. Historians are often as divided as the general population on this topic. Ed O’Donnell: Right, but even those flags are also interesting, because they’re part of that story as well. So was Delaware. That much noted, political discussions about public monuments of all types could benefit from a firmer grounding in historical evidence and data. Often, statues reflect the time period in which they were erected, more than the statue itself. Live TV. Including Lincoln results in a sustained pattern of naming schools after him from the Civil War era to the present day.). I think that captures monuments. Which Confederate emblems, the Confederate flag? On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within itself, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”. Vandals also damaged a statue of Abraham Lincoln in his namesake city in Nebraska. Monument construction dates also clearly cluster in the years around this period, as depicted below. Are there more confederate monuments as opposed to union ones in the country. Ed O’Donnell: Yeah, he backs off of that. Looking at the Census-designated subsections of the United States: New England (49% vs. 25%) and the Pacific coast (44% vs. 27%) are the most likely regions to say that the Confederate flag is a sign of racism over heritage. The Republican Party, led by Abraham Lincoln, won the 1860 presidential election. supercurrymax 5 months ago #1. The Confederate-Monument Controversy Is a Democrat-vs-Democrat Question By Kevin D. Williamson. Then when we think about the context of Jim Crow, in some ways, some of these monuments perhaps did go up as just general statements of loss and mourning and sentimentalism and nostalgia, but in many cases they go up as explicit monuments to white supremacy, using the words white supremacy in the text of the monument, such as in the one that was removed from downtown New Orleans. I’m not saying that to make Lee into the shining knight that some people have made him into, because he was not. That is a very, very big question, simply because there are so many statue… Most of these were put up in the 1880s and the 1890s, about the same time as the Confederate statues we’ve been talking about, and those were really put up as monuments. I suspect that partly that’s true, but at the same time, the meanings shift over time. Perhaps the defenders of Confederate monuments will demonstrate their good faith by pressing for funding for new monuments to Southerners, white and black, who fought on behalf of the Union … The Great Courses: Yeah. I think you’re right. People who look at Lee say, “He fought …” There’s certainly balancing ideas about Lee, but if you say, “What did Lee fundamentally do?” He fundamentally left the American army, resigned his commission, and then signed on to a rebellious effort that was designed to pull the Union apart, and that movement was to pull the Union apart was to pull it apart for not the sole purpose but the fundamental purpose of preserving slavery into the forever. In California, protesters defaced a statue of abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier and tore down San Francisco’s monument to Ulysses S. Grant, the Union general most associated with winning the Civil War. Leave the Lee memorial up there, but put a Sojourner Truth memorial there, or something along those lines where they can be in conversation, and also put a new interpretive text next to the Lee monument that explains the context in which it went up. It is not my purpose here to offer advice on what should be done with specific statues, save to note that the point of decision-making needs to occur through input into normal and democratic processes – not mob action, and especially not the type that indulges violent and indiscriminate destruction. That is, the 1890s are the time when the South economically is starting to finally recover from the economic impact of the Civil War, which is to say that between 1865 and 1890, there’s not a lot of monument-building because they can’t afford it. The post-1954 spike in Confederate-named schools suggests an unsettling political reality. About half a mile away at Monument and McPherson Avenues, a similar monument marks the spot where Union General John B. McPherson was killed by Confederate forces the same day. Allen Guelzo:Right. With a few notable exceptions, monuments in this era often neglected or omitted the presence of African-Americans entirely, including the United States Colored Troops that fought on the northern side of the war. On June 3, 1907, a new attraction was unveiled in Richmond: a monument to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America during its … I think decades now on of revisiting that question, historians, certainly it would be hard to say exactly the number, but a great majority of American historians, particularly those who study the Civil War period, certainly rank slavery as a primary cause of disunion and civil war. I think this is what Ed was getting at when he was talking about Ida Wells. The problem we are facing today is, how do we understand monuments and memorials without it turning into a kind of cultural iconoclasm which, in a fairly short period of time, we’re very likely to regret? It was a way of putting a marker down and saying, “Over our dead bodies.” Even those flags are freighted with a history that’s worth knowing. Many purporting to speak in the name of fighting racism present the monument controversy as a cut and dry issue. I cant seem to find a comparison of these 2 things. The other aspect is that they are going to build a national monument, a national memorial to lynching, something that would have been unthinkable 20, 30, 40, certainly 100 years ago. It’s an interesting question, and all of those options are better options in many ways than simply smashing memorials, because as you point out, Allen, that’s an irreversible and often regrettable decision. Union monuments substantially outnumber Confederate monuments in total, although the annual number of Confederate statues briefly overtook the Union totals in the cluster of dates around the 1911 anniversary. What does it mean for a public statue not just to be erected but to be maintained within a public space? Since then, a statue to Roger … A rlington National Cemetery is the hallowed resting place of America’s war dead. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where copyright is otherwise reserved. Sitemap. One is that you can’t reverse it. You’re looking at monumentation and memorialization which is going all across the country. Angry mobs are tearing down and defacing monuments across America. He expels a student who he finds guilty of that. Union vs Confederate, North vs South. Allen Guelzo: Let me give you an even stranger case, and that is the Lee monument on the Gettysburg battlefield. What we saw in Charlottesville is in many ways a continuum of that tradition. After some of the deadliest battles in U.S. history, Union forces gradually regained control of southern states. Southerners themselves, including the Ordinances of Secession in many of the Confederate states, said their number one reason for leaving the Union was to protect slavery. In light of this movement, we're resurfacing a … Our politics are very fraught and very fractured at this point, but we also see certain trends taking place in our politics that are pretty alarming and should be alarming to anybody who cares about democracy, that principally being voter suppression efforts taking place. That’s going to change in 1862 for Grant. Jefferson’s list of positive accomplishments, and helping create a country that eventually gets around to doing the right thing, that eventually gets around to including everyone, or to the largest possible extent, in full citizenship, and Washington’s in that same category. They’re about an individual. Their principal achievements are in founding the American republic, and creating a nation and creating a language, even if it was not quite intentional, like Jefferson when he writes, “All men are created equal.” He’s not thinking about slaves. There are monuments, and then there are memorials. Grant’s not one of the greatest presidents, but Grant’s record in the early years of his administration are very impressive when it comes to pushing for equal rights, pushing for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment. The problem is that the line between memorials and monuments isn’t really all that clear and distinct. The place that I always turn is to a great quotation by James Baldwin. Earlier this month, the last major Confederate monument in California came down.It was a curious one: a nine-foot granite pillar in an Orange County … There’s a sense that Southern identity is tied to national identity in a way that can’t be untied. That was not in 1870, 1890, 1910. Other parts of the country are more narrowly divided. They want to erect monuments to their youth. I don’t mean ignorance in the sense of never having learned anything. That’s white supremacy, but if the group that’s tearing it down is a Marxist organization, is the pulling down of that itself an ideological statement for an ideology which, if anything, is even more reprehensible. The non-profit Southern Poverty Law Center asserts in a 2016 report that there are “718 [Confederate] monuments and statues, nearly 300 of which are in … The long-simmering controversy over Confederate symbolism in the Southern United States has boiled over in the wake of anger over police brutality against African-Americans, obliterating any notion that overcoming America’s tragic past of slavery and segregation is no longer relevant today. What emerges is a more complex picture that tells its own story of changing beliefs and attitudes about how we commemorate our past. As the chart below shows, schools named after Confederate figures were at best sporadic and infrequent for the first 90 years after the war. Applauding mob violence leads to indiscriminate attacks increasingly dissociated with any historical context. In the immediate wake of this anger lies a fork in the road. The dead end of mutual recrimination to which this choice leads is already clear. I think that’s the argument in favor of somebody like Washington and Jefferson being honored, and in fact now, if you go to Monticello, if you go to any of the Founding Fathers’ homes, they’re all busily working on giving voice to the story of slavery and giving voice to actual enslaved people, Sally Hemmings. Difference between Union and Confederate . We could say the same thing about Ulysses Grant, because Ulysses Grant before the Civil War was a slave-owner. The wave of mass vandalism quickly spreads to whatever statue happens to be next in line–targets have already included such figures as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, Theodore Roosevelt, Miguel de Cervantes, and Winston Churchill. All right, which Confederate flag? 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