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The Legacy of the Confederacy Part II

Monumental Problems

By Robert WellsPublished 7 years ago 4 min read
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On May 19, 2017, a statue of Robert E. Lee, the military leader of the Confederate States of America, was removed from a public square in New Orleans a mere 152 years after the defeat of the Confederacy. The city workers tasked with removal wore bulletproof vests and masks to conceal their identities. Meanwhile, a congressional representative in Mississippi publicly threatened via Tweet that anyone who tried to remove Confederate memorials in his state should be “lynched.”

I live in Chapel Hill, the supposed liberal bubble of North Carolina, and I can always directionally orient myself because our largest monument, a fictitious Confederate soldier named Silent Sam, faces north. Beside him is a much smaller “functional” monument honoring the slaves who built the University of Chapel Hill, which is literally a table where people change babies’ diapers. Several of the university’s buildings are named after dead KKK members (one was finally named after a slave, poet George Moses Horton, in 2006).

Just 15 miles away in Pittsboro, you could have recently attended a Confederate flag pride parade. Some of the attendees have ancestors who died during the Civil War, yet they weren’t just honoring their loved ones; they were celebrating the ideology of white supremacy that their ancestors defended.

To people in other parts of the world, this may sound bizarre, and it sounds bizarre to many liberal Americans. The CSA lost the war, and its government is long gone and never coming back. But a lot of white southerners have an affinity for fetishizing the CSA, a country founded upon the rights of white people to enslave black people for the purpose of sustaining an economy based on free labor.

To those who deny the CSA stood solely for white supremacy, I point you to the words of South Carolina congressman John McQueen’s 1860 letter to Richmond leaders in a plea for them to join the CSA:

“I have never doubted what Virginia would do... to choose between an association with her sisters and the dominion of a people, who have chosen their leader upon the single idea that the African is equal to the Anglo-Saxon...We, of South Carolina, hope soon to greet you in a Southern Confederacy, where white men shall rule our destinies.”

McQueen’s contemporary, South Carolina religious leader James Henley Thornwell, went even further in his defense of the CSA, suggesting that Christianity compelled white people to enslave black people, and abolitionists were godless communists:

“The parties in the conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders. They are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on the one side, and friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground – Christianity and Atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity at stake.”

Many modern CSA flag wavers don’t see themselves as white supremacists. Nonetheless, to defend Confederate symbols is to defend slavery and white supremacy. Indeed, white supremacists groups have long used the “rebel flag” as a rallying cry (a topic I will cover in the future). White people who are against white supremacy should denounce the CSA and recognize that its downfall was deserved.

A common argument against public displays of the Confederate flag is that Germans no longer fly the Nazi flag. In fact, many artifacts from the Nazi era that are housed in museums today have had their swastikas effaced. Many Germans were embarrassed, as they should have been, so today Berlin is filled with monuments honoring the victims of WWII rather than the ideology of German supremacy that caused it (That’s not to say that Germany is perfect; I’ll address this issue more in later posts).

Is there a way to honor those who died in the Civil War without honoring the CSA itself? Instead of just statues of Robert E. Lee, could we have statues of Lee and Union leader Ulysses S. Grant shaking hands as they did at the end of the war? Could we have monuments remembering black victims of slavery just as big as monuments remembering white people who fought for their enslavement? Can we have monuments celebrating the freedom of black people? Rather than celebrating the Confederacy, can we celebrate the reunification of the United States of America?

Then again, we were never truly reunited. Black people remained and remain subject to systematic oppression by the US government and their white neighbors, and symbols glorifying CSA still stand. Banishing these symbols to museums and adopting new ones is imperative.

In a future part of this series, I’ll showcase pictures from my last trip to Berlin to offer a different perspective on how uncomfortable history can be handled. The next entry, however, will explore the film Birth of a Nation and its influence on the KKK.

Sources:

New Orleans removes a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from its perch of 133 years

South Carolina in the American Civil War

Chapel Hill mayor wants Silent Sam removed from UNC campus

Unsung Founders Memorial

history
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About the Creator

Robert Wells

Robert Wells is a freelance writer from North Carolina. His specialties include history, film and video games.

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