The Confederate Monuments and Contemporary Strife.

 

 The Virginia Memorial at Gettysburg.  This impressive memorial was only dedicated in 1917.

I run more than one blog, which some folks who stop in here know. Amongst those is our companion blog Some Gave All.  Some Gave All is a blog that was originally dedicated to war memorials, but it's expanded out to include memorials for those who "gave all", in some fashion, beyond service in war.  Like our blogs Churches of the West and Courthouses of the West, it got started as we get around a fair amount.  

It nearly lacks, however, any depictions of Confederate memorials. Nearly, but not completely. That may be because my trips to the South either preceded, by and large, my creation of Some Gave All or because most of my recent trips to the South have been to Texas and I haven't run into any Confederate memorials there.  Indeed, curiously, the one I ran into most recently was at Ft. Fred Steele in Wyoming, and I frankly have some questions about that one, and indeed some that directly tie in to contemporary times and the topic of this entry.

Unusual civilian headstone noting that this individual had served with a provisional Confederate unit at some point that had been raised in California.  The marker must be quite recent, to say the least, and was placed by something styling itself the "Twenty First Century Confederate Legion".  I don't know what the "Twenty First Century Confederate Legion is, but frankly it placing monuments on the old graves of men at Fort Fred Steele makes me queasy.  Would this guy have even wanted that?

The biggest collection of them I've ever run into were at Gettysburg, where there are a collection of impressive ones.

 

North Carolina's early (post 1917) monument to her Confederate forces, at Gettyburg.  North Carolina had a large black population in the 1860s, and at the time that this monument was placed. What did they think?

In order to grasp the contemporary story, it's necessary to grasp the the history of the monuments themselves which is somewhat complicated.

Contrary to what people tend to think, they didn't go up right after the Civil War.  By and large, they went up well after.  And that has a bit to do with how the Civil War itself was actually fought, and by whom.

The Southern states that attempted to secede from the Union did so over one singular issue alone, slavery. That's it.  Debates about leaving the Union at the time were clear on that point.  Moreover, the class that supported that movement was largely that class that was well off financially, in relative terms, or that depended heavily on slavery, such as the planter class, both of which are the classes that owned slaves or benefited from the social order that tolerated slavery. The white class on the outs, and often on the other side of this effort, was the yeoman class, which actually constituted a majority of Southern whites.  In some areas, but not all, the yeomanry was very hostile to secession.  Ironically, the yeoman class would do the bulk of the fighting for the South during the war, although Southern leadership was always vested in the more monied and propertied classes.  The slave owning class, which was most responsible for succession, actually benefited from the broadest service exemptions in the South in yet a further unfair irony.

When the war ended, most Southerners feared that the North would treat those who had served the CSA, voluntarily or not, as traitors.  And, at least at law, they clearly were.  In the immediate aftermath of the war, at least according to contemporary accounts, the yeoman class and the non monied white class in towns accepted the results of the war and what that meant and got along relatively well with the newly freed black slaves.  Indeed, one contemporary account by a Union solder noted how an assistance line in one town that had been segregated into white and black reformed itself into a mixed line, all the distressed together, independently.  It wasn't long, however, before the monied and propertied classes began to resist Reformation in all sorts of ways, including violently.  Indeed, that same soldier noted that the whites in the aforementioned class were basically harassed back into line segregation by the classes of which we've been speaking.

This story is well known, but less well known is that in some areas of the South a second civil war between yeomanry and propertied classes smouldered for years as the two contesting sides fought it out over land rights.  The propertied classes became more restrictive on the use of land and more possessive of political rights after the war and increasingly so.  The Southern yeomanry could never get around to seeing blacks as really equal to whites and so their combined political power, which could have been real, was never realized.  The South became a sort of white planter/monied oligarchy in the years following the war.

Southern political leaders, coming from that class, were not dense to the the divisions in their own land and by the 1890s were working to overcome it. As they defeated the yeomanry in various ways they realized that they needed to unite Southern whites in some fashion and they undertook to do it.  Part of that was the creation of The Lost Cause.

The Lost Cause myth presented a noble, mythologized, view of the Southern states and the war.  Emphasizing in part the yeoman nature of the Southern combatant, the better qualities of some Southern officers, and the genteel nature of the planter class, a myth was born of a uniformly brave, well lead and manly army in a democratic cause that was defeated in battle simply because it was outnumbered and outgunned.  While enough of that was true to make the myth believable, in reality it was far from the overall truth of an oligarchic state organized around wealth that used the poorer members of its society to fight in order to keep people who were enslaved due to race enslaved. The democratic argument of the South indeed is basically a lie if we consider that a large percentage of the population in every Southern state could not vote, because they were black, or did not vote due to economic disadvantage.  Had all native born Southerners voted on succession, irrespective of race, rather obviously there would have been no succession.

 

"Virginia to her sons at Gettysburg" presents the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia in allegorical terms, the figures represent, on the left,  a professional man, a mechanic, an artist, in the center a young mounted man, and on the right a businessman, a farmer, and a youth.  19,000 Virginians served at Gettysburg, the largest contingent of the Southern states, and one in four were casualties of the battle. But, if the monument was accurate, most of the men in the foreground would be shoe-less small farmers.  Truly, from the Confederate side, the Civil War was a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight".  For the North, it was more of a middle class war.

The monied political class's embracing of the Lost Cause effectively managed to embrace the yeoman class that fought it, deserted from it in stunning numbers, or even fought against it, at the very time at which the old combatants and deserters were growing old and in need of assistance.  Not only, therefore, did memorials come, but stipends to elderly men who could prove they'd fought for the CSA, irrespective of what they'd thought of that at the time.  No pension was going to come from the Federal Government, to say the least, but it did come from the various Southern states, extending not only to the old veterans but to their spouses and children as well, resulting in payments that stretched on nearly throughout the entire 20th Century.  The last confederate pension receiving widow died in 2008.  Freed slaves, by contrast, ended up largely getting. .  .nothing.  Particularly after Reconstruction ended in 1876.

The effort was, no matter what it otherwise was, a stunning success.  By World War One the white Southern population had united behind the Lost Cause myth and Southern blacks were completely disenfranchised.  Many in the North, which had changed a great deal economically and demographically since the Civil War, embraced the romantic vision as well.  Portrayals like The Birth of a Nation  (the 1915 one, not  the 2016 one) fueled it.   Southern participation in the Spanish American War helped repair northern views over the South and its loyalty and Woodrow Wilson, who hailed most recently from Princeton but who was a Southerner, was elected to the Presidency over two competing Yankee contestants.  And monuments to the rebel army and its leaders went up everywhere in the South.

But wars and history keep on, keeping on.  Rising with the Progressive movement was the old civil rights movement dedicated to blacks and their position in the United States.  Woodrow Wilson may not have supported it, but many did.  The Great War saw blacks serve or attempt to serve in ways that were often heroic.  During the 1920s and the 1930s they kept on as support for civil rights slowly increased in most of the country outside of the South, even as romanticized portrays of the Antebellum South continued on in such things as Gone With The Wind.  World War Two came and basically made it impossible for a nation that had seen the horrors of racism carried to its extreme to keep on with racism in its own country in an official form and it began to crack in numerous ways. By the 1960s the game was really up even as Southern Democrats waged a rearguard effort to keep it, adding the old blood stained flag to state flags and threatening independent political movements of their own.  Neal Young decried the Southern Man while the South's own Lynyrd Skynyrd straddled both sides of the fence in Sweet Home Alabama.

In Birmingham they love the Gov'nor, boo-hoo-hoo

Now we all did what we could do
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you, tell the truth.

Well the northern answer to Skynyrd's question was clearly "no", they weren't bothered existentially, at least on this, and the political and economic situation of American blacks improved enormously, even though it isn't apparent to younger generations now.  

But something weird is going on currently.

It's hard to peg what it is, but over the last decade racist elements that never really went away have been sort of bizarrely resurgent.  It might be attributable to the usual suspects in this category, those being economic stress and the like.  Or perhaps its more complicated than that.  What is also clear is, and also surprisingly, for the first time ever sufficient numbers of residents of Southern states no longer look upon the Southern heroes of the Civil War as heroes, or look upon the Southern cause as noble.  Indeed, during the twenty four hours during which I started this post, and then resumed typing on it, Baltimore, which was not in a state that bolted the Union but which was strongly Confederate in sympathy during the war, took down all of its Confederate monuments.  I'd never have thought I would have seen a thing like that. Charlotteville, Virginia, population 50,000, which has of course been in the news over the past few days, changed the name of the park where its Robert E. Lee statute is located to Emancipation Park about a year ago and clearly Marse Robert is coming down.

The Stars and Bars started coming off of Southern flags some time ago.  All of a sudden, and very surprisingly, states and towns began to take down Southern memorials, such as noted above.  It's really shocking, if simply because its so unexpected.  At the same time three, or maybe four, elements have risen to oppose the removal of the monuments.  Two or three are likely genuine, and one likely is not quite so much, or in the same way.

One is the one we saw strike out violently this past week.  This group is the last one mentioned in the paragraph above. They identify with the Confederate memorials in the same way, to a degree, that the KKK did with the Southern lost cause at its core. They're racist and they're celebrating the racist nature of the Southern cause.  That the South had a racist cause cannot be doubted, so in a way, they're celebrating what secessionist in 1860 would have welcomed.  If Robert E. Lee would have found them vile, maybe, many Southern politician would not have, or not have clearly.

A second group, however, would be Southerners who hold on to the Lost Cause myth but who are not racists today.  That's undoubtedly a larger group.  Having grown up with the myth and having embraced it, they see the Southern cause as one for the democratic rights of states.  For northerners its very difficult to grasp it as we can't understand how they work around the racist elements of the Southern cause.  I.e., how could the war have been for State's Rights if a large population in the state didn't have rights?  It's impossible for us to grasp, but that's how they see it.  Figures like Lee are particularly heroic to them as Lee isn't strongly associated with slavery and some suggest he opposed it, although the history on that is not very clear.  If so, he certainly was willing nonetheless to violate his oath of service to the United States and serve as an effective general in slavery's cause.  We'll come back to this group in a moment.

Another group here are those who identify, oddly enough, with the Southern yeoman.  The Stars and Bars has become for them what it never was for the original Southern armed combatant, a symbol of rural yeomanry.  This class doesn't think much about the slavery aspect of this at all, but rather looks upon the late Southern small farmer as models of independence and as sort of aggressively opposed to effete urban culture.  There are varying degrees of this and greater or lesser attractions to the South depending upon where the person is, but this explains why the same person can have a "Cold War Veteran"  and a "Stars and Bars Fighting Terrorism Since 1861" sticker on their truck and not think they're being inconsistent, or that this even makes sense.

The irony for this last group is that, in the South, this group was actually add odds with the people who lead the South into the Civil War. Economically, politically and culturally that class, the Yeomen, were highly independent but often not disloyal to the Union. They felt oppressed, because they were, by the big monied elements in Southern society.  In some cases they took up arms against the South with the example of "The Free State of Jones" being one such example, but not the only one, and they struggled against the resurgent Secessionist class after the war, ultimately unsuccessfully.  While this group may identify with Confederate symbols today, it didn't when the CSA was alive, or a fresh living memory.

A fourth, and final, group doesn't sympathize with the Confederacy at all, or if they are Southern they may have some attachment to it but recognize what the Southern cause stood for and are repelled by that, but worry that removing monuments does violence to history itself.  I'm in that group.  I don't hold romantic views about the CSA at all, and I even somewhat sympathize with the basic motivation of those who would take these monuments down, but I worry that it does violence to history and our recollection of history.

Indeed, the Baltimore monuments, which came down last night, sort of symbolize that for me.  I've been to Baltimore and I think it's safe to say that whatever views that city's father's held that caused it to put up memorials to Southern officers from that state (of which Lee was one in a way, Arlington was his property) are long gone.  Baltimore was a Southern city, although Maryland did not leave the Union (with an occupying Union Army right there, it couldn't) , but it isn't any more.  Not like that, anyhow.  Most people probably don't begin to think of it  that way.  There's no earthly way the town would spring for Confederate monuments now.

But there was a time when it would, and by removing them, we are removing the evidence of that. And that's something to remember.

All over there's been a movement to remove monuments that were erected in earlier times to things that now are recognized as morally wrong.  Yale University, for example, has been fighting over the removal of symbols that demonstrate that some of its early donors were slave holders.  But removing them won't change that fact.  At least one other university went through something similar as well.  Probably almost any Eastern university has some money that came, originally, out of human trafficking and something that recalls that in honorific form.  Removing that causes that to be forgotten, it doesn't change the fact that it occurred. And it needs to be recalled that it occurred, and that something about earlier generations even celebrated it, or at least could but it out of mind.  Taking the evidence away doesn't correct the wrong, it just dulls the memory until it is erased entirely.

Indeed, such monuments, in my view, can serve as monuments to a greater historical reality, and that's what's occurred in my region of the country.  There are a lot of monuments put up in the early 20th Century to people and events involved in the Indian War that were massively one sided and even racist, as we'd view that now.  Some have come down, such as the "First White Man's Cabin" marker here in Natrona County.  But most have not. Rather, efforts have been made to correctly name things, such as changing the Little Big Horn battle ground to that name (which was always used here, oddly enough) form Custer Battleground, and where older monuments exist new explanatory ones have been added that enhance the understanding of what actually occured.

Monument at the Fetterman Battleground, placed in the early 20th Century.  The battleground itself has a large number of very good explanatory signs that explain the battle and what occurred there.

 

Of course, while that might make sense, making sense after things go badly awry is difficult to say the least.  And that's where we are now at.

Because of the first group, "white nationalist", or whatever they are called, things have now developed to where addressing this in a manner that doesn't do violence to history is probably impossible.  The monuments have been co-opted and adopted by these racist and almost nothing now can be done to address that.  People like me who would wish for the monuments to serve as historical lessons about the things I've discussed here cannot really argue for that in the face of such vile conduct by such hateful groups, as we do not wish to be associated with them in any way.  Those in the second group, cannot really either as even though they may hold romantic notions about the South, they don't hold contemporary racist views and can't effectively argue any position. So the monuments are likely doomed, and perhaps need to be, all things considered. 

And while this is occurring the further scary polarization of American politics continues on.  The "Alt Right" isn't a conservative movement, as fascism isn't a conservative movement.  It may not even be a right wing movement, showing the unfortunate nature of left right characterizations in politics.  A conservative movement would not be racist as it couldn't be.  Blacks form part of the original culture of the country that American conservatives seek to conserve.  But the Alt Right has managed to confuse the line between it and the legitimate "Right" which isn't aided by the incorporation of figures like Steve Bannon in the Trump Administration.  Trump's own inability to effectively speak on anything, an amazing lack of talent for somebody as well educated and successful as he is, only fuels this.  On the left, the extreme left, which is a sort of Alt Left in and of itself, has managed to further boost the blurring of the lines to discredit conservatives, to their horror and no doubt to the delight of the Alt Right, which proves Jean Shepherd's observation that what fanatics truly love is fanaticism, to some degree, and that fanatics admire each other in their fanaticism.  American politics, in the meantime, risks being buried beneath the rubble of wherever the old Confederate monuments end up.