It was Never Just About History…Then or Now

I’ve kicked off 2022 by reading historian Karen Cox’s new book No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice. Although I have been pretty invested in the Confederate monuments debate for a while, Cox’s scholarship has been very enlightening for me. In particular, she clearly demonstrates that mass protest against Confederate monuments in public places is nothing new, particularly among Black Southerners who were often left out of the decision-making process to install these icons in public spaces in the first place. This is a particularly important point given the popular impulse to assume that this particular debate only started in 2015 with the horrific massacre of the Charleston Nine, when in reality that tragic event accelerated an already long-standing debate over the appropriateness of Confederate monuments, statues, and flags in public places.

One particularly noteworthy aspect of No Common Ground that I appreciate lies in how Cox clearly describes the ways Confederate monuments have always been inherently political. I was particularly struck by reading about the dedication of a Confederate monument in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1898. Former state governor and Confederate veteran Thomas Jones stated during the monument’s dedication that “our duty is not ended with the building of this monument,” which served as a means to “stimulate youths to admire and to . . . emulate” their ancestors. For Jones, those ancestors had not fought to preserve slavery but states’ rights, which in his mind was the true underlying message of Confederate iconography. President Grover Cleveland’s Secretary of the Navy, Hilary Herbert, also a Confederate veteran, followed Jones and remarked that “we build monuments to heroes so that future generations may imitate their example.”

In summarizing the significance of this rhetoric and the erection of Confederate monuments more broadly, Cox argues that “the most enduring monument to the Confederacy was a population of white southerners educated to defend both the memory and the principles for which [the Confederacy] stood” (51). In other words, the notion that Confederate monuments can only be narrowly viewed as reminders of the past completely devoid of politics is simply untrue. Confederate veterans, Lost Cause apologists, and other supporters of Confederate monuments viewed them at the time of their erection and dedication as political tools within a larger struggle over the memory of the Civil War. As Jones implied, the monuments were but one step towards a larger goal of instilling pride in the Confederacy and support for Jim Crow governance in the present. He hoped the erection of monuments would eventually translate into written histories, school textbooks, patriotic rituals (such as Confederate Memorial Days), and a political culture in which a shared historical memory of the Confederacy served as a binding agent to promote social unity and cohesion among white southerners.

Confederate monuments were never just about honoring the soldiers or just about history, then or now.

I have written before that monuments are often a poor communicator when it comes to promoting a nuanced understanding of history. Rather, they often promote unquestioned hero-worship of false idols and a simplistic understanding of history that is really more about the present than the past. No Common Ground only reinforces my position on this topic.

Cheers