Confederates in Harvard's Memorial Hall

via

With the advent of the sesquicentennial, there has been a surge of interest in all things related to the Civil War. At Harvard, this has taken the form of intensified debates over the inclusion of Harvard's Confederate dead in Memorial Hall.

Memorial Hall via Wikipedia

Harvard's Memorial Hall was built in the 1870s as a monument to Harvard's Union war dead. It is a huge, gothic building that houses Annenberg Dining Hall, Sanders Theatre, and a memorial corridor lined with marble plaques that bear the names of 136 Harvard graduates who died while serving with the Union army. The plaque in the center of the transept declares,

This hall commemorates the patriotism of the graduates and student of this university who served in the Army and Navy of the United States during the war for the preservation of the Union and upon these tablets are inscribed the names of those among them who died in that service.

The controversy arises from the fact that the 71 Harvard graduates who died in the Confederate armed forces are not included in this memorial. When the cornerstone for the building was laid (1870), the prevailing sentiment was toward honoring only those soldiers who had fought against treason. During the reconstruction era, Cambridge was still proud to characterize the war as a sacred struggle over both union and slavery, as demonstrated in the sphinx monument at Mount Auburn Cemetery (1872), which bears the text,

AMERICAN UNION PRESERVED
AFRICAN SLAVERY DESTROYED
BY THE UPRISING OF A GREAT PEOPLE
BY THE BLOOD OF FALLEN HEROES

Yet, the reconciliationist narrative came to Cambridge as surely as it swept over the rest of the nation. By the time the 50-year celebrations rolled around, there were active efforts to include the names of Harvard's Confederate dead at Memorial Hall. Monuments erected at Yale and Princeton during this era jumbled the names of Union and Confederate dead and honored all as patriots.

In the past year, the campaign to include the Confederate dead in Memorial Hall has ramped up again. Many pro-memorialization advocates have latched onto the fact that Memorial Church (a different building on campus, built in 1932 to commemorate the WWI dead) lists the names of several Harvard men who died serving in the German army in WWI and one Divinity School graduate who died in WWII. Last fall, the Harvard Crimson ran a long article about the differences between the Memorial Hall and Memorial Church commemoration philosophies, in which it quoted Prof. Alan Dershowitz as saying,

The University needs to adopt a policy one way or the other. The current inconsistent standard is unacceptable, and it’s particularly unfortunate that the exception seems to be for a member of the Nazi army, one of the darkest regimes in human history, and a regime with which Harvard had too cozy a relationship.

While I tend to think that Prof. Dershowitz would probably rather see the deletion of German soldiers from Memorial Church than the addition of Confederates to Memorial Hall, others have come to the opposite conclusion. The Harvard Confederate Memorial Initiative is a small, but vocal organization dedicated to advocating for a Confederate memorial at Harvard. You can view their intro video here. Their cause has been getting some attention, not just from the Crimson, but from conservative media outlets like World Net Daily. Last summer, a WND reporter confronted White House press secretary Robert Gibbs over the Memorial Hall issue — Gibbs had no comment. The HCMI also has a Facebook petition (currently rather pathetic at about 130 "likes"). Executive Director Roger McCredie told the Crimson that the HCMI's goal is to correct the historical narrative of "South equal bad. North equal good":

If you want to talk slavery, we can talk slavery all day long and about how no one’s hands are clean from it—including the Fanueil family and the Brown family, both of whom made fortunes on the slave trade. This extremely skewed view of history and of historical perspective has become pandemic—it does not infect merely Harvard; it infects the entire educated and cultural edifice of the United States these days.

Now, I know Mr. McCredie has a particular political agenda to advance, but this sort of thing is rage-inducing. He seems to be confusing Harvard with a mediocre elementary school circa 1990. The Harvard curriculum is hardly trying to cover up Northern complicity in American slavery with courses like Sven Beckert's "Harvard and Slavery" or faculty research like Jill Lepore's New York Burning or events like last month's joint conference with Brown, which was called "Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development" and focused on slavery's role in national economic development after the Revolution. When someone claims that academic historians are ignoring or trying to cover up Northern slavery, I know that I can safely disregard everything else in his/her manifesto because he/she clearly has no grasp of what academic historians do. Northern slavery is one of the hottest things going in Early American history at the moment. People who pretend otherwise are willfully ignorant in service of their neo-Confederate politics.

Yet, admittedly, academic historians are notoriously awful about getting the word out about our work. Part of that is our fault (we generally for one another rather than for a wide audience and punish colleagues who try to engage with the public), part is the fault of the structure of history education at the k-12 level (holiday history controlled by politicized state committees and useless AP-driven fact cram later on), part is the fault of public figures who appeal to history as a cover for their own biases (see the entire Scalia oeuvre), and part is the fault of an incurious general public that can't be bothered to read anything more challenging than a David McCullough biography. As an historian with a commitment to public history, I think it would be a great idea to do some public outreach regarding Harvard's role in American slavery and its considerable ties to the Confederacy.

Therefore, I propose the following exhibit:

Remembrance

In the transept of Memorial Hall, two rows of rectangular display pedestals will stand along the East and West walls, each directly under a memorial panel and mirroring the panel in shape and size, though tipped at a slight angle so that visitors can view the contents easily. Each pedestal will display an object or text relating to Harvard's multifaceted role in creating, sustaining, and challenging American slavery and the war that ended it. A final pedestal will stand at the North end of the transept, under the stained glass window, bearing the names of the 71 Harvard students and alumni who gave their lives in support of the Confederacy and its cause — not in violation of their position as Harvard men, but in fulfillment of it.

Examples of objects that would go into these cases:

• J.T. Zealy / Louis Agassiz Daguerreotypes:

• In 1850, Harvard's most celebrated naturalist, Louis Agassiz, traveled to South Carolina, where he commissioned a series of photographs of African-born slaves and first-generation African-Americans in an attempt to gather evidence about racial types. Agassiz believed that various races were created separately, and his use of scientific methods, including these photographs, lent his ideas intellectual weight in antebellum America. The daguerreotypes — many of them depicting their subjects nude, in the poses now familiar to us from mug shots — are held by Harvard's Peabody Museum. They are not on display, partly because they are fragile and partly because they are ghastly. For more information, see Molly Rogers' Delia's Tears: Race, Science and Photography in 19th-Century America. This book reprints all of the images in full, something I would not do here, even if I had permission.
• Portrait of Thomas Wentworth Higginson by Frank Weston Benton (1893)

• Higginson, a fiery abolitionist who contributed openly to John Brown's cause, was a member of the class of 1841. He was a true radical and found that the reforms brought about by the Civil War fell far short of his hopes for racial justice. In 1904, he gave a Decoration Day speech in Sanders Theatre in which he suggested that Confederates might be included in the tablets in the transept. While some historians (David Blight) have argued that Higginson represents the erasure of abolitionism from Civil War memory, others (W. Scott Poole) argue that Higginson's remarks in 1904 "speak to his own disillusion about the possibilities of nationalism and his doubts about whether or not it could serve as a force for racial justice." Higginson's portrait (along with various quotations) would provide an unparalleled example of the complexity of Harvard's relationships with abolitionism and Civil War memory.
• Samples of "Negro Cloth" from Rhode Island 1839-1850 from Baker Library (Harvard Business School)
•  Many Harvard alumni and donors (ex: Francis Cabot Lowell, class of 1793) were industrialists who turned slave-grown Southern cotton into cheap cloth. Some of this material, like the samples above, were manufactured in order to be sent back to Southern plantations to clothe those same slaves. Several cases in this exhibit would be devoted to the Harvard/factory/plantation nexus.

Other cases would showcase other items related to Harvard's historical support of and entanglement with slavery — receipts for gifts from slaveowning or slave-industry alumni, a replica of the gravestone dedicated to Cecily (d. 1713, 13-year-old slave to William Brattle, class of 1680), a fragment of brick from an 18th-century college building built using slave labor, etc. An exhibit like this would probably be the fruit of research conducted in undergraduate seminars (like Prof. Beckert's) and by professors and community members as part of a commission similar to Brown's Committee on Slavery and Justice. Its catalog would probably go on to form part of a larger report by the commission laying bare Harvard's complicity. I know that a report from a steering committee doesn't sound like a very friendly way to get the word out, but there was plenty of interest in Brown's report, and Harvard's would make a bigger splash. People might not read the report, but they would read the NYT article about the report.

In this way, Harvard could engage in meaningful reflection on its institutional history. I think that a public exhibit in Memorial Hall would be a powerful way to write Harvard's Confederate dead back into its story, not with celebration, but with conscience. The point would be to bring context to the names already on the walls in the transept. They were the memorial that Harvard needed in 1870, but we need something more in 2011.

Roger McCredie and others who call for the names of Harvard's Confederate dead to be added to the rolls of honor in Memorial Hall argue that Harvard should acknowledge its role in the development and maintenance of American slavery. I agree. But simply adding the names of Harvard's Confederates would not just acknowledge that role — it would perpetuate it. If Harvard were to take such a bold and public step in favor of a reconciliationist narrative that argues that the Civil War was about personal valor and sacrifice, rather than a struggle over treason in defense of slavery, the institution will have lent its considerable cultural capital to the mythology of the Lost Cause. It will have arrayed what arms it has on the side of a white supremacist, anti-intellectual movement that is stuck in the mindset of the 50th anniversary while the rest of the nation observes the 150th. Luckily, I think there is very little chance that this will happen, particularly under the administration of President Faust, who is, after all, a scholar of the Civil War with a particular interest in memorialization. If the names of Harvard's Confederate dead are added to Memorial Hall — and I hope they are — they must be part of an effort to confront Harvard's institutional complicity, not an attempt to prolong it.

Six Percent Revisited

Andy Hall, guest-blogging for Ta-Nehisi Coates, takes on the myth of the 6% in a new post, "Small Truth Papering Over a Big Lie."

In addition to Joseph T. Glatthaar's study of the Army of Northern Virginia, which Hall mentions, I recommend the following books to anyone who is interested in the question of white Southerners' investment in slavery:

• Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country by Stephanie McCurry
• What This Cruel War Was Over: Soldiers, Slavery, and the Civil War by Chandra Manning

I'm glad to see this issue getting some attention on a blog with such a large popular readership.

"Burn a Confederate Flag Day"

General J.C. Christian from Jesus' General is leading a campaign to get progressives to participate in "Burn a Confederate Flag Day" on September 12, 2010. He envisions it as a counter to the 9/12 Tea Parties and hopes that it will expose the Tea Partiers' "conscious effort to show African Americans as subversive and anti-American and to tie that to Obama."

My first question: should participants burn the Confederate national flag to protest the Confederacy's assault on the U.S. Constitution or the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia to protest the ongoing racism of the Lost Causers?

The Forgotten Legion: A Thought Experiment

Frances Clalin Clayton

Union soldier

The controversy over "Black Confederates" seems unlikely to die anytime soon. Recent posts by Kevin Levin and Ta-Nehisi Coates (and the comments on those posts) have inspired me to ponder the possible tactics for combatting the myth that tens thousands of slaves willingly served the Confederacy as enlisted soldiers and its implications (i.e. that slavery was incidental to the Southern economic/social/political regime, that a large number of slaves were unfailingly loyal to their owners, that the war was not about slavery, etc.).

As Ta-Nehisi Coates has rightfully observed, the evidence supporting the "Black Confederates" argument is both anecdotal and incidental. Among the thousands of slaves who were forced to serve the Confederate army and its soldiers as teamsters, manual laborers, cooks, body servants, and orderlies, some may have served willingly and some may have taken up arms at some point. Yet, it would be foolish to turn scattered stories of slaves retrieving their masters' bodies from battlefields or protecting their homes from foraging troops into legions of armed slaves recruited by the Confederate government and willingly fighting to preserve the Confederacy.

Thus, I propose a thought experiment. Anyone who accepts the idea that a significant number of black men fought for the Confederacy must also accept the "fact" that all Civil War armies were chock-full of women. We'll call this the Forgotten Legion Theory.

Jeff Davis, General Lee, and Stonewall J

When I first found Lavinia Meekins in the census, I thought that her family might be unique. After all, how many black Southerners had children named after Confederate heroes?

Actually, quite a few.

The more I looked, the more I found. So far, I have looked at the 1870 and the 1880 census records for all 11 ex-Confederate states. Here is what I've found*:

I was surprised to find 325 black children named Jefferson Davis in the 1870 census — I was expecting to find no more than a dozen. To put these numbers in perspective, there are about 2,000 white Southerners named Jefferson Davis in the 1870 census.

One interesting thing about this chart is the tremendous drop in the name "Jefferson Davis" between 1870 and 1880. It seems unlikely that more than half of the black children named Jeff Davis died in the intervening decade, especially since most of them were older than 5 in 1870, so they had a better chance of survival than infants. Did many of the boys named Jeff Davis decide to go by another name when they reached the age of 15 or 16?

Unfortunately, it is difficult to track any Southerner from census to census. I count 166 black Stonewalls in 1870 and 161 in 1880, but there is very little overlap between the two lists. This makes it difficult to generalize about the rising or falling popularity of a name over time. In my next post, I'll try to tackle this problem.

These three names seem to be the most popular, but a few others crop up from time to time. The 1870 census shows handfuls of black Southerners named Pickett, Longstreet, Wade Hampton, General Forrest, Zollicoffer, and Braxton Bragg. I haven't run the numbers on "Forrest" and "Beauregard," but, in initial searches, both seem to be almost as popular as Stonewall and Lee.

I won't overburden this post with specific examples, but here are a few notable examples of Confederate names given to black children during and after the war:

Secession Bants, b. 1862, Fredonia, AL
(one of four black children — two boys, two girls — named Secession, 1870 Census)

Confederacy Johnson, b. 1862, Livingston, VA

brothers, Zollicoffer Robinson, b. 1862 and General Lee Robinson b. 1864, Lancaster, KY (not included in statistics)

the McCullough family of Fairfield Co., SC:
Wade H. (b. 1862), Jefferson D. (b. 1863), Braxton B. (b. 1862), Beauregard (b. 1866)
(They have a little brother named Dempsey — any suggestions?)

*In this graph, "Jefferson Davis" includes black or biracial men and boys named "Jefferson Davis," "Jeff Davis," and "Jefferson D." living in the ex-Confederate states. "Stonewall Jackson" includes men and boys named "Stonewall Jackson," "Stonewall," and "Stonewall J." "Robert E. Lee" includes men and boys named "Robert E. Lee," "Robert Lee," "Bob Lee," and General Lee."

Should President Obama Honor Confederate Soldiers?

Apparently, several historians have written a letter to President Obama asking him to discontinue the nearly century-old tradition of placing a wreath at the Confederate Memorial at Arlington on Memorial Day. Over at Civil War Memory, Kevin Levin argues that the letter strikes the wrong tone and should be ignored.

I would be perfectly happy to see Obama's staff "forget" to order the wreath for this particular bit of Lost Cause nostalgia, but that's not really his style. It seems much more likely that President Obama could be persuaded to add an extra stop on that Memorial Day wreath-laying tour — I suggest a trip to the African American Civil War Memorial before the Arlington excursion.

Anyone can start a tradition. If Obama lays a wreath for secessionists, which I assume he will, let him also lay one for the freemen who fought for Union and liberty. Hopefully, his successors will continue to do so for the next century.

more photos via

Six Percent

What do you think when you hear "6%"?

Chances are, if you're interested in the Civil War or Civil War memory, you may recognize 6% as the number of white Southerners who owned slaves in 1860 (some say 5%. Whatever). In many apologetic texts, this number magically morphs into 6% of Confederate soldiers (or fewer!). Nevermind that recent scholarship puts the number of Confederate soldiers who lived in slaveowning families at well over a third.

This statistic is always dragged out to "prove" that the average Confederate soldier was absolutely not fighting to preserve slavery. It's not just the crazies who argue that very few Confederate soldiers were slaveowners — this stat is pretty well accepted by people who are not inveterate Lost Causers. "[T]he vast bulk of Confederate soldiers did not own a single slave," writes Robert Mackey of the Huffington Post "and many from the most rural areas had never even seen a black man or woman in their lives."

Where did everybody get this number?

It seems that the argument that minuscule numbers of Southerners were slave owners come from sophisticated mathematical formulas that divide the number of slaveowners on the 1860 Census (316,632 in the 11 Confederate states) by the total population of white Southerners (5,447,220 in the CSA). That gets you 5.8%.

I am no math genius, but there seems to be a problem here. The 1860 Slave Schedule lists slaves under the name of the legal owner, who is generally a man and the head of a household. The women and children living in the household were not legal slaveowners, but their inclusion in the data dilutes the percentage of white Southerners who owned slaves to the point of absurdity. Using similar logic, you could "prove" that fewer than half of Americans own cars.

I spent some time looking over the 1860 census data at UVA's wonderful census website and on the library edition of Ancestry.com. Here are some of my preliminary findings:

1. Over half of all white Southerners were under the age of 20.

Of the 5.4 million white Southerners in 1860, 30% were under the age of 10 and another 23% were between 10 and 19 years of age. Very few of these children owned slaves. Those who did were generally under the protection of a guardian who would have been listed in the census as the slave owner.

2. Over 30% of Southern households had slaves.*

*Maybe. I came up with these percentages by dividing the number of slaveowners by the number of households in each state. It is entirely possible that a household could have more than one slaveowner listed in the Slave Schedule, but my preliminary readings of that document indicate that that's pretty rare. These percentages should not be interpreted as a random sample of households, but as rough numbers. My real point here is not that these numbers are perfect, but that 6% is way, way off.

3. The 1860 slave census both overcounts and undercounts slave owners.
The 1860 Slave Schedule overcounts some slaveowners (those with many slaves in more than one county). Yet, it also undercounts slaveowners and those living in slaveowning households. For example, a woman who brings personal attendants with her to her husband's home at marriage is a slaveowner, but she is unlikely to be listed as one on the census. Similarly, the guardians of slaveowning minors (or unrelated women) are often listed as the owners on the census, as in the case of William G. Allen of Clarke Co., Alabama:

When the people indexing the census counted this entry, did they count it as one slaveowner? Two? Three?

4. The 6% figure obscures the number of white Southerners who lived in slaveowning families. Duh.
Let's take the case of William C. Riddle of Washington Co., Georgia. Riddle owned 92 slaves. On the 1860 Slave Schedule, he is the only member of his household listed as an "owner." This household also included Riddle's wife, their five children, and two 26-year-old male tutors.

It may be technically true that only 11% of the whites in the Riddle household were slaveowners, but that number does not reflect the historical reality. Little John Riddle, age 10, owned no slaves, but he expected to inherit them when he grew up, as did his four sisters. Thomas Evans and James Griffen, the two tutors, owned no slaves, but their jobs depended on the Riddle family's continued prosperity. I doubt that they made their own beds or saddled their own horses. Should they be counted as people who did not have a direct connection to slavery? What about David Clark, the 21-year-old who owned no slaves, but whose occupation is listed as "overseer" in the household of Rufus King of Haywood, Tennessee? What about Robert Martin's five non-slaveowning sons (ages 17, 15, 13, 10, and 8) of Abbeville, South Carolina?

In 1901, Samuel French wrote, "let it be known that the Confederate army was not an army of slave owners." Confederate apologists near and far have taken that tidbit and run with it. It turns out not to be entirely true. Some will say that the 37% quoted by Joseph Glatthaar in General Lee's Army is still small, but I would point out to them that Glatthaar is only talking about soldiers who "either owned slaves themselves, or the parents or family members with whom they resided in 1860 owned slaves" (Glatthaar, 468). I'm not sure whether he includes those tutors and overseers, who were not family members in their 1860 households. In any event, it is a logical fallacy to conclude that just because someone didn't own slaves he neither aspired to ownership nor supported the slave system. For more on that, see Masters of Small Worlds on the importance of white male mastery over the private household and dependents. The slave system upheld the independence of all white men, whether they owned slaves or not, and all had a vested interest in keeping it up and running.

P.S. Also, I know that this is going to come up, so I'll nip it in the bud. Yes, some women and some free African-Americans owned slaves. Their numbers don't change my conclusions. Since women who are listed as slaveowners are likely to be heads of households, their inclusion doesn't change the percentages listed in part 2. The number of black slaveowners is very small, certainly too small for it to make sense that 2 of the first 4 Google hits for "Confederate slave owner" are dedicated to the subject. From these preliminary forays into the records, I'd say women make up fewer than 10% of slaveowners (that's an educated guess, not a quote-worthy number) and the largest estimate of black slaveowners I've ever seen is 5,000. Maybe for my next project I'll investigate those numbers. After all, there were fewer than 150 black slaveowners in Charleston in 1860. I've seen the number 3,000 quoted for Louisiana, but the slave schedule makes me a little skeptical. 

Look at this page from Bernard Co., Louisiana (click to enlarge). There are two names in the "Name of Slave Owner" column that belong to black men — "Big James slave" and "Charles slave." They are both listed as being 100+-year-old fugitives who are listed on the last line along with the total number of slave houses on the plantation. I don't think they were really slaveowners, but that's how they're listed. How were these two men counted by the indexers? It's obvious that there were some black slaveowners, but I wonder about the numbers when the census contains ambiguous entries such as these.

The Bloody Shirt

I'm currently listening to the unabridged audio version of Stephen Budiansky's The Bloody Shirt: Terror After Appomattox. I'm ambivalent about it. The prologue had me all psyched up for a ripping expose of reconstruction-era violence, but the rest of the book is falling a bit flat for me.

Most of this book is made up of primary sources (letters, newspaper accounts, journals, etc.). After the prologue, Budiansky steps back, offering very little analysis of his sources. What authorial presence exists takes the form of omniscient narration. The sources are quoted at great length, often in their entirety, and are left to speak for themselves.

I found this style to be more than a little annoying. Budianskyhas found some amazingly revealing documents, but he does not provide much context, leaving the reader wondering whether these anecdotes are universal or local. In addition, Budiansky treats the Northerners who produced much of this material (Adelbert Ames, Albert Morgan, John Dennett, Lewis Merrill, etc.) as neutral observers, rather than as men who were constructing their own narratives. He basically treats them as unbiased reporters of fact, which doesn't do much to help his argument.

But what an argument it is. No one could possibly read the virulent, aggressive, racist words written and spoken by white Southerners and maintain that these were men of honor and character. The documents that Budiansky has assembled are shocking in their brazen contempt for the equality of all citizens, their horror at the idea of freedmen voting, and their hatred for due process in all its forms. These are not hints and subtle, coded messages. The shameless vitriol of the Southern newspaper writers will shock even those readers who were already acquainted with the rhetoric of the period. Budiansky ably demolishes the idea that the KKK and its allies were marginal or honorable by reproducing their indignant arguments against the stirring guarantees of the Declaration of Independence.

One criticism I expect to hear from the few neo-confederates who bother to read this book is that it paints Northerners in an all-to-heroic light. Budiansky is not attempting to take on the issue of racism or anti-equality movements in the North, but that does not mean that the North was a utopia of progressive racial harmony. Since the Northerners in this book are generally abolitionists, progressive reformers, and liberal Republicans who voluntarily traveled to the South in order to guide the process of Reconstruction, they do come out of this looking pretty good. Budiansky acknowledges that there was corruption and incompetence among the military and civilian authorities during Reconstruction, but his main Northern characters call to mind innocent, idealistic college students of the 1960s. I don't think there's anything wrong with making African-American elected officials, white Republicans (including some Southerners, such as James Longstreet), and ordinary freedmen/women the heroes of this story — in fact, I think that that is an angle that is too often undersold. Still, Budiansky's choices may make him vulnerable to attacks by those who choose to ignore his core evidence.

As much as I applaud the aim of this book, there are several things that grated on me. First, even though "colored" and "negro" were considered respectful terms in the 1870s, that doesn't mean that it is appropriate for historians to use them without quotation marks. Second, Budiansky never met a dramatic rhetorical flourish he didn't like. Third, see above complaint about his not being critical of the sources he presents. Fourth, the chapter breaks often seem random. Fifth (audiobook specific complaint), the narrator does voices for all of the different authors, and some of them make me a little uncomfortable because they sound like something out of Song of the South. I think that this is an important piece of work, but I think it might have been better in documentary movie form than in book form.

I disagree with William Grimes of the New York Times, who thinks that the myth of the oppressed South "surely expired a generation ago." It's probably true that academics no longer ascribe to a narrative of Yankee tyranny, but this book is not written for academics. The old idea that white Southerners were a noble people who were outrageously abused and harassed during reconstruction still thrives in the public imagination, and the value of Budiansky's work lies in its relentless presentation of an alternative narrative in which freedmen and their Republican allies are the true heroes of Reconstruction.

Internet Jackass Theatre

Over at Civil War Memory, Kevin draws our attention to a "Big Ass Confederate Flag" being erected on the side of a highway in Florida. Quite rightly, he points out that a group like the SCV, which purports to be educational and celebratory, could probably spend their money on better projects than the erection of a gigantic middle finger along the side of the road.

Lest we harbor any illusions about who supports this project, allow me to present a few of the comments from the St. Petersburg Times website:

I fully support the display of any Confederate Flag as a reminder of the Yankee armies invading the Southern people's homeland. The states had every right to seceed from the union. Lincoln's greatest concern was collecting his "cotton tax".
- "West"

Gorgeous. I can't wait to see it ! Why is this whole slavery crap revisionist stuff always trotted out when this topic comes up. This flag is about MY Southern heritage. My blood. Too many are brainwashed or gutless to challenge this indoctrination.
- "John-Kiwi"

The confederate stands for a southern uprising against the tyrannist north of the time. The North tried to control the southern states and tell them where and to whom they could sell their export. Race only entered when the north was losing.
- "Jared"

God bless the boys in gray! It's shameful that everyone in America is allowed to be proud of thier heritage except for those of us who are decended from the valiant Confederate soldiers. The NAACP has made the confederate flag "racial". Deo Vindice!
- "Jesse"

To be fair, plenty of people commented and called these jerks out.

It is important to read these comments because, for many people, it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that those who want to fly the Confederate flag* are really only interested in honoring their ancestors. The whole "Heritage, Not Hate" campaign is carefully calculated to make the public display of this hateful symbol palatable. Even I fell for it — when I was a freshman in high school, I wrote a 25-page paper for my Civics class about how the administration shouldn't have suspended a kid for wearing a Stars and Bars t-shirt.

While individual people may indeed be well-meaning, the display of the Confederate flag* is an intrinsically political act — and its politics are racist, segregationist, and retrograde. This flag has been a familiar symbol since the time of the war, but it was only during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s that it began to be displayed in such a prominent, public, "f-you" sort of way.

We should read comments like those on the St. Petersburg Times' website to remind ourselves that this type of racism is alive and well in America. Remember it any time CNN or your local newspaper expresses shock at racism in the current presidential campaign or uses words like "resurface" or "reemerge" or the odious "postracial" that imply that racism died out at some time.

Of course, racism exists in many forms, of which the dumbass, slavery-denying variety is merely the most quotable. Racism, like sexism, is part of our daily lives in America, and any impression that easily-recognizable flare-ups are some sort of aberration results from a privileged ability to deny quotidian examples (see Melissa McEwan for more — she says it better than I can).

Being reflective about my own privilege and trying to recognize how it works in my life are constant projects for me, as they are for many (but not enough) people. I don't think that "West" and "John-Kiwi" really overburden themselves with similar concerns. Is there a way to clue them in? I don't know. Any discussion of privilege, even if you're only talking to yourself, is intensely uncomfortable, and I'm not sure how to reach across the aisle without seeming like an enemy.

*The "Confederate flag," is, of course, the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia, not the Confederate national flag. Why isn't the SCV erecting one of the many versions of the latter? I think it's because they secretly hate the Army of the Tennessee.
I once saw a Confederate reenactor proudly flying what he thought was the First National Flag of the CSA from his truckbed at an event in Virginia. It was actually the Puerto Rican flag. I didn't tell him.

Poe's Law

I'm sure I've asked this before, but I'll ask again: Is there a Poe's Law corollary for neo-Confederates?

Recently, the Florida Times-Union ran a story about Bobby Tillet, a BJ's Wholesale Club employee whose bosses told him he could either remove the stars and bars from his truck or park it somewhere outside their lot. There's a lot of bloviating about "freedom of speech," but at least the article manages to quote someone from the ACLU who helpfully points out that BJ's is not an agency of the federal government and is thus not bound by the first amendment.

There has been some predictable reaction to this story in the Times-Union's "Rants & Raves" section, in which loyal readers rehash their predictable and blockheaded arguments.

Tuesday, 5/27:

This is concerning the article with the fellow having the Confederate flag flying from his truck. I think it's wrong that they singled him out and made him move his truck to another location. I will never shop at BJ's again. Where's the right of freedom of speech and freedom of expression? It's OK if blacks wear a shirt showing (Malcolm-X) or they wear clothing Fubu (for us by us) ... Yet somebody wants to show the Confederate battle flag and they're racist. What's really racist is NAACP, the black college fund, the black college spring break and Black Miss America. They're racist! Until those people change their ways, there will always be divisiveness.

Thursday, 5/29:

I want to give the Times-Union a huge rave for displaying the Confederate flag. Living here in the South, that shows me a time when people were kind and gentle, and worked hard for what they got. They didn't take from others. It was a much more genteel time. People showed respect for each other. It was gaiety instead of the constant sorrows and negativity . . . For the person who said he was canceling his subscription, I'm making up for it by calling in for a subscription.

Bachelor #1 just sounds like some jackass 14-year-old, but I call Poe's Law corollary on the second author. Not even the most delusional Lost Causer could come up with that "they didn't take from others" line.

Confederate Monumental Landscape: Placement

In addition to their style and their dedicators’ stated intentions, the location of monuments is important for interpreting their meaning. The Confederate monuments at Gettysburg were deliberately placed in their current locations in order to further a pro-Confederate telling of the story of the battle of Gettysburg. That these monuments were erected at Gettysburg rather than at Manassas, Vicksburg, or Appomattox is itself significant. Furthermore, each monument’s placement at its specific location on the battlefield is calculated to support a heroic Confederate narrative by freezing the imagined landscape of the battle at the dramatic moment of greatest possibility. Visitors’ experiences of the battlefield is profoundly shaped by the placement of monuments, and that placement tells a particular story.

In some ways, Gettysburg is a strange place for Confederate memorials. After all, communities generally prefer to commemorate their proudest moments rather than their embarrassments or defeats: Lexington and Concord rather than New York, San Juan Hill rather than Manila, D-Day rather than Hiroshima. Although Southern states erected monuments at other battlefield sites during the 20th century, many erected their most spectacular memorials at Gettysburg and no other battle site can boast monuments commemorating every Confederate state. Undoubtedly, some Southerners’ interest in building monuments at Gettysburg sprung from a practical desire to present their version of history to the greatest possible number of visitors at the country’s most popular Civil War site. In addition, by the early twentieth century, Gettysburg had become a national shrine to reunification and industrial-age might with a focus on military glory that “eclipsed the fundamental issues of race and freedom that propelled the war and continued to linger” (Weeks, 83).

The Confederate defeat at Gettysburg also occupied a special place in the mythology of the Lost Cause. In the years following the war, veterans and historians searching for explanations for the South’s defeat pinpointed Gettysburg as a crucial turning point in the war. Confederate sympathizers rushed to exonerate their beloved General Lee from any wrongdoing, eventually pinning most of the blame for the Confederacy’s defeat on General Longstreet’s supposed blunders during the second day’s fight, which necessitated the calamitous charge on the third.

According to many Confederate veterans and apologists, the loss at Gettysburg was a blow from which the Confederacy could not recover. Though most modern historians identify other factors – including the implosion of the slave-labor system, rampant desertion, and the collapse of support from Southern civilians – as the true causes of the Confederacy’s eventual demise, “elevating Gettysburg to mythical status” allowed Confederate sympathizers to “[explain] the loss of the war as a whole in a more palatable way” (Nolan, 23).

After deciding that Gettysburg was an appropriate place to honor the Confederacy, state monument committees had to choose specific sites for their memorials. These decisions were anything but straightforward, owing to the battlefield’s immense size, the dispersal of a single state’s troops among several different divisions and corps, and the historical fact of troop movements over the course of the three-day battle. How could the state of North Carolina possibly honor the men of the 23rd North Carolina, who suffered 84% casualties on July 1st in an assault northwest of the town, and the men of the 26th North Carolina, who were decimated during Pickett’s Charge on July 3rd, with a single, stationary monument?*

Monument committees could not place markers at sites that were significant only to one or a few regiments without slighting others, so they erected their monuments at places that they believed would be significant for all. New York placed its state monument in the Gettysburg National Cemetery; Pennsylvania chose the geographic center of the Union battle line; all eleven ex-Confederate states chose Seminary Ridge.

The Gettysburg battlefield is generally described as two opposing ridges, Seminary and Cemetery Ridge, which run parallel, about a mile apart, for several miles South of the town of Gettysburg. Cemetery Ridge is flanked by hills: Cemetery and Culp’s Hill to the North and Little and Big Round Top to the South. Excluding the first day’s battle, which was fought in the town and to its northwest, the two ridges form the defining topographical features of the battlefield. After the fighting on July 1st, the Army of the Potomac took up their famous “Fish Hook” position along Cemetery Ridge and dug in. On July 2nd, Confederate forces attacked the hills on both Union flanks, but were repulsed and fell back to Seminary Ridge. From this position, Lee ordered Pickett’s disastrous charge on July 3rd. The Confederate monuments form a mile-long line on Seminary Ridge, approximating the Confederate line of battle in the early afternoon of July 3rd, just before Pickett’s Charge was launched and lost.

By placing their monuments along Seminary Ridge, Confederate monument committees enshrined the mythology of Pickett’s Charge as the “high water mark of the Confederacy.” The idea that Pickett’s Charge marked the beginning of the end for the Confederacy is a central tenet of Lost Cause mythology, and the moments preceding the charge occupy a prominent place in the neo-Confederate imagination. In his 1998 book, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, Tony Horwitz describes reading the following passage from William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust (1948) to a group of Confederate reenactors as they prepared to recreate the doomed charge:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are loaded and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out . . . it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances . . . yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed even a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.

This fantasy had “lingered in the Southern imagination” long before the Confederate monuments were constructed, but their placement embodies the reverie, giving pilgrims a destination and firing the imaginations of visitors.

The position of the Confederate monuments also supports the curious fiction of the two armies’ physical separation during the battle. Although a few Confederate markers denote the point of farthest advance at the Angle, most Confederate monuments were erected far from any Union monuments. Union regiments such as the 72nd Pennsylvania and 20th Maine placed their memorials near the places that saw the fiercest fighting, but the monumental landscape bears little indication that Confederates also fought in those places.

On Little Round Top, the 20th Maine fought against men from Alabama, but, although the 20th Maine monument sits near “the spot where the colors stood,” the Alabama state monument is over a mile and a half away. Many sections of the battlefield that lie beyond the Union “Fish Hook,” including the Wheatfield, Devil’s Den, and the Peach Orchard, are littered with dozens of Union monuments, but they are unopposed by Confederate memorials. The 114th Pennsylvania commemorated their desperate fight around the Sherfy farm by erecting their monument a few feet from the Sherfy’s front door, while a monument on faraway Seminary Ridge honors the Mississippians who opposed them.

Though Union veterans undoubtedly wished to draw attention to their role as active combatants by placing their monuments at these sites, the absence of adversaries ultimately supports a history of reconciliation, in which Union and Confederate soldiers never get close enough to stab or maim one another.

The most recent Confederate monuments reflect the enduring resonance of both the Pickett’s Charge mythology and the reconciliation narrative. Two, the General Longstreet equestrian statue (1998, image at right via justmecpb) and the 11th Mississippi monument (2000), are located on Seminary Ridge among the Confederate state monuments. Two others, the Maryland state monument (1994) and the “Friend to Friend” memorial (1993) are removed from the most active parts of the battlefield; the former stands in a small plaza near the old visitor’s center parking lot, the latter is the centerpiece of the WWII annex of the Gettysburg National Cemetery.

While the two Seminary Ridge monuments merely contribute to the established monumental landscape there, the Maryland and Masonic monuments are part of an expanding effort to commemorate the battle by emphasizing mutual aid and suffering with monuments placed in locations that visitors do not generally associate with fierce fighting.**

Other monuments that contribute to this reconciliationist landscape are the Elizabeth Thorn Memorial (2002, image at left via), which honors the women of Gettysburg, and the Amos Humiston monument (1993), dedicated to a Union soldier whose mangled body was identified when a burial detail found a picture of his children in his hand and published it in newspapers across the North.*** By shifting their attention from military valor to the trauma that soldiers and civilians shared, the growing 21st-century monumental landscape characterizes the battle as a national calamity similar to September 11th or a massive natural disaster, in which Americans banded together to overcome a tragedy that they seemingly had no hand in causing. In the coming years, we might expect to see new monuments erected at ostensibly neutral sites, such as the locations of field hospitals, in and around Gettysburg.

It is easy to glean meaning from sculptural forms and the words that are spoken over them, but most of Gettysburg’s visitors pass over monument placement without a second thought. At most, some might wonder why a monument to Confederate sailors or to the last surviving Union veteran, Albert Woolson (d. 1956), neither of whom fought at Gettysburg, were erected on this particular battlefield.

Still, the position of monuments influences the visitor’s experience and his or her historical imagination. When the principal Confederate monuments stand along the edge of the field immortalized by Pickett’s Charge instead of near Culp’s Hill or Little Round Top, they elevate the failed assault’s importance in service of the “High Water Mark” narrative. The physical distance between Confederate and Union monuments subtly deflects attention from the bloody reality of battle by separating the combatants and glorifying each side’s deeds without necessarily impugning the valor of the other. In recent years, efforts to extend the monumental landscape into putatively neutral spaces with explicitly reconciliationist sculptures have begun to temper the battlefield’s military focus, but without really challenging the older landscape’s values.

“Monuments attempt to mold a landscape of collective memory, to conserve what is worth remembering and discard the rest,” writes Kirk Savage in Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves. At Gettysburg, the Confederate monumental landscape has preserved and elaborated on the mythology of the Lost Cause for the benefit of generations of 20th- and 21st-century visitors. Over the course of the 20th century, pro-Confederate memorialists have presented the Confederacy and its cause through images of heroic and suffering soldiers that elicit visceral, emotional responses in ways that the stiff, formal, and, in many cases, funerary sculpture of the Union monumental landscape does not. Is it any wonder that young visitors often feel drawn to the Confederate side, preferring to identify with the heroic underdogs of those awe-inspiring monuments rather than with the stolid and formulaic Union?

Despite the efforts of academic historians to challenge the foundations of the Lost Cause mythology, more Americans experience the Civil War through interactions with the monuments at Gettysburg than by reading an academic text, and the Lost Cause remains central to American historical memory. Rather than diminishing in power over the years, the central tenets of the Lost Cause have been packaged in more palatable forms and preserved. It is difficult to oppose the construction of monuments such as the “Friend-to-Friend” memorial, which is not blatantly offensive in any way. Still, the trajectory of the monumental landscape at Gettysburg suggests that future monuments will continue to represent Confederate soldiers as sympathetic and continue the “urgent” project of “dissociat[ing] the Confederacy from slavery” (Savage, 131). For now, at least, the only mention of any “new birth of freedom” at the battlefield will remain hidden away in the darkened room that houses the original copy of the Gettysburg Address.

*The 26th North Carolina marched into battle on July 1st with 843 officers and men. Of these, only 70 remained alive and unwounded three days later, a casualty rate of 92%. See Earl Hess, Lee's Tar Heels: The Pettigrew-Kirkland-McRae Brigade, 153.
**Of course, the battle of Gettysburg raged through all parts of the town, so it impossible to draw a sharp distinction between the town and the battlefield. Nevertheless, certain parts of the battlefield, including the Angle, Little Round Top, and the fields to the northwest of town belong to the National Park Service, and are considered to be “the battlefield.” The monuments discussed here are located in developed areas of the town of Gettysburg, near hotels, shops, and restaurants. Though there was fighting in these areas, visitors generally experience them as places to sleep, shop, and eat, not as battle sites.
***Elizabeth Thorn was the wife of the caretaker of the Evergreen Cemetery in Gettysburg. Six months pregnant during the battle, she personally buried approximately one hundred soldiers in the following weeks. Her statue stands just inside the entrance to the Evergreen Cemetery. Isbell, 136.
Amos Humiston, a sergeant in the 154th New York, was killed on July 1, 1863. When his body was recovered by a burial detail after the battle, the only identifying document they could find was a photograph of Humiston’s three children, 8-year old Franklin, 6-year-old Alice, and 4-year-old Frederick. On October 19, 1863, the Philadelphia Inquirer published the photograph under the headline, “Whose Father Was He?” The story was reprinted in many newspapers, and Humiston’s wife, Philinda, eventually recognized the photograph. The tragic story of the Humiston children became a fundraising cause throughout the North, and so much money was donated that the Humistons built a house for war orphans in Gettysburg after the war. see Mark Dunkelman, Gettysburg’s Unknown Soldier: The Life, Death, and Celebrity of Amos Humiston, (Greenwood Publishing, 1999).

Confederate Monumental Landscape: Argument

On a clear June day in 1917, Confederate veteran Leigh Robinson looked out across the fields of Gettysburg and addressed over 2,000 of his fellow veterans, government officials, and interested onlookers. They had gathered together to dedicate a new monument to the Virginians who fought on that field in 1863, the first of many monuments that would commemorate the valor of men from each of the eleven Confederate states. For over two hours, Robinson spoke on a wide range of topics, from the Constitution to the life of Robert E. Lee to the works of Plutarch. At every turn, Robinson defended the Confederate soldiers and their cause against imagined aspersions cast against them:

There is a voice which says: All this heroism was “ghastly error;” heroism for a cause which was intrinsically false — false to the rights of man. They who so speak think all too lightly of a cause hallowed by such sacrifice. In memorials, like the present, is felt the refutation of the charge. There are things too high, too deep, too appealing to the genuine grace of sympathy, for memory to be other than a shrine (source).

For Robinson, as for millions of Americans who visit the Virginia monument every year, the Confederate memorial landscape at Gettysburg affirmed a belief that the Confederate cause was worthy because it was consecrated with the blood of courageous men. Over the course of the twentieth century, Southern states, memorial societies, and Civil War enthusiasts erected over a dozen additional monuments to Confederate valor at Gettysburg, enshrining the mythology of the Lost Cause at America’s most famous and most visited Civil War site.

Unlike the Union monuments at Gettysburg, which often commemorate a single regiment or individual, nearly all of the Confederate monuments are dedicated to the men of an entire state. Only four individual Confederate regiments have their own monuments at Gettysburg, and only one of those was erected prior to 1985.* Each of the eleven ex-Confederate states erected a monument at Gettysburg between 1917 and 1982, and several border states, including Kentucky and Maryland, dedicated their monuments to both Union and Confederate soldiers. These thirteen monuments, along with the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument and a handful of other, smaller markers, form a monumental landscape that is distinct from its Union counterpart in style, intention, and physical placement.

Whereas the Union monumental landscape was a project of the nineteenth century directed mostly by veterans, the Confederate landscape is a twentieth-century creation. By the time the Virginia monument was erected in 1917, few Confederate veterans were alive to attend its dedication, and fewer still survived until the second state monument was dedicated by North Carolina in 1929. While Union monuments on the field marked the position of Northern regiments, the monuments erected by the grandsons and granddaughters of the Confederacy were more concerned with shaping the memory and controlling the meaning of their ancestors’ actions. In their style and form, the Confederate monuments tell a tale of heroic valor, desperate suffering, and unsurpassed glory. In inscriptions and dedication speeches, the builders of these monuments made their intention to support a pro-Confederate history of the battle and of the war explicit. In their placement at Gettysburg, the monuments stand as “sentinels of stone,” protecting and promulgating the mythology of the Lost Cause.

“[T]he Lost Cause was expressly a rationalization, a cover-up,” writes historian Alan T. Nolan in his essay, “The Anatomy of the Myth.” In the years following the Civil War, Confederate veterans and their sympathizers attempted to justify the Confederacy’s actions by rewriting the history of the war. This revision involved several key tenets, including idealizing Southern soldiers as “heroic, indefatigable, gallant, and law-abiding,” vilifying the North as meddlesome, heartless, and immoral, and trivializing the role of slavery as a cause for sectional conflict. By the early twentieth century, the mythology of the Lost Cause had come to dominate the nation’s memory of the Civil War. In movies, children’s stories, and academic histories, Confederates were portrayed as chivalric defenders of a noble, but doomed, way of life.

Equally important is the narrative of reconciliation, which holds that the resolution of the military conflict put to rest all of the concerns that had originally sparked the war and that reunification reaffirmed the bonds that tied white, Christian, native-born Americans to one another and to their nation.

The Confederate monuments at Gettysburg support the claims of the Lost Cause mythology by presenting heroic, slave-free images of Confederate soldiers to the battlefield’s millions of visitors. Although most professional historians now recognize the Lost Cause as an egregious distortion of nineteenth-century history, the story presented by the Confederate monumental landscape continues to influence the public’s memory of the Civil War.

*The 2nd Maryland Volunteer Infantry (C.S.A.) erected a small granite monument on Culp’s Hill in 1886. Monuments honoring the 26th and 43rd North Carolina Infantry regiments were dedicated in 1985 and a monument to the 11th Mississippi went up in 2000. For more info on monuments, check out Virtual Gettysburg, which has a wonderful, free, searchable database (with pictures!).

Confederate Monumental Landscape

I recently finished a research paper on the Confederate monumental landscape at Gettysburg. I enjoyed writing it and my professor was encouraging, so I may try to turn it into something publishable.

My central argument was that the Confederate monuments at Gettysburg are specifically designed to preserve the mythology of the Lost Cause by presenting it to 20th and 21st century. I built this argument by examining three aspects of the Confederate monumental landscape: placement (where monuments are located), style/form (what monuments look like), and literate sources (inscriptions and dedication addresses).

In addition to the three major sections, I included an introductory section about the Union monumental landscape at Gettysburg so that I could compare the two at various points. One important difference between the Union and Confederate monuments at Gettysburg is that the vast majority of the former were erected by veterans during the 1880s and 1890s, while almost all of the later were built by veterans' descendants during the 20th century. While Union monuments generally commemorate the actions of Northern soldiers at the battle of Gettysburg, Confederate monuments attempt to offer commentary on the causes and meaning of the war.

I will post some modified sections of this paper here over the next few days. If you have any suggestions, please leave them in the comments. This project is in its infancy, and I know there are a lot of knowledgeable people out there, so any tips, counterarguments, or suggestions would be most welcome.

(Louisiana monument photo via)

UPDATE:
Here are the other posts:
Part I: Argument
Part II: Union Monuments
Part III: Style
Part IV: Literate Sources
Part V: Placement

Retouching History

(Images in this post via unless otherwise noted.)

If you are in the mood for a little righteous anger this morning, head over to RetouchingHistory.org, where Jerome Handler and Michael Tuite have documented a disturbing example of how some Confederate sympathizers have used Photoshop to distort documents relating to the service of African-Americans in the Civil War. (Also check out Handler and Tuite's other project, "The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record.")

The above image was widely distributed as a recruitment tool and is based on a photograph of African-American federal troops taken in Philadelphia around 1864:
There are several details that confirm that these are Union soldiers. First, the white officer is clearly dressed in a US Army uniform. Second, several of the soldiers are wearing US belt buckles and eagle breast plates, the former most visible on the sixth private from the left, the latter on the bearded soldier at center-right. Third, they are wearing Union insignia, including company letters and infantry horn insignia, on their forage caps (see the fifth private from the left).

But wait, I thought that Union soldiers wore dark blue. Why are their coats so light?
Behold, the Union military-issue great coat:

Ok, so we've shown pretty conclusively that these are UNION soldiers. But hey, if you crop out the officer, blur the insignia, add some misleading text, you get the first and only photograph of the fabled 1st Louisiana Native Guard, CSA!
After that, make some prints, slap it on a website, and all of your neo-Confederate friends can pat themselves on the back, knowing that the South was always more righteous than the North and the war had nothing to do with slavery.