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.

Lost Cause Nostalgia Again

Tami at What Tami Said offers a trenchant critique of the pop-country band Lady Antebellum that may be of interest to some readers (cross-posted at Racialicious).

Though it sounds like Lady Antebellum's Lost Cause Nostalgia doesn't extend much beyond its appellation, I'm glad to see other people calling out the casual romanticization of the antebellum South. This is not a case of over-the-top neoconfederate fantasy like Gods and Generals, but it's important to recognize that casual references that idealize the antebellum South are a symptom of something fairly odious. It's easy to laugh at something as epically ridiculous as Mary Fahl's Going Home, but Lady Antebellum might slip under the radar.


I love this video. Seriously, try to keep a straight face past the 2:15 marker. It gets me every time.

Lost Cause Nostalgia

One night, when I was in high school, I babysat for my siblings while my parents went to see the Tony-nominated musical/concert, "The Civil War." My mom and dad are massive Civil War buffs — they went to Gettysburg for their honeymoon — with a particular interest in Civil War music, so they were pretty excited about seeing this show.
They came home spluttering.

Besides the overall dreadfulness of the show in terms of music and lyrics (detailed in delightful pans here, here, and here), they were highly offended by the content. My mom could not stop raging over a nurse's song called, "I Never Knew His Name," in which the nurse repeatedly expresses her gratitude for not knowing the names of the dying so that she can retain emotional distance. Of course, real Civil War nurses were desperate to find out soldiers' names in order to notify families and give the dead proper burials (see This Republic of Suffering). My mom, who was in the midst of editing a Civil War nurse's letters, was beside herself.

Then there was the whole slavery issue. Apparently, this show decided to take the "everyone is equally brave, so who cares about moral questions" approach. Yes, there are slaves in the show, but they are this oddly estranged third party who stand around passively hoping for freedom. The production is heavy on uplifting songs called "Someday" and "River Jordan," but light on connecting slavery to the Confederacy or acknowledging black men's and women's roles in securing their own freedom.

I recently came across the soundtrack of this monstrosity and was quite shocked by it. I had remembered that it was bad, but not this bad.

In particular, one song — "Virginia" — made me queasy. Sung in the voice of a Confederate soldier, this maudlin crapfest is as bald a celebration of the antebellum south as you're likely to find on iTunes. Sample lyrics:

There was a time, a time of splendor and grace
When the world moved by at a kinder pace.
There was a land, a land to pleasure the eyes
Where the old was new and the foolish wise [wtf?].

Truly awful stuff, all wrapped in cotton candy and run through a synthesizer.

My one question was whether there is a degree of plausible deniability in the fact that this is sung by a Confederate soldier. Unlike the odious "Going Home" from Gods and Generals,* which adopts the voice of a modern viewer yearning for the antebellum Elysium, "Virginia" is presented as the sincere nostalgia of an historical actor. Of course, he is a sympathetic character whose highly selective vision of his homeland is supposed to touch the audience, so the distinction only goes so far. There are no cues in the show suggesting that we should regard this character's ideas as unfortunate, problematic, or racist.

After seeing a post on Civil War art over at Civil War Memory, I decided to make a video combining this terrible song with Lost Cause imagery. If you can make it through the first two minutes, I added some commentary near the end.


p.s. I was going to make a parody video of "Going Home," but nothing could be more hilarious than this serious video, starting around 2:15:


*Why do I hate "Going Home"? 
Simple: it conflates the antebellum south with heaven. You might even think that the song is about heaven if not for the lines,

I know in my bones
I've been here before,
The ground feels the same,
Though the land's been torn.

A close reading of this passage strongly supports the idea that she's talking about the south, a place where the "land's been torn" by the war. If you still think that this song is about heaven or going "into the West," check out the actual beginning of Gods and Generals, where this song is immediately preceded by the following quotation:

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead. —George Eliot

It is then followed by a three-and-a-half-hour Jackson hagiography.

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.

Lee as Christ

"Trinity"
by Clyde Broadway
Ogden Museum of Southern Art

I love this painting. With its allusions to Latin American religious icons, its succinct encapsulation of white Southern cultural identity, and its commentary on the relationship between history and myth, this is a striking and witty piece. At least, that's how I'm interpreting it. Is there a Poe's law corollary for neo-Confederates?

As I've been researching my paper on Confederate monuments, I keep running into Lee-as-Christ imagery. Here are a few choice words from Confederate Veteran Leigh Robinson's speech at the 1917 dedication of the Virginia monument at Gettysburg:

At the crisis of federal history, and of [Lee's] own, two crowns were offered to him, the crown of gold and the crow of thorns. He lifted the latter to his brow, and never was heard from him a murmur against the destiny of duty. Every gift of fortune had been showered on him, but he was greater than the gifts. Every blow of adversity was rained upon him, but he was greater than the blows.

It's not just Lee who is Christ-like — for Robinson, the whole Southern cause can be understood as a persecuted, yet gentle, savior:

It is my cherished faith that what is true of Lee is true of the cause we served, which pierced with wounds for us is sacred; and crowned with thorns for us is holy.

And, of course, for every Jesus, there is a Pontius Pilate:

Few things could be more sardonic than the crucifixion of Virginia by New England, with the approbation of Old England, for the sin of slavery.

And what of slavery, that most benevolent of institutions?

If the service of the slave had been compulsory, it was a compulsion which had liberated from degradation. The white man by his works had said to the black man at his back: "Brought to me by others as you have been, it is my part to afford the discipline, which, of yourselves, you are unable to acquire. The universe abandons you. I will protect and direct."

Yes, that's exactly how it happened.

The deeper I get into this Lost Cause stuff, the creepier it gets.

Confederate Apologists

I found a new blog today when I was rumbling around the tubes searching for more information on Lost Cause commemoration, Confederate Memorial Day, etc.: Michael C. Hardy's North Carolina and the Civil War.

Hardy is a thoughtful, well-meaning Confederate apologist, which is the kind that fascinates me most. He is earnestly devoted to preserving "Southern Heritage" and honoring soldiers who fought for the Confederacy. Of course, that means ignoring the nasty bits like slavery, patriarchy, and coercion. A search on his blog for the word "slave" is revealing: as of today at 3 pm, there are 272 posts about North Carolina and the Civil War on this blog and exactly 6 of them contain the words "slave" or "slavery." Of the six posts that mention slaves,

• one complains that there are few interpretive markers at the North Carolina state capitol, and that "the few markers present are devoted to African-Americans"
• one describes a loyal slave who brought his master's body back from Gettysburg
• one is made up of quotes from 1860-1 describing reactions to secession
  
• one is a post entitled "Happy 200th Birthday, Robert E. Lee" and mentions Lee's slaves, but goes on to declare, "his entire life is an example that should be emulated. In a day and age when we need heroes, when we need people to look up to, Lee should be one of those men who command our attention."
  
• two chronicle that most elusive of apologist canards: the black Confederate soldier.

It would be beyond tedious for me to go through all six posts that mention slavery (let alone the 266 that don't), so I will confine my comments to the insidious myth of the black Confederate.

Some may argue that "myth" is an inappropriate word here. By "myth," I do not mean to imply that there were absolutely no African-Americans or Native Americans who fought for the Confederacy. There undoubtedly were a few.

Rather, the myth of the black Confederate reads something like this: during the Civil War, over 50,000 slaves and free black men served as soldiers in the Confederate army, which PROVES that the South wasn't racist, and, by the way, the North was racist too!
*Please note, this is NOT a quote from Mr. Hardy - I'll get back to him in a minute.*

First, the claim that 50,000 (or more - these guys say 100,000, this guy says "at least 100,000") African-Americans fought as soldiers for the CSA is flat-out bullshit. Many, many slaves worked for Confederate troops in service capacities and as manual laborers/drivers/gravediggers, etc., but many of them ran to Union lines as soon as they could (many bringing valuable information with them). Saner heads have found that, at most, a few hundred African-Americans may have fought on the Confederate side. Which, incidentally, is about the number of female soldiers who were able to join the army by dressing as men.

Second, the idea that finding black soldiers who fought for the Confederacy would prove that the war was not about slavery is silly. The war was about slavery. It was not necessary a war for emancipation, but saying it wasn't about slavery is unfathomable. Don't take my word for it - just ask Confederates circa 1861. Regardless of how many people of color may have fought, the idea that the war was not about slavery is a pillar of the post-war myth of the Lost Cause.

Third, lots of Confederate apologists like to stick in a gotcha: The North was racist too! Thing is, you'll find no argument here. The North was horribly racist - hell, even abolitionists were paternalistic, condescending racists. I fail to see how this makes the war less about slavery.

All of this is a lot of lead up to say something very simple: Michael C. Hardy is not a wild-eyed crazy person. It is easy to dismiss people who say insane things, but the myth of the Lost Cause does not always come wrapped in the Stars and Bars. From what I have read on his blog, Hardy is a considerate, well-intentioned person who is interested in research, history, and honoring his forebears. Still, he is not at all interested in slavery and posts information about black Confederates on his blog without commenting on the history of this debate.

The problem is that Hardy's vision of the Confederacy is a gentler, more reasonable version of the insidious Lost Cause ideology. When our focus is on honoring the men who fought and died, no doubt bravely, without ever really grappling with what they were fighting for, we don't learn anything. When we implicitly deny the horror of slavery and the continual betrayal of African-Americans during and after the war, we are setting ourselves up to accept racist fantasies in the present. When we fawn over Southern leaders like Lee and Jackson as models of American manhood, what we are really doing is yearning for a white, Christian, patriarchal past in which women and slaves knew their places and real men were subordinate only to God.

I realize that everyone has interests and doesn't necessarily have time to explore all of the problems that attend those interests. I don't have a problem with Michael Hardy if he wants to write primarily about military history. Still, his blog is a reminder of how the soft power of the Lost Cause myth continues to inhabit our mental landscapes.