Reflections on monuments

As a Virginian with pretty deep roots in the state and more than a few Confederate ancestors, I get the emotional attachment to Confederate monuments. Growing up they were a source of pride to me. I was raised to revere that part of my personal heritage and until I went to college, nobody really suggested there was any reason to feel otherwise. The Confederacy, I was taught, was only peripherally concerned with protecting slavery. My ancestors were really only concerned with protecting their “way of life” from outsiders bent on forcing them to go in directions they did not wish to go. So, what was there to be concerned about… that was certainly a noble enough cause, right?

So taken and fascinated was I in that rather idyllic past, I decided to become a History major and make that my life, going on to earn a Master’s and a Ph.D. in the field with the Civil War era and the Southern History as my particular areas of interest. I chose the University of Mississippi for my doctoral work, in part, because it boasted the Center for the Study of Southern Culture. It was as a graduate student at James Madison and later Ole Miss that objective study of the past significantly altered, as higher education will do when one is open to it, my perceptions and understanding of the Confederate past. My past.

What I discovered, upon reading the records of the past and letting those who lived at that time speak to me, was that I had been more than a little naïve taking at face value that defending the “Southern way of life” was only peripherally related to defending slavery. I so wanted that to be the case, but the objective evidence from the period kept intruding and challenging what I “knew” to be true. At the end of the day, and after much difficult reflection, there was no alternative for a true historian (and I like to think of myself as such) but to conclude that secession and the birth of the Confederate States of America, much as I’d always hoped it did not, rested on the protecting and perpetuating slavery and white supremacy.

How I came to that admittedly painful, if undeniable, conclusion is through the words of the leaders themselves, the men who were voted to their positions by the citizens of their states & crafted the secession ordinances explaining to the world the reason for their leaving to hopefully forge a new republic… clearly a slaveholders’ republic it turned out. In South Carolina they made it clear that they had to sever their connections from a people to the north “whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery.” How, they asked in their ordinance, could they remain in the Union with people who “have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery.” The people of Georgia were quite clear that they had to leave because, “For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding… States with reference to the subject of African slavery.” Mississippi made it about as blunt as they could have in their ordinance when their leaders said, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” Going further, they said that upon the election of a Republican president, “There was no choice left but submission to the mandates of abolition, or dissolution of the Union….”

Going along with the protection of slavery, was the stark openness that protecting white supremacy was also at the heart of the movement to create the Confederate States of America. Texas could not have made it more clear when its ordinance of secession proclaimed:  “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.” And in March of 1861 the Vice President of the Confederacy explained in a very public speech that was greeted with loud applause at the time and reprinted throughout the Confederacy that Northern attacks on slavery were, “the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.” And he went on to say that Founders like Jefferson were certainly well-meaning, but quite mistaken, when they said that slavery was a problem they hoped would be dispensed with at some future time. The problem was that the Founders, Stephens argued, harbored a flawed assumption of equality of races, which he said was “fundamentally wrong.” Stephens proudly said that: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Then there was how the Confederacy prosecuted the war. When the United States determined it would permit African Americans to serve in the army, the Richmond government refused to recognize black soldiers as eligible for POW exchange on an equal footing with white prisoners under the official exchange cartel between the two belligerents. During the 1864 Overland Campaign General Grant reached out to Lee to offer a prisoner exchange. Lee’s response was that he was certainly willing for humanitarian reasons, but that he could not exchange black soldiers as per his government’s position on that particular subject. Unfortunately for the prisoners on both sides, Grant also stuck to his government’s position that soldiers would be treated equally regardless of color or there would be no POW exchanges. Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin Staton were quite clear about that… all soldiers wearing the US uniform would be treated the same way in the field. When captured, black soldiers were routinely enslaved or forced into labor on Confederate defensive works. Tragically, however, on more than one occasion, most famously at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, black soldiers were gunned down rather than taken as prisoners.

Monuments to the Confederacy, like the one getting so much local attention, are not “historical markers.” They were erected, and have been maintained, to honor and celebrate the Confederate past, not merely document that it happened. And, as I said at the beginning of this letter, I understand the emotional attachment. I grew up with it myself. But the reality is that continuing to protect public monuments to a cause rooted in the protection and perpetuation of racial slavery and whose “cornerstone” was the belief in the natural inferiority of black people is simply not defensible in this day and age.

That’s not “political correctness” or my “interpretation.” It’s simple objective reality from someone with 3 degrees in the subject, a number of scholarly publications in the field, and over 20 years’ experience teaching this time period at the college level… and someone from here with his own Confederate heritage. So I don’t offer this in any way as an indictment of anyone’s feelings or to condemn anyone’s ancestors. I merely wish to lay before people, as I do my own students, the objective historical record in hopes that it has the effect of encouraging people to see the past and make decisions based on the facts rather than emotion.

Dr. Jay Gillispie
Dean: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
Lord Fairfax Community College