While every soldier has his reasons for marching off to war, governments always decide the cause of that war. In the case of the Confederate government, the casus belli (its reason to justify war) for the American Civil War was, beyond a doubt, the continuation of slavery. The ways in which white Southerners remembered the conflict either downplayed slavery as the central cause or reinforced their notion that slavery had been a benign institution.
As a result, Confederate monuments sprung up across the South as white terror campaigns struck black communities. Fueled by paranoia and racial animosity, lynch mobs targeted skilled and educated blacks as whites strove to maintain some semblance of the old biracial social order. What made Jim Crow violence so insidious was that it required the participation of the locale’s entire white community. Those who did not actively participate still allowed the bloodshed, through either silent support or fear of punishment; there are several recorded instances of whites being lynched for defending their black friends or “angering the Klan.” Southern law enforcement either looked the other way or actively joined the mobs as they launched riots in small towns like Slocum, Texas, and burgeoning cities such as Tulsa and Atlanta.
A second wave of monuments appeared throughout the South during the Civil Rights movement as part of a backlash against advances that blacks had made. White Southerners chose not to commemorate those massacres for decades afterward, as they engaged in a collective omertà. For example, the Slocum Massacre occurred in 1910 but did not receive a plaque until 2016. Even then, the marker was dedicated over the objections of local officials.
Many Union and Confederate monuments were placed on battlefields, and they served to commemorate specific events. The monuments in question are those that are not attached to any battle, but to the Lost Cause. Statues, plaques, and other such displays are an expression of the communities’ wishes and values. In the case of Confederate symbols, they were and remain a brazen expression that showed everybody, especially blacks, that white supremacy would remain dominant, and that any deviance or resistance would meet the most barbaric cruelty that white Southerners were ready and willing to inflict. The monuments were placed in prominent locations so that viewers would know where the residents’ sympathies lay.
Despite the post-Reconstruction South’s generally handicapped economy, local communities received funds for the mass-produced statues through benefactors. Towards the turn of the next century and beyond, white supremacist groups, such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, desperately attempted to rehabilitate their fathers’ cause by erasing their guilt in both starting and losing the Civil War. Composed principally of well-to-do Southerners, they financed the construction projects. The purpose of those monuments was to intimidate the black community into submission. The unveiling speeches themselves are outright damning, with speakers boasting they had horsewhipped local blacks and that suppressing blacks during Reconstruction was even more important than the combat faced during the Civil War. Americans outside the South, in the meantime, largely permitted it as they also allowed Southerners to insert Lost Cause hagiography into Civil War history until the mid-twentieth century.
Even in states that had remained in the Union, Confederate statues appeared as supporters seamlessly merged with contemporary white supremacist and nativist movements prevalent throughout the United States. Today, Confederate monuments far outnumber their Union counterparts in Kentucky and West Virginia and can even be found in California and Massachusetts. There are far fewer monuments to Southern Unionists and United States Colored Troops in the South, despite that region being home to hundreds of thousands who fought for the Union. Remembering those men would dispel the rosy narrative of Southerners standing united against overwhelming numbers. They were largely forgotten as a result until very recently.
It is understandable that many white Southerners place their families in high esteem. It is incredibly uncomfortable for them to think of their revered ancestors as anything but heroes. For the Confederate soldiers’ descendants, the notion of their distant relatives fighting for a white supremacist cause is a bitter pill to swallow. It is even more unpalatable for them to think of their tight-knit communities once being involved in massacres. They may remember their ancestors as fondly as they please, but that is best done in museums and not in the town square or in front of a courthouse.
Ian Abbey, Ph.D.
These monuments were placed without any input from the local black communities and were dedicated by white supremacists to perpetuate an execrable system. Today, those monuments commemorate a little over four years of a failed rebellion and many decades of white terrorism. As was horrifically displayed in Charlottesville in 2017, reactionary white nationalist thugs still rally around those statues for support. The Confederacy was founded on the principle that blacks should be subservient and in bondage, and the echoes of that pernicious message still reverberate every time neo-Confederate hate groups gather. It is fitting that today’s anti-racist movements might delegitimize those groups and herald their idols’ removal from places of honor. The South has a rich and colorful history, and there is much to celebrate other than a short-lived rebellion that ruined a generation of young Southern men and inspired a century of hatred.
Ian Abbey, Ph.D., is a history lecturer in the Division of Social Work, Behavioral and Political Sciences at Prairie View A&M University.