Here's a bit softer view for those of you that cower from the unvarnished truth . . .
While every statue in every town has a different origin, taken together, the roughly 700 Confederate monuments in the United States tell a national story. Many of these commemorations of those on the losing side of the Civil War are a lot newer than one might think.
According to the
Southern Poverty Law Center, which
compiled a list of these monuments last year, these monuments are spread over 31 states plus the District of Columbia—far exceeding the 11 Confederate states that seceded at the outset of the Civil War.
Most of these monuments did not go up immediately after the war’s end in 1865. During that time, commemorative markers of the Civil War tended to be memorials that mourned soldiers who had died, says
Mark Elliott, a history professor at University of North Carolina, Greensboro.
“Eventually they started to build [Confederate] monuments,” he says. “The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of
Jim Crow segregation.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s research, the biggest spike was between 1900 and the 1920s.
In contrast to the earlier memorials that mourned dead soldiers, these monuments tended to glorify leaders of the Confederacy like
General Robert E. Lee, former President of the Confederacy
Jefferson Davis and
General “Thomas Stonewall” Jackson.
“All of those monuments were there to teach values to people,” Elliott says. “That’s why they put them in the city squares. That’s why they put them in front of state buildings.” Many earlier memories had instead been placed in cemeteries.
The values these monuments stood for, he says, included a “glorification of the cause of the Civil War.”
White women were instrumental in raising funds to build these Confederate monuments. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, founded in the 1890s, was probably the most important and influential group, Elliott says.
In fact, the group was responsible for creating what is basically the Mount Rushmore of the Confederacy:
a gigantic stone carving of Davis, Lee and Jackson in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Its production began in the 1910s, and it was completed in the 1960s.
By then, the construction of new Confederate monuments had begun to taper off, but the backlash to the
Civil Rights Movement was spreading Confederate symbols
in other ways: In 1956, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag; and in 1962, South Carolina placed the flag atop its capitol building. In its report last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center said that the country’s more than 700 monuments are part of roughly 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in public spaces.
Protesters and city officials have taken down statues in Baltimore and Durham, North Carolina. And many cities—including Washington, D.C.—are calling on their elected officials to do the same. Two of Stonewall Jackson’s great-great-grandsons have written an open letter to the mayor of Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy as well as the grandsons’ hometown, regarding Jackson’s statue there.
“[W]e are writing today to ask for the removal of his statue, as well as the removal of all Confederate statues from Monument Avenue,”
they wrote in their letterpublished on Slate. “They are overt symbols of racism and white supremacy, and the time is long overdue for them to depart from public display.”
Even Robert E. Lee V, whose understanding of his great-great-grandfather’s legacy is steeped in
Lost Cause-ism, made a similar recommendation about statues of him. Speaking to The Washington Post,
he said: “if it can avoid any days like this past Saturday in Charlottesville, then take them down today.”
https://www.history.com/news/how-the-u-s-got-so-many-confederate-monuments
