Arlington National Cemetery and Confederate Monuments

Getting Black history and the Civil War right is critical

In the center of Arlington National Monument where some of America’s war dead are honored and buried stands a monument to the women and men who died not in service to the United Sates, but who waged war against the United States. The monument stands prominently on a 32-foot-high pedestal majestically overlooking looking hundreds of headstones. Two weeks ago, after years of wrangling – and the ever present, “It just represents history”  jargon - the monument finally came down.  

The Monument was proposed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1906 and funded by them and installed in 1914. “The elaborately designed monument offers a nostalgic, mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery. Standing on a 32-foot-tall pedestal, a bronze, classical female figure, crowned with olive leaves, represents the American South. …

Two figures are portrayed as African American: an enslaved woman depicted as a “Mammy,” holding the infant child of a White officer, and an enslaved man following his owner to war.”^[1]

Monuments to the Confederacy have been an issue since they began showing up which was not after the war, when you'd assume that people would be mourning the most for those who had been lost, but during times of civil rights tensions and intimidation in the early and mid-1900s during the Jim Crow era, and then again in the 1950s and 60s during the Civil Rights era.^[2] Monuments to the Confederacy have always been controversial, but many accepted the White supremacist mantra that they merely honored our nations’ history. There never was much of a real hullabaloo about monuments until after a White supremacists posed with a Confederate battle flag and gunned down nine Black worshippers in a Charleston South Carolina church in 2015 and then again when George Floyd was murdered.  It finally dawned on the many Americans who had accepted that the flag and Confederate monuments were just inoffensive symbols honoring our history, that they are actually symbols of hatred and intimidation.

So I was intrigued when I read about a monument to the Confederacy in Helena Montana – a city far from any Civil War activity - that had been placed in 1916 and removed in 2017 after violent clashes in Portland OR between The Proud Boys, a violent White Supremacist Organization, and Antifa, an anti-White Supremacist organization capable of and willing to respond to violence with violence.

My initial intrigue with the monument gave way to confusion when I learned that Montana had no dead Confederate soldiers to honor. Nor dead Union soldiers for that matter. Or any Civil War soldiers of any kind, dead or alive, because the state of Montana wasn’t a state at all until 1889 - 25 years after the war had ended. Curious about what was going on and always up for a road trip, I headed to Helena to snoop around.

I arrived in Helena on one of those ultra-beautiful autumn days. Set in the foothills of the Elkhorn mountains, Helena has clean, wide, tree-lined streets; cute, gentrified Victorian homes; and a very walkable downtown and (I heard!) more than one good brew pub. The colors were beginning to change and the air was crisp. The city has a welcoming feel and appeared to be aptly nicknamed “The Queen of the Rockies”. I was lucky to have arranged a meeting with former mayor Jim Smith, a big, out-going guy who shares my love for history, good beer, and tromping around the hills. It was Jim who had first broached the topic of removing the fountain during his tenure as mayor from 2001-2018.

The monument had been a beautiful, imposing granite fountain, standing 9 feet tall, that was situated on a rise in a small park overlooking Helena. Inscribed in the plaque were the words “A Loving Tribute To Our Confederate Soldiers”. When it was dedicated in 1916 by Georgia Young, president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy Chapter, her words sounded downright neighborly. “On behalf of the Daughters of the Confederacy, I present this fountain to the city of Helena Montana as a token of our esteem toward our new home.”

The Montana Territory’s first two petitions to congress to become a state were rejected – likely because of the state’s pro-confederacy politics. So in 1909 the UDC, sensing fertile, Confederate-friendly ground, opened a chapter in Helena. The stated purpose of the UDC included the commemoration of Confederate Soldiers who gave their lives for a noble cause.

The UDC describes itself as a group of genteel ladies preserving the noble history of the Confederacy and of the Civil War but has been described by historians as a White supremacist organization promoting a revisionist history version of slavery and the war. When I contacted prominent sociologist, historian, and author James Loewen (Lies Across America, Lies My Teacher Told Me) he had this to say about the UDC; “For more than a hundred years, the United Daughters of the Confederacy has harmed Americans' understanding of the past by putting up triumphant counterfactual monuments and influencing timid textbook editors.”

Karen Cox who has written several books on the UDC describes the organization this way: "UDC members aspired to transform military defeat into a political and cultural victory, in which states' rights and White supremacy remained intact."  

After the racially motivated murders in Charlestown in 2015, Jim presented the removal of the fountain as a safety issue. Antifa and The Proud Boys both frequent Seattle and Portland - within a day’s drive from Helena. Jim didn’t want them heading his way. His advocacy created a buzz around town.

Jim bought up the issue at a public meeting four days after Charleston. Not everybody at the meeting was in favor, but nevertheless the city government approved its removal and two days later – 6 days after Charlottesville - the monument was gone…placed in permanent storage.

Since a White supremacist made Confederate imagery an issue by posing in front of the Confederate Flag before murdering nine parishioners and especially since the Charlottesville rally in protest of removing a statue of General Lee, there’s been a national ebb and flow conversation about the wisdom and politics of removing or maintaining the statues. The issue is complicated, and complicated even more by our nation’s unwillingness to delve deeply into teaching the complexity and Black history behind the Civil War. Just last week yet another school board, the Francis Howe School Board in MO voted to stop teaching Black History and Black Literature.  Our long experiment with slavery and racism and its aftermath doesn’t fit within our national narrative.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, based on a PEW poll, estimates that 48% of American teachers, believe that it was the issue of States’ Rights that led to secession, believing in what historians called the ABS version of succession - Anything But Slavery. Historian Loewen, in his own formal poll of thousands of teachers, as concluded at some 55 to 75% of teachers – regardless of race – conclude States’ Rights as a key reason for secession.

But as Historian Loewen says, “It’s critical to today’s understanding of race to understand that the Confederate States seceded over only one issue: Slavery. It informs virtually all the attitudes about race that we wrestle with today.” How can there be so much ignorance about the seminal event of this country’s history? It’s not accidental. After the war and the proud south’s humiliating defeat, there began a concerted, and remarkably successful campaign, coordinated by the UDC, to revise the narrative. Instead of having fought, killed and died to maintain the ignoble causes of White supremacy and slavery, the narrative became the noble cause of the rights of states to be free from federal government control and maintain their sovereign right to determine their own destiny. Good, all-American values that still resonate to this day.

That sounds good, but it belies the truth. In the years preceding the war some 9,000 pages were written clearly defining the reasons the south was in conflict with the north. The south was clear about what bothered them and their views on White supremacy and Black inferiority. According to Historian and author Dwight Pitcaithley - one of the country’s foremost experts on secession and the politics of the Civil War - none of those documents, editorials, or speeches mentioned states’ rights other than the right of a state to engage in the business of enslaving humans.

Southern states proposed some 90 constitutional amendments to federally protect slavery, states’ rights be damned. Per Historian Pitcaithley the poster child for this effort was future president of the Confederacy Senator Jefferson Davis, who proposed that slavery be nationalized and slaves protected universally as property under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. Clearly Jefferson was not an advocate of state’s rights as much as he was an advocate of slavery.  One of the first things the Confederate Constitution writers in Montgomery did when they constructed their own constitution, was to remove protections for slavery from the states and place those protections with the new Confederate federal government.

Five states, upon secession, quickly penned somewhat similar open letters, called  the “Declarations of Causes” to establish why they seceded. Texas was perhaps the most forthright: “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the White race,... that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race...."

Mississippi’s delegation claimed "Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.... And Alabama, not to be outdone in forthrightness explained the need to secede in simple terms: "The question of Slavery is the rock upon which the Old Government split: it is the cause of secession…We are sent (to Alabama's secession convention) to protect, not so much property, as White supremacy,...."

And in his famous “Cornerstone speech” future Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens defined the reason behind secession: “Our new government is founded 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, (to be) based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

That false belief of slavery as benign - where slaves and their ‘masters’ loved and cared for each other like family - fosters the racism and White supremacy that America suffers though today.  In that scenario, when people look at Black Americans today they can only conclude they are on the bottom of every metric because of their lack of capability rather than the still unresolved effects and attitudes brought by slavery.                                                                                  

The cornerstone for perpetuating the Lost Cause lie was the United Daughters of the Confederacy – the same outfit that installed the fountain in Helena as well as hundreds more, including the now-famous statue known as ‘Silent Sam’^[3] that stood on the campus of the University of NC until protesters toppled it in August, 2018.

When the UDC financed and dedicated ‘Silent Sam’ statue in 1913, 48 years after the end of the war, 26 years after reconstruction, and smack dab in the midst of Jim Crow,  they recruited Julian Carter, a prominent industrialist and ranking member of the KKK to speak at the dedication. Carter’s dedicatory remarks help us understand the true nature of Confederate statues. He credited Confederate soldiers with “…saving the very life of the Anglo-Saxon race in the South. Today, as a consequence, the purest strain of the Anglo-Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States. Praise God.”

Then, out of meanness and braggadocio, he went on to tell an illuminating personal story about the love White southerners held for their enslaved; “I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, albeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison.”

But back to the belief that Confederate Monuments are just a part of American history? Throughout the south there exist many monuments to General Nathan Bedford Forrest. But who was he? Prior to the war he’d made a fortune in Tennessee as a plantation owner and slave trader. Tall, handsome, broad-shouldered, and courageous, Forrest quickly rose from private to general. He’s been called the most brilliant military tactician born in America. He fought and lead successfully in many key battles, one of which was the battle of Fort Pillow TN in March 1864.

Fort Pillow, held by some 600 Union troops, approximately half of whom were Black, was attacked by Forrest with some 1,500 to 2,500 troops. The Union quickly surrendered. But Forrest, instead of taking prisoners, massacred some 300 soldiers, likely because most were Black. He denied this of course, even though there are reports that he bragged about the slaughter. Never charged with the war crime, a military tribunal nevertheless found the reports of his actions to be accurate.

After leaving the army, Bedford went on to become the KKK’s first Grand Wizard. In May 2019, Tennessee Gov Bill Lee declared June 8 a day of remembrance for this heroic slave trader, unindicted war criminal, and ranking KKK member.

In Cleveland MS a Confederate monument dominates the lawn in front of the county courthouse placed there by the UDC. The inscription reads “To the memory of our Confederate dead. No nation ever rose so free from crime, nor fell so free from stain.” But like Helena, Cleveland didn’t have any Confederate dead. Cleveland didn’t even exist until well after the war had ended. The monument was erected some 43 years after the last battle…smack dab in the middle of the Jim Crow reign of terror.

And then there’s Baltimore! During the war Maryland was solidly pro-Union sending some 60,000 men to fight for the Union Army and in 1861 state lawmakers declined to even consider secession. Yet between 1887 and 1948 Baltimore installed four monuments to the Confederate cause and one to the Union of which they were a part. According to the Baltimore Heritage Project, “The meaning of the works is not limited to what they say about the Civil War but what they say about the racist backlash against Black civil rights in Maryland and throughout the South in the 19th and 20th centuries.”

Baltimore’s first Confederate monument was not to any general or soldier, but to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Roger Taney. Taney’s only memorable contribution to the court was that he authored the Dred Scott decision where the court found that the U.S. Constitution held no provisions for the citizenship of Black people. Thus Scott, an enslaved man who had sued for his freedom, had no standing with the court and therefore could not sue. At the time of Judge Taney’s death in 1864 the NYT Obituary wrote about the judge’s tenure and his Dred Scott decision; “The decision itself was in accordance with the opinion of the majority of the court and was merely to the effect that the Circuit Court of the United States for Missouri had no jurisdiction in the suit brought by the  plaintiff in error. But the Chief Justice went out of his way to indulge in a long and entirely irrelevant dissertation about the estimate which he claimed our ancestors placed upon the negro, and the rights to which he was entitled. In the course of his remarks the Chief Justice took occasion to assert, that for more than a century previous to the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, negroes, whether slave or free, had been regarded as "beings of an interior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the White race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the White man was bound to respect;" that consequently such persons were not considered "people" in the general words of that instrument, and could not in any respect be considered as citizens.” Taney contributed nothing else of note, yet Baltimore decided to honor him with a statue 22 years after the end of the war and during the Jim Crow era.

When a map of the monuments is overlaid with a map of the over 4,000 Black Americans who were hung, shot, burned alive, dismembered, or castrated in the latter third of the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^thcentury the parallel is uncanny and leaves no doubt as to the meaning of the statues.

                       Map of monuments                

     Map of racial lynchings

So what of all this controversy over Confederate monuments? Is it even important? Is it just a matter of hurt feelings? Historian and author James Loewen again, “Concealing the role of White supremacy—on both sides of the conflict— makes it harder for students to see White supremacy today. After all, if southerners were not championing slavery but states’ rights, then that minimizes southern racism as a cause of the war. And it gives implicit support to the Lost Cause argument that slavery was a benevolent institution. Espousing states’ rights as the reason for secession Whitewashes the Confederate cause into a “David versus Goliath” undertaking— the states against the mighty federal government.

States’ rights became a racist rallying cry for southerners fighting all federal guarantees of civil rights for African Americans. This was true both during Reconstruction and in the 1950s, when the modern civil rights movement gained strength. Today, the cause of states’ rights is still invoked against federal social programs and education initiatives that are often beneficial to Black people.”

Teaching the Civil War wrong and placing statues under false pretenses cedes power to some of the most racist forces in the United States letting them rather than truth dictate what is taught in the classroom. Allowing revisionist history to stand literally makes the public ignorant about the past.

Confederate monuments don’t preserve history. They preserve a false and dangerous narrative and make erasing the effects of White supremacy and living up to the ideals and potential of this country much more difficult.

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/19/arlington-confederate-memorial-removal-ruling/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/12/18/confederate-memorial-removal-halted-arlington-cemetery/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/16/confederate-memorial-arlington-cemetery/

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The most recent comprehensive study of Confederate statues and monuments across the country was published by the Southern Poverty Law Center last year. A look at this chart shows two huge spikes in construction twice during the 20th century: in the early 1900s, and then again in the 1950s and 60s. Both were times of extreme civil rights tension.

More than 230 monuments, and memorials have been removed since the death of Mr. Floyd

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^[1] Arlington National Cemetery brochure

^[2] A look at this chart shows two huge spikes in construction during the 20th century.

^[3] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2018/08/22/scholars-explain-the-racist-history-of-uncs-silent-sam-statue/?sh=7d27af20114f