In June 2015, nine African Americans were enjoying bible study at Mother Emanuel Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina when Dylann Roof, a white supremacist, murdered them. Roof had displayed the Confederate battle flag in online posts, causing a tide of political opposition to turn against the flag’s display in public places. The public discussion about the battle flag then broadened to include monuments as well (Crenshaw, Brent & Brent, 2016). Roof chose Emanuel Church and the city of Charleston for a specific reason: its history. Emanuel Church was erected in 1816 and was known for anti-slavery activity, while two Confederate monuments of John C. Calhoun and Wade Hampton, noted slaveholders, stand half a block away. Both the monuments and the church played a role in the Southern Civil Rights Movement: one stands as a statement, the other its rebuttal (Cobb, 2017). Charleston’s history involving the Civil War and slavery is dark and complicated. This essay will explore this history and demonstrate how Confederate monuments celebrate slavery, the Lost Cause ideology, symbolize white supremacy, and why they should be removed.
Let’s start by defining monuments. A monument is a structure of durable material that has symbolic or memorial value. As a symbol it “encapsulates or nurtures
an idea or a set of ideas” that tend to incorporate certain values or ideals of that particular society (Winberry, 2012, p. 20). The meaning of monuments is defined through interpretation. There is a complex process of public and private interactions between those who erected the monument in the first place, and those who view it through time. These interactions can result in many different meanings considering many people can interpret the monuments differently. Thus, the meaning of monuments can change over time as they continue to be viewed by new generations (Winberry, 2012).
Confederate monuments celebrate Southern heroes and leaders and originate from the American Civil War that was fought between the North and the South between 1861-1865. The war was a result of a major socio-economic division between the North and the South, particularly over the right to pursue a way of life that endorsed slavery and states’ rights. The Southern people were known as Confederates, and this resulted in the Confederate flag and Confederate monuments. Confederate monuments come in all shapes and sizes and were erected from a few years after the Civil War and put up as late as the 1980’s. Most frequently, the erection of these monuments was undertaken by Southern women in groups such as Ladies Memorial Association and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (Winberry, 2012). In order to finance these monuments, these organizations would hold fairs, concerts, and dinners to raise funds.
Confederate monuments are troublesome. The language of the monuments is a code referencing ideas that seem universally appealing like honor, duty, and loyalty. Monuments appear to refer to events of the past, not of the present. They often memorialize the death of individuals or groups and so mingle the memory of the dead, the causes for which they fought, and the causes of those who erected the monuments. They may be complicated, but Confederate monuments and the landscapes that contain them are not innocent (Crenshaw, Brent & Brent, 2016).
John C. Calhoun stands right in the center of Charleston in Marion Square. Calhoun was born in South Carolina and lived from 1782-1850. He was a prominent U.S. statesman and spokesman for the slave-plantation system of the antebellum South. As a young congressman, he helped steer the U.S. into war with Great Britain and also helped establish the Second Bank of the United States. Later, Calhoun went on to serve as United States secretary of war, Vice President, and secretary of state. Also, as a long time South Carolina senator, he was in opposition to the Mexican-American War, and was renowned as a leading voice for those who were seeking to secure the institution of slavery. For the rest of his life he defended the slave-plantation system against a growing antislavery stance in free states.
Wade Hampton stands in Marion Square as well. He lived from 1818-1902 and was a South Carolina plantation owner and politician and also served as a Confederate general during the Civil War. Hampton grew up on a sprawling plantation in Charleston tended by many slaves and received private schooling growing up. He then went on to graduate from South Carolina
College in 1836 and spent two years studying law before returning home to manage his family’s properties in South Carolina and Mississippi. His father died that same year, making Hampton one of the largest owners of slaves and land in the South.
Reverend Joe Darby, first vice president of the Charleston NAACP, says that adding new language to the John C. Calhoun and Wade Hampton monuments could be a positive step, but it would all depend on the details of the language. “If you put in 5-foot letters, ‘Racists who pushed the Civil War,’ that might be a possibility. It could be a small plaque but one that could be largely seen…. An egregious statue really ought to go, and I lean toward Calhoun being egregious” (Behre, 2017).
Although built because of the Civil War, most of the monuments are much newer than one might think. There are roughly 700 Confederate monuments in the U.S. and, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, these monuments are spread over 31 states plus Washington, D.C.. This list clearly exceeds the 11 Confederate states that seceded from the Union. In her article How The U.S. Got So Many Confederate Monuments, Becky Little introduces Mark Elliott, a history professor at UNC Greensboro. Elliott says that most of these monuments did not go up immediately after the war’s ending. Rather, the monuments that were erected during that time were to mourn soldiers who had died. “The vast majority of them were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation”, Elliott says (Little, 2017). These new monuments were used to glorify Confederate leaders, including General Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson. Many earlier monuments were placed in cemeteries, while these new ones were situated prominently in public places, such as in front of state houses. The Civil Rights Movement triggered the start of spreading Confederate symbols in several other ways (Little, 2017). “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” (Little, 2017).
Confederate monuments celebrate slavery. The politics of remembering and forgetting history through commemoration is certainly controlled by those in power, but marginalized social actors and groups can use memorials and monuments to challenge dominant narrations of the past (Alderman, 2010). Some African Americans “refuse to forget” the suffering their ancestors endured through slavery, and this is why they believe that these monuments should be taken down (Alderman, 2010). Jennifer Eichstedt and Stephen Small, co-authors of Representation of Slavery, used the concept of ‘symbolic annihilation’ to characterize how traditional accounts of the South's antebellum history tend to silence or misrepresent the enslaved and, thus, perpetuate an institutional forgetfulness. They visited over 120 plantation museums in multiple Southern states and found at most sites “slavery and people of African descent either literally were not present or were not important enough to be acknowledged” (Alderman, 2010). Instead, these sites focused on the social life, achievements, and possessions of the white plantation class. Most tourism operators are reluctant to even utter the word “slave or “slavery” when discussing these plantations and have used euphemisms such as “servants” to describe those enslaved if they are mentioned at all (Alderman, 2010). As Dominick Paolillo, a journalist for USA Today says, “Right wing radicals defend those monuments to amplify their efforts to maintain white supremacy. The economic motivation for slavery disappeared with industrialization. But racism replaced economics as motivation for denying black Americans
equality” (Paolillo, 2017). The context of the battle for equality may have changed since Civil War days, but the basic principles have not.
Those who defend the Lost Cause ideology promote the idea that the Civil War was fought over states’ rights, defense of the homeland, and protecting a Southern way of life, while having nothing to do with slavery. This ideology characterized the South as “a region victimized by Northern aggression” (Burkhardt, 2011, p. 18). Stephanie Meeks, President and CEO of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, explains that advocates of the Lost Cause erected these monuments all over the country to “vindicate the Confederacy at the bar of history, erase the central issues of slavery and emancipation from our understanding of the war, and re-affirm a system of state sanctioned white supremacy” (Meeks, 2017). Historians have thoroughly documented the process of selective memory in recent years. “The centrality of slavery as a cause of the Civil War was written out of the collective memory of the war….it happened through a concerted effort to first forget the causes of the war, then to focus on the war as an effort to protect the homeland.” (Brophy, 2006, p. 126). Alfred L. Brophy, an American legal scholar at the University of Alabama, explains that if the memory of the Civil War is that the cause was slavery, those who fought against the Union would seem immoral. However, if the war was thought of as fought over political self-determination, home rule, and about honorable people fighting for their homeland, then we would have a different view of the war. While certain people may want to remember their Confederate ancestors in cemeteries and at battle sites, many neo-Confederates’ efforts to commemorate their version of the Civil War era are
drawn from, and justified in their arguments by, the Lost Cause version of history and similarly, the contemporary narrative of Southern Heritage (Winsboro, 2016).
To put it simply, the erection of these Confederate monuments and enforcement of Jim Crow went hand-in-hand. They were intended as a celebration of white supremacy when they were erected. The Civil War ended in 1865, yet there were spikes in the construction of these monuments in both the Jim Crow era and again during the Civil Rights Movement. The heyday of monument building between 1890 and 1920 was also a time of extreme racial violence against African Americans by Southern whites (Cox, 2017). During the Civil Rights Movement, monuments were strategically erected in front of court houses and state capitol buildings, not to mourn dead soldiers, but to make a statement towards African Americans. Brian Blount, an African American who grew up in Smithfield, Virginia, discusses his experience, “The Confederate flag and the monuments have an impact for me. I don’t know that they do for all African Americans, but it is a painful thing for me…. The message that flag gives is that we are still, in many ways, fighting in a spiritual kind of way against some of the hostilities that were part and parcel of the Civil War. The statues on Monument Avenue are not just pieces of concrete, but they are a way in which society continues to say that there are some of us who are valued more highly than others” (Blount, 2016).
White supremacists aren’t the only people who don’t want to see these monuments taken down. President Trump tweeted, “This week, it is Robert E. Lee. I noticed that Stonewall Jackson is coming down,” he told a news conference. “I wonder, is it George Washington next week?” Some people say the monuments are about heritage and history, not racism. Others say
we need to keep them in place to remind us of our dark past (Cox, 2017). Historians argue that we need to keep them up to teach us the darker lessons of Southern history, but at what cost? As we saw with the Dylann Roof shooting and many other similar events, these monuments have assisted the cause of slavery, the Lost Cause, white supremacy, and the deadly violence that has accompanied it. This is why the country has a moral obligation to remove them. The artifacts of hate will be lost, their history and meaning will not.
Now that we have seen the true history behind these monuments and that they celebrate slavery, the Lost Cause, and white supremacy, do we still feel that they should be glorified? Other countries can provide examples. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler's underground bunker is marked only by a small sign outside a parking lot. "One reason for not preserving Hitler's bunker was that it was feared that the site might become a place of pilgrimage for neo-Nazis; a place of violence and shameless celebration of a history that should be shameful," Maggie Penman from NPR reports (Wamsley, 2017). Additionally, a statue of British colonialist Cecil Rhodes became the subject of student protests at the University of Cape Town, South Africa in 2015. After a month of demonstrations, the university council voted to take down the statue. "It marks a significant … shift where the country deals with its ugly past in a positive and constructive way," a spokesman told the wire service (Wamsley, 2017). It is time for us to think about our dark and complicated history. Every American is impacted by this controversy because it concerns our history as a country, and whether we believe the past is so important that we will allow it divide us now. After seeing how other countries dealt with similar situations, the United States can learn
from these countries’ opinions about their past and apply it to our own. It is time to recognize that our past is not important enough to let it shape our future as a country.