How Far Shall We Go?

The frenzy over the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina state house has largely abated—at least in the national press. South Carolina removed its flag on July 10^th. But this doesn’t mean that the Confederate flag issue, or, more broadly speaking, the Confederate symbol issue has gone away.

Sitting around the dinner table with friends shortly after the Emanuel AME church shooting in June, the talk turned to the (then) proposed removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina state house. A lively back-and-forth ensued, ending with the questions—not answered that evening—Say the Confederate flag goes away, what’s next? How far shall we go? 

Confederate symbols and memorials abound in the South. Are they now part of our national history, and in this sense exempt from present-day protest? Or do they represent a false past that should be corrected?

Graffiti on the Confederate Defenders
of Charleston monument

Among numerous military-themed monuments in White Point Garden, a public park in Charleston, SC, one commemorates the Confederate soldiers who defended the city during the Civil War. A naked warrior holding a broken sword and a shield emblazoned with the South Carolina seal defends a female figure representing the city of Charleston. Inscribed on the base is “Count them happy who for their faith and their courage endured a great fight.” The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) put up the memorial in 1932. On the one hand it is a simple homage to men who died in battle, on the other it implies the men died in a righteous cause. Not surprisingly (to me anyways) it was spray painted with “Black Lives Matter” in the wake of the Emanuel AME shooting.

In a prior post I noted that the Confederate battle flag still flies above a southern state house in the form of the Mississippi state flag. A Facebook friend shared a headline from a southern Mississippi TV station’s web site (WLOX-TV). It announced the resolution by the national NAACP demanding the state change its flag. I read through the posted comments (there were hundreds), overwhelmingly attacking the NAACP resolution. Here follows a sampling:

• “Unlike South Carolina, Mississippi will not be bullied by blacks or the liberals they rode in on.”
• “NAACP take your racist BS and stick it. We the people of Mississippi have already voted to keep our flag.”
• “The NAACP is the biggest racist group there is…”
• “Put flags in every yard my fellow Mississippi friends…”
• “I’ve got one flying in my yard right now right between the Confederate flag and the American flag. They aren’t going anywhere.”
• “The name NAACP offends me. It [sic] racist right in the name.”
• “I’ve been saying this whole time that the flag debates, arguments, and everything else is covering up something the government doesn’t want us to know.”

A lot of familiar themes here—anger and vitriol directed at any outsider who suggests that Mississippi change its ways (NAACP, blacks, liberals), a self-righteous turning of the tables (we’re not racist, you’re racist), the weird conflation of the Confederate flag and the American flag (implying both are expressions of patriotism, one is, the other isn’t), and the suspicion that it’s all a government plot (it is). Even South Carolina gets thrown under the bus. What’s missing in these posts is any empathy towards the large black minority, 37% of the state population, who likely perceive the state flag in a completely different way.

I’m a Pennsylvanian. If my neighbor announced he was going to burn the Pennsylvania state flag, my reaction would be, “knock yourself out.” I don’t even know what it looks like. Perhaps all state flags should be innocuous and forgettable.

As of a month ago, nine southern states permitted the sale of Confederate flag specialty license plates. However, this may be changing quickly. Interestingly the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in June that Texas had the right not to issue Confederate flag license plates. The Court argued that license plates are official documents, and as such, convey messages with which the state presumably agrees. Several governors have already acted to curtail sale of these specialty plates.

The South still memorializes the Confederacy with state holidays. Robert E. Lee Day or a variant, Lee-Jackson Day, is observed in Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Florida, and Georgia. Three states perversely pair it with Martin Luther King Day. Many of the same states also observe a Confederate Memorial Day or, as it’s known in Texas, Confederate Heroes Day. Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi celebrate Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s birthday. Tennessee uniquely celebrates the birthday of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, reputedly the first Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Grand Wizard and commanding officer of Confederate troops who slaughtered some 300 mostly African-American Union soldiers who had surrendered to his forces at Fort Pillow in April 1864.

To my knowledge none of these states has considered setting aside a day to memorialize an estimated 80,000 African slaves who died during the “Middle Passage” to the United States or the 4,000 African-Americans lynched between 1877 and 1950. [1]

Statues of Confederate heroes, usually astride a horse, and usually Robert E. Lee, dot the public landscape of Southern cities. Among the most prominent of these is a colossal statue of Lee on horseback on Richmond’s Monument Avenue. Writing in Slate, Maurie McInnis reports that the dedication of this statue in 1890 was accompanied by a parade of 20,000 Confederate veterans. The significance was not lost on Richmond’s black population. It effectively marked the beginning of the “Jim Crow” system of racial segregation that remained firmly in place until the Brown v Board of Education of Topeka ruling by the Supreme Court some 64 years later.

Bas-relief carving of Confederate Heroes
at Stone Mountain, Georgia

On the volcanic rock outcropping called Stone Mountain outside of Atlanta, there is a massive bas-relief sculpture of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson, all on horseback, hats over their hearts, seemingly riding off to some Confederate hero’s Valhalla. The back story is less ennobling. Samuel Venable owned the mountain at the turn of the 20^th century.  In 1915 he facilitated the revival of the KKK by allowing the group to use Stone Mountain as the site of its kickoff cross burning ceremony. Later he gave the KKK a legal easement to continue holding meetings there. About the same time Venable deeded the north face of the mountain to the UDC for the express purpose of creating a Confederate memorial. While the work was started in 1916, it was abandoned in 1928, presumably because money ran out. The state of Georgia purchased Stone Mountain in 1958 and then completed the sculpture over the next 14 years. It is now run as a fun-for-the-whole-family theme park complete with an “authentic” antebellum plantation, Skyride, scenic train, putt-putt golf, museum, et cetera, all under the stoney visages of the noble lords of the Confederacy.

The criticism implied by the question “How far shall we go?” is that you can go too far, that removing the symbols of the Confederacy from public life would somehow sanitize history. But this ignores evidence that the white South had already created an elaborate “Lost Cause” mythology to go along with its imposition of Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow rebuilt southern society keeping southern blacks “in their place”; the Lost Cause mythology provided moral cover. After all, if such an upright and inspiring father figure as Robert E. Lee—just observe his handsome features and noble bearing astride his stalwart warhorse “Traveler”—then how could the cause for which he fought be other than good and noble? 

In this context the Confederate flag in its various modern forms, the statues of Robert E. Lee, “Stonewall” Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, the many monuments to the brave defenders of (fill in the blank) who died for the Cause, the schools and buildings named for Confederate heroes collectively conspire to maintain the illusion that the Southern case for war was noble and righteous.

But the hard, cold truth is it wasn’t, any more than Robert E. Lee--the focus of the South's idolatry--was a paragon of honor. As David Brooks points out in a recent op-ed, Robert E. Lee was a West Point graduate and career Army officer who took an oath to defend the United States, not the state of Virginia. His decision to join the Confederacy was not preordained. His sister Anne Marshall was staunchly pro-Union. His wife Mary Ann Lee reportedly preferred that Virginia remain in the Union and would have supported his decision either way. 40% of his fellow Virginian military officers opted to remain with the Union, notably Winfield Scott, who served as Lincoln’s first Army chief-of-staff. Unlike most of the foot soldiers who followed him into battle, Lee had a real choice in the matter.

It's curious today that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are perceived as romantic warriors, imbued with almost mystical powers, whereas Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, the generals who won the war for the North, are often maligned as barbarians who invented "total war" and inflicted it on the South.

Reputedly Lee was a reluctant slave-owner. While this may be true, after inheriting his wife’s family estate “Arlington” in 1857, he kept the estate’s 195 slaves in bondage another five years, releasing them only after the maximum period stipulated by his father-in-law’s will. Again, he could have freed them forthwith, but chose to keep them in slavery to preserve the estate.

In her recent book “Galileo’s Middle Finger,” Alice Dregor recounts a trip with her immigrant parents to Poland in 1990, just as the Soviet empire was crumbling. A crowd gathered as a large statue of Lenin in the center of Gdansk was ostensibly being moved to a “safe location.” The crane lifted the statue up and then unceremoniously dropped it on the ground with predictable results. The crowd broke out the vodka and broke into song. No one worried that they might be whitewashing Polish history, they just celebrated being free.

We can admire Lee and Jackson as skilled battlefield leaders without turning them into demigods. Instead, in a kind of collective intellectual laziness, we have become enthralled by a self-serving Southern-apologist version of American history, where both sides can claim the moral high ground. It’s past time to push back assertively. Get rid of the special license plates, drop the Confederate holidays, change the names of high schools, and banish the Confederate flag in all forms from public grounds. (I can accept an exception for museums and battlefields.)

As for the multitudinous statues and monuments, I am content to leave most in place, and let their significance fade with the passage of time (as with most war memorials). But there are a few that even today give particular offense, and these should be moved to a "safe location." The city of Memphis, a predominantly African-American city, has reported already voted to remove the statue and grave of Nathan Bedford Forrest from a city park that bears his name. Senator Mitch McConnell and other Kentucky politicians have called for removing the statue of Jefferson Davis from the Kentucky state house, where it now stands a few feet from the statue of fellow Kentuckian Abraham Lincoln. I suspect there are others that deserve a similar fate. Unlikely as it is, should the Georgia National Guard choose to direct a "live fire" artillery exercise at the Confederate memorial at Stone Mountain, I would go witness the event, then break out the bourbon and break into song..."Glory, glory, hallelujah..."

[1]  Best estimates are 12.5 million Africans were transported to the Americas as slaves between 1680 and 1866. Only about 500,000 slaves went to North America, the rest shipped to other countries in the Americas, most notably the Caribbean and Brazil. The mortality rate during the Middle Passage was 10%-20%. Do the math and the U.S. part of the slave trade accounts for about 80,000 slave deaths. The Equal Justice Initiative documented 3,959 lynching deaths in the South between 1877 and 1950.