Why the Right Is Wrong on Confederate Statues

I’m struggling to understand my country’s confusion on the recent issue of removing statues that lionize the Confederacy.

For well over 200 years, slavery was a legal institution in the United States. The institution itself had its roots largely in our young country’s struggle to attract laborers, meaning slavery was both driven by, and valued for, economic reasons. By the time of the American Revolution, slavery existed in all colonies and the status of slave had been institutionalized as a racial caste associated with African ancestry. In other words, owning other human beings was (a) both an industry and economic driver in the United States, and (b) the mechanism behind which an entire race of people was classified as subhuman.

Fast forward to the Civil War, which, in spite of whatever nonsense article you just read on Breitbart or Fox News, was, in fact, fought over slavery.

Sure, the mainstream history-class-type story is not entirely accurate. For example, the notion that the war was fought over the moral issue of slavery is somewhat revisionist, and while there was a vocal minority of abolitionists who had moral reasons underpinning their commitment to the emancipation cause, it was the economics of slavery and the political control of that system that were truly central to the conflict. This is the states’ rights argument that is so often cited as the ‘real’ reason for the Civil War. But the critical point is that the two rhetorical items at play — states’ rights and slavery — are not mutually exclusive. The Southern states wanted to assert their authority over the federal government so they could abolish federal laws they didn’t support, especially laws interfering with the South’s right to keep slaves. In other words, the right the states were so adamant about retaining was the right to own other human beings. This dispute came to a boil over the issue of the westward expansion of slavery and culminated when Lincoln was elected without a single Southern electoral vote, signaling to the South that it had lost political influence and, ultimately, control over the fate of their greatest economic asset: slaves.

Follow the money, folks…

Consider that only about 5% of Americans owned slaves in 1860, meaning slave ownership was concentrated in the hands of a small subset of the Southern population, usually referred to as the “Planter Class.” To put this into perspective, by 1850 the Southern states were responsible for producing 80% of the world’s cotton, nearly all of which was harvested by slaves. This was an enormous industry and slaves were the engine of the entire system. Replacing unpaid labor with paid labor was an unimaginable economic transformation that plantation owners feared. In other words, the wealthiest fraction of Southerners had the most to lose from the abolition of slavery, and because of their recent loss of political influence, the Southern class of economic and political heavyweights turned to the only alternative they believed was left to them: secession, a political decision that led directly to war.

But still, how did a small percent of the population convince the rest of our Southern brethren to take up arms against their own country?

As already noted, under slavery, the relationship between white masters and their black slaves created a hierarchical social structure in which blacks were seen as a secondary (at best) form of human being. This meant that Southern whites of all economic classes enjoyed an unquestioned position of superiority. So, what happens if slavery were to be abolished? Might blacks and whites intermingle and destroy the white race’s superior status in the South? Might poor, non-slave-owning whites experience economic competition for ownership of land or for employment as labor? After all, slaves were roughly half of the Southern population at this time, and in some states like South Carolina, blacks outnumbered whites by a significant margin. Might poor whites fall to lowest ranks of Southern society? And what about the potential for violence? Events like the Nat Turner slave rebellion terrified Southern whites and led many to believe that freed slaves would bring anarchy and chaos to the region. Beginning to make sense?

In short, money drove the elites to choose secession, and fear drove the masses to fight for their Southern Cause.

This dynamic may sound familiar…

We know what came next: 620,000 American lives lost in the bloodiest war in our history. South Carolina seceded in late 1860, and they were followed by ten other states by June of 1861. And on April 12th of that same year, Confederates bombarded Union soldiers at Fort Sumter, starting the Civil War. The men who led the Confederacy were leading a rebellion against their own country to preserve the institution of slavery, and they lost.

This latter point is critical: the South lost.

Throughout history, the loser of an insurrection is rarely championed with statues and monuments. Robert E. Lee himself said as much: “I think it wiser,” the retired military leader wrote about a proposed Gettysburg memorial in 1869, “…not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

Lee also swore allegiance to the Union and publicly decried southern separatism, whether militant or symbolic, once the war was over.

So, why the big outcry today if the leader of the Confederate Army himself understood that it was in the best interest of our nation to “obliterate” the ugliness of our civil strife?

Perhaps it’s important to understand how the statues and monuments came to be in the first place.

Several decades passed after the end of the Civil War before any real effort to memorialize the Confederacy appears in American history. In large part, the resurgence came as Confederate veterans were dying, and their daughters — the United Daughters of the Confederacy — began taking actions to memorialize their fathers. Beginning in the 1890s, this group raised money in towns and cities across the South to erect statues and memorials to Confederate soldiers. Most of these statues weren’t erected until the early 20th Century — three to four decades after the war.

But while memorializing the Confederacy may have begun with the UDC, it is perhaps most critical to acknowledge the civil conditions that were put in place during this time and how they impact our understanding of this statue debate today.

In the years after emancipation, miscegenation laws and other social structures preserved white superiority in the South, irrespective of the “free” status of blacks. Southern legislatures rapidly enacted “Black Codes” to condemn the behaviors they anticipated from freed slaves, which became what we now know as Jim Crow laws. Things like vagrancy and unemployment were banned with severe punishment — including imprisonment and hard labor — and segregation became mandated in many Southern states. Freed slaves were essentially forced into low-paid servitude and a status of second-class citizen, continuing the institutional oppression of an entire race of people for another 100 years.

Also during this time, white Southerners began to reshape their history into a narrative in which slavery did not play a leading role in the Civil War. The revised story was that men that like Robert E. Lee had risen up to fight against a tyrannical federal government that was trying to take away the rights of the states. In this narrative, the Confederates had fought a valiant cause against much larger forces, lost, and when they did, laid down their arms in a gentlemanly way. In other words, slavery was, to an extent, written out of Southern history until relatively recently, resulting in a fresh generation of men and women who grew up resenting the federal government, African Americans, and the “Lost Cause” of their valiant Southern ancestors.

When the Jim Crow laws were finally challenged and eliminated in 1965, progress had only come after a second imposition of federal law forced the South to integrate and grant Civil Rights to all of Americans, regardless of race. Not coincidentally, this second moment of government intervention is a period during which a fresh desire to memorialize the Confederate cause spread across the South, and more monuments and statues were erected in protest of the Civil Rights movement.

All of this context is critical if we are to have an educated debate about whether celebrations of the Confederacy are appropriate or necessary today. Historically, these statues and memorials have most often been manifestations of protest against the progress of a race of human beings, and not efforts of history or heritage. And had they been, it’s important to remember that those efforts are in celebration of a rebellion against our country.

Now here we are today, when the President of United States tweets: “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments. You can’t change history, but you can learn from it. Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson — who’s next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish! Also the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!”

President Trump’s statement is either entirely ignorant of the history of these monuments (and history in general), or designed to appeal to a racist or misinformed segment of his voter base. The answer is likely a combination of both.

There is not a single statue of Hitler in Germany, nor are their monuments to Mussolini in Italy. Countless decolonized democracies have torn down statues of monarchs and unloaded unwanted historical baggage. Statues of Lenin have been toppled in most of the former Soviet Union. A monument to Henry IV on the Pont Neuf was destroyed in 1792, only to be reproduced in 1818 after the monarchy was reinstated — some of the metal came from a statue of Napoleon that had been pulled down from the top of the Vendôme Column. Queen Victoria has been put into storage in Dublin, and India threw aside monuments to Great Britain along with the colonial yoke. The toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square is celebrated as an image of American success, and monuments to the Assad family are falling across Syria as we speak. Without these statues, are we suddenly ignorant of the circumstances behind their existence? Have Germans forgotten their Nazi history? Have Indians rebuffed the remnants of English culture and heritage? Have the French forgotten the Revolution? Perhaps the story of their removal is as important as the story of their existence in the first place, no?

The argument that removing physical monuments somehow changes or erases history is demonstrably weak. And the fact that our President views the leaders of the Southern rebellion with the same respect that he does our founding fathers is foolish at best, and insincere at worst. Jefferson and Washington were slave owners, yes, but they were men of their time and operating under an entirely different set of circumstances than General Lee and the Confederacy. And while this may not be a politically-correct viewpoint, the issue at hand with this specific debate is not the fact of an American icon having owned slaves, but rather the fact that when the question was finally raised to be answered once and for all, a portion of America took up arms to preserve the institution of slavery. By celebrating Washington and Jefferson we celebrate Enlightenment ideals and the formation of an entirely new experiment in self-government. By celebrating Lee and Jackson, we glorify a group of traitors who actively fought to divide our country. Our President’s statement makes a dangerous and false equivalency.

Because the majority of these monuments were erected long after the war and in explicit protest to a push for racial equality, their removal does not remove “the beauty” from our cities and parks, but rather the undeserved honor we have bestowed upon periods of resentment and racial malice in our country’s history. In fact, these statues have little to do with culture and heritage and everything to do with lingering aspects of bigotry that must be condemned at every chance. It’s a pleasure to watch them fall.

Finally, even if one is to ignore the context I’ve provided or dispute the argument I have made, one must still be able to agree that the loser of a Civil War should not continue to be celebrated in a culture. Yes, we learn from the ugly history of our slave-owning past, but no, we do not erect participation trophies across the country to acknowledge the efforts of the losing side — especially when that side fought to preserve the worst of all human institutions.

-AN