Last month my family and I finally visited Georgia’s famous Stone Mountain Park. The stone forms of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson are certainly impressive, whatever the intent of their sculptor. Equally impressive were the stone plaques engraved with famous quotes from the Founding Fathers, Confederates Leaders, and even, to my happy surprise, Booker T. Washington. (I was less happy, but not quite as surprised, to see Woodrow Wilson quoted nearby.) As we wandered amidst the state flags beneath the mountain, my father-in-law remarked that it was a good thing we came when we did; with everything going on, who knows how long the figures on Stone Mountain will remain there?
I must make two points very clear before I continue. First, I am approaching this question of Confederate Monuments and Myths largely from the outside. Both sides of my family, immigrants from Ireland and Germany, settled well north of the Mason-Dixon Line (Illinois for my Father’s family, Colorado for my Mother’s). Furthermore, I doubt many of the Confederate Leaders, or of rank and file, would look kindly upon my “Roman Popery.” This Confederate Heritage, therefore, is not mine, even if I live among it at the moment.
Secondly, I must state unequivocally that the Confederate States of America, as a nation, as a government, as a political ideology, was evil. Like its mother nation, the ante-bellum United States of America, it was founded not on blood relations and ancestral lands, but on a confessional creed. But whereas the USA was founded as, to quote President Lincoln, “a new nation, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” the CSA was founded on White Supremacy. That is not my opinion. That is the opinion of the CSA’s only Vice President, Alexander Stephens, in his infamous Cornerstone Speech:
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, 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, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”
Comparisons to Nazi Germany are all too easy to make. But I have no intention or desire to defend the Confederate Regime or its unconscionable founding philosophy. The question I mean to discuss here is the status of Confederate Monuments erected long after the Civil War, and the Southern Identity that has grown up with them.
It would be entirely unjust, and more than a little bigoted, to assume that the Nazis represented the whole of German history, the USSR was the entirety of Russian heritage, or that the regime of Xi “the Pooh” Jinping is the final word on Chinese Culture. No matter how odious, a single regime, or a succession of regimes, do not define a people or culture. So it is, I hold, with the American South.
As our nation once again grapples with racial tensions and our long history of institutional bigotry, it has become once again fashionable to lob stones at Southern History. The most common of these is to state that the CSA only lasted five years, and thus hardly counts as a legitimate heritage. This is more than a little disingenuous, akin to claiming that American culture only goes back to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In truth, the history of the culture that would become the United States of America begins with the founding of Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. Both the North and the South have their roots there. In fact, they were the very same tree, at least until the Confederacy cut off the branch it was standing on. We must not think that, for a brief five-year period, that the culture of 11 states (including 4 of the original 13 colonies) was somehow replaced by something alien and hitherto unknown to everything that had come before. Rather, the culture and identity of the South, including the ideology of the Confederacy, were outgrowths of pre-existing customs and attitudes, which were just as old, and as legitimate, as those that prevailed in the North.
Still, the question remains as to why the inhabitants of the former Confederate States would hold on to iconography of an era that occupied such a short span of their history. I can think of two reasons for this. The first is that it was one of the few things that made them distinct from the North: the Union could claim Jefferson and Washington, but not Lee and Davis.
The second, related reason, is trauma. The war was fought mainly in the South, and it was there that most of the damage of the war was done. It was Southern cities that were burned to the ground. It was Southern farms and houses that were pillaged. It was the lives and livelihoods of Southerners that were destroyed by Sherman’s March to the Sea, with all the horrors that an invading army typically inflicts on a conquered populace. Small wonder that these “repatriated” Americans held on to the flag they were under when they were conquered, or revered the leaders of the army that tried to protect them. (This in no way diminishes the suffering of blacks, enslaved or free, endured in the South before, during, and after the war. Suffering is suffering, no matter who inflicts it, and no one’s trauma is cancelled out by someone else’s.)
Honoring those whom your parents honored is entirely natural, so it is no wonder that, even today, there are numerous monuments and organizations honoring Confederate Soldiers in the South. This, too, has come under criticism in some quarters. The question is posed like this: “Was not your great-grandfather more than just a Confederate soldier? If he was a man of character, as you claim, was not that character wasted on such an evil cause? Why not forget that he was a soldier for the Confederacy, and remember the rest?”
I will readily agree that the Confederacy was an evil government with evil aims, and that it was entirely unworthy of the sacrifices of its soldiers. But I wonder if any would be brave enough to suggest we give similar treatment to veterans of the Iraq Wars, both of which were carried out by dishonest means and towards dubious ends. What of Somalia, Libya, or even Vietnam? I do not think anyone would dare to tell a living American Soldier that because their valor was used for dishonorable ends or for an ill cause, that their valor is not worthy of remembrance, or that their being soldiers had such an insignificant impact on their lives and character.
“But,” one might object, “We not talking about Americans, but racist traitors defeated by the Real America!” This Real America, as far as I can gather, is always on the side of righteousness, guided by the values of equality and freedom, and only ever fights Bad Guys. Which America was it, then, that threw its own citizens in camps due solely to their ethnicity? Which America dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and firebombed Tokyo, incinerating children in their beds? Which America was it that perpetrated that great crime against humanity known as the Trail of Tears? Which America was it that annexed Puerto Rico and the Philippines (to say nothing of the territories of the Native Americans) simply because they could, or sent Jewish refugees begging for help back to Germany just as Hitler was coming to power? And which America is it that has permitted the murder of millions of preborn children since 1973?
The fact of the matter is that the United States of America is, like every other nation, a mixed bag, filled with achievements and heroics to be proud of and atrocities to by ashamed of. This is because it is, like every other nation on Earth, made up of people who are both good and evil in varying degrees, and that its history is determined by the choices those people make. To try and pin a whole nation’s sins on one small group is not only dishonest, but it blinds its people to further self-reflection and self-criticism. It hinders growth and healing where growth and healing most needs to happen.
It is telling that the victorious Union did not treat the defeated Confederates as traitors, or scapegoat them as modern progressives tend to do. After reconstruction, the Confederates were welcomed back with open arms (literally, in the case of the 50th Anniversary Celebration of Gettysburg in 1913). The Confederate Memorial Days, Societies, and Monuments, we must remember, were not erected in defiance of the federal government, but with its blessing. Even former Confederate leaders were welcomed back into positions of leadership (Alexander Stevens, the same man who served as the CSA’s Vice President and author of the “Cornerstone Speech,” later become the governor of Georgia!) It was, to my knowledge, the only time that the American Government actively pursued forgiveness as National Policy.
Now, an argument can be made that it was taken too far, that the Federal Government was entirely too tolerant of Southern Post War abuses, especially the Jim Crow laws, or that it allowed the history of the Confederacy to be too thoroughly whitewashed. However, I find it hard to object to the principle behind it. After all, the Catholic Church has done the same thing throughout history when converting previously pagan nations, encouraging them to keep the good things of their heritage while discarding the bad. It was Catholic monks who preserved The Iliad and The Odyssey, as well as committed the entirety of Norse and Irish Mythology to writing. Why should not the American Government, in an effort to bring the South back into the fold, allow them to keep their iconography and narrative if it helped assure their compliance with Federal Law?
There is, however, a deeper motivation for the Union of yesteryear and the Conservative of today to make allowances for the celebration of Confederate heritage. Though the leaders of the Confederacy might have disagreed with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson on the question of racial equality, they held them high as heroes and inspirations. After all, both men were Southerners, both were slave-owners, and both were leaders of a rebellion against an allegedly overreaching central government. The comparisons made between the secession of the Confederacy and the War for Independence were all too easy to make. Even the Northern Press admitted as much:
“If [the Declaration of Independence] justifies the secession from the British empire of 3,000,000 of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of 5,000,000 of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.” – New York Tribune, December 17, 1860
In other words, to criticize the Confederacy too closely is to risk unraveling the Myth of America. For the charge that the Confederate cause was a front for wealthy elites to protect their economic interests can be just as easily leveled against the Founding Fathers. The Confederate Elite wanted to protect their right to own slaves. The Colonial Elite wanted to protect their right not to pay taxes on luxury goods that would help to pay for a war fought on their behalf (a war that they started in the first place!). So it is no surprise that the most fervent believers in the American Myth are so willing to give Confederate Veneration a pass, as though they were tolerating a popular piety that their newly reconciled co-religious picked up while they were in schism.
Unfortunately for them, those who not only disbelieve, but despise the American National Myth recognize the similarities too. It is why we are seeing not only Confederate Monuments being torn down by the mobs, but Union Monuments, including one for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment (an all-black Union regiment), and statues of Jefferson, Washington, and even Christopher Columbus and St. Junipero Serra (who advocated for the Native Americans).
It should be obvious to anyone with two brain cells that knocking down statues is not going to one damn thing to prevent another unjustified murder by police officers, nor is it likely cause any racists to repent. If anything, it will cause opponents of reform to dig in their heels, and attract otherwise neutral bystanders to their cause. By extending the scope of their iconoclasm to encompass the entirety of not only the history of America, but of all European interaction with the American Continent, the people behind this movement have managed to insult anyone of European heritage who might have been sympathetic to them. I would think they would know better than to tell any ethic group, “You are irredeemably evil and bring nothing but savagery wherever you go. Whatever good you have accomplished was stolen from someone else. We will gladly make use of your ancestor’s hard work, but give them none of the credit. Bow before our superiority!”
Apparently these (mostly white) activists have failed to learn from their ancestor’s mistakes.
So, rather than further dividing the American People and setting back a just cause just for the brief adrenaline rush of political theater, I propose that we focus of legal reform and leave the statues alone. Yes, even the Confederate ones. If Southerners want to venerate the C.S.A. leadership and soldiery while disavowing their racism, fine by me. It’s what every culture on earth does with their ancestors and heroes: embrace the good and try to forget or forgive the bad.
Besides, one of the best things about America is that it is the country where old-world prejudices go to die. English, Irish, French, German, Italians, Poles, and many other peoples who would have been at each other’s throats on the European Continent have been able to live peacefully, even joyfully, side by side in this country. The prejudice between White and Black has taken the longest to die, but I see no reason why it cannot be murdered and buried in the same way, with either party able to honor whoever they like. It may be a bizarre vision to imagine a park where statues of Jefferson Davis and Harriet Tubman stand across from each other, their artificial faces glaring with solemn disapproval at each other, while the children of their descendants play happily at their feet.
Such a vision is strange, but it is quintessentially American.
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