Confederate Monuments and their Changing Place in History

By: Kurt Vetters, The University of North Alabama 

Confederate monuments continue to be reflective of race relations in the United States, and understanding their unique historiography is important for Public Historians. These monuments are symbols of the short-lived Confederacy of 1861-1865 but also of the greater narrative of white supremacy, from the Antebellum Period through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights struggles, and beyond. Across the region, many of these statues were taken down during the early twenty-first century in the Black Lives Matter movement. Smaller towns, however, have had a more difficult time removing these statues, and many remain standing into the 2020s.[1] Understanding how these monuments have been viewed over the last one hundred and fifty years will help decide strategies for their future.

Kurt Vetters, 2024, photography, Tuskegee, Alabama. 

Thomas J. Brown, a Harvard professor and specialist in the Civil War and Reconstruction, provides a detailed analysis of Civil War monuments in Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America.[2]  He gives us excellent insight into these monuments through history. Brown’s overarching analysis is that these statues meant different things to each generation of installers and that those underlying motivations matter to people today. Brown contextualizes these monuments into three groups: first, memorialization by ordinary citizens; secondly, monuments placed by organized associations with political agendas; and lastly, Confederate victory monuments.[3]

As men died on battlefields far from home, most of the bodies were unable to be returned to their families. These monuments became tangible reminders for families and communities of their loss and the focus of the ceremonial grieving process. Typically installed as obelisks or shafts, many with a list of those killed in the war, they followed European traditions of the time.[4] By the late 1860s, commercial statuary figures became available.  The statue’s stance was indicative to the attitude of the purchasers, mostly women’s groups in local communities made up of mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives of the fallen. These soldier statues were contemplative, not in an aggressive stance but looking down, leaning on grounded rifles, and appearing mournful.[5]

The 1870s began to see a change in soldier monuments, and the lower South began to increase their proliferation.[6] Much of the acute mourning for the Civil War dead had passed, and as the centennial of the American Revolution began to inspire the country in the North, expanded resistance to Reconstruction motivated the South.  Some of these motives included reducing Republican voting and overthrowing of the bi-racial Reconstruction governments.[7] 

This period also saw the rise of several significant organizations who used monuments to further their cause: the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) in 1889 and the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 1892. Monuments were no longer about  fallen soldiers but began to focus on veterans’ rights as the UCV followed the growing momentum of the North’s Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) in 1866.[8]

Adding to the proliferation of statues in the South was also a proliferation of courthouses as the Southern economy improved after 1879. Reconstruction was over, prosperity again began to reign, growing urbanization in the South created new public spaces, and these established organizations stepped in to fill those spaces with monuments to the Confederacy and their causes. The twenty years after 1885 saw explosive growth of Confederate Monuments.[9]

The last phase of monuments Brown discusses using contemporary narratives is the advent of “Victory Monuments.” Harkening back to the triumphal arches of Rome and France’s Arc de Triomphe, American architecture and monument philosophy began to craft a narrative of American Imperialism after the Spanish-American War. This was the era of the large statues of Confederate generals, following the same type of memorials in the North, particularly the Grant Memorial in Washington DC. This was the Gilded Age, and the South was influenced by its example.[10]

Brown notes that these monuments, however, were natural at this time. He uses Charles Colcock Jones Jr.’s observations in 1878 at the unveiling of the Confederate Monument in Augusta, Georgia, who found it unusual that a victory monument would be erected to celebrate a cause and war that was lost, to point out that the citizens of the South had effectively regained control of their local governments.  By re-establishing control of the African American population, they had virtually eliminated Northern control over their society. They had in fact achieved victory.[11]

Brown has given us an excellent analysis of contemporaneous historians' views at the time of monument construction, from the end of the Civil War through the early days of the twentieth century. His epilogue ends with a hopeful narrative from Demopolis, Alabama, where a community replaced a damaged Confederate monument with an obelisk dedicated to the local dead of all wars.[12]

Southern historian John J. Winberry’s “Lest We Forget:” The Confederate Monument and the Southern Townscape, written in 1983, provides an analysis of these monuments before the Black Lives Matter movement of the twenty-first century, and looks closely at how these monuments were viewed by people in the South.[13] His work remains influential and is referenced as an important source in almost every work on the subject.[14]

Winberry gives an excellent timeline of courthouse monument dedications, spanning 1866 to 1929, with the vast majority erected between 1900 and 1918, dwindling to near zero by 1929.[15] His map of locations of Confederate courthouse monuments follows a pattern across the American South as their primary placement sites.[16] Using Winberry as the resource, by the 1980s historians were still viewing these monuments in four camps: memorials to Confederate soldiers,[17] memorials to the rebirth of the former Confederate States to equal footing as part of the United States, memorials to the nostalgic “Lost Cause” vision of the past, and, finally, memorials marking the end of the reactionary “Populist Movement” and iconography of the new Democratic party.[18]

In this work, Winberry only briefly acknowledges the huge gulf arising in the perception of these memorials between the White and Black communities. In his conclusion, he comments on their role as a symbol that differentiates the South and makes it unique and particularly Southern. His sentimental portrayal of their place in society begins to vanish from the study of these monuments within the next generation.

Modern discussions of monument-removal stirred in 2000 in South Carolina as then-Governor David Beasly expressed his support for the removal of the Confederate flag from the State House grounds. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) was prominent in this controversy and drew the attention of young historian Karen Cox while working on her PhD dissertation.  Her 2003 book, Dixie’s Daughters, chronicled the UDC’s role in erecting Confederate monuments across the South. Cox attributes the dramatic rise in the number of monuments beginning in the 1890s directly to the organizing skill of this powerful women’s social organization. 

According to Cox, by the 1880s, the significance of Confederate monuments began to move away from mourning tributes to Confederate dead. The new monuments began to celebrate the former Confederacy and its Lost Cause mythology.[19] The UDC, founded in 1894, descended from the scattered Ladies’ Memorial Associations who had erected most of the earlier monuments, and now began to use them to serve as symbols of the present. Cox argues that they were a key force in promoting vindication of the Southern perspective of the war and its aftermath and  preserving conservative values.

Her book examines the UDC and their impact on the proliferation of statues as only a part of her research. She gives equal study to the organization’s work in taking care of Confederate veterans, orphans, and widows; their efforts to control the educational and cultural narrative across the country in education; and their eventual success in the country, including the North, accepting the Lost Cause narrative as fact.

Dixie’s Daughters, published in 2003, certainly gives attention to the impact these monuments had on the Black perspective, but the views are not what we will see later in her work. Like Winberry, in 2003 there was still room among historians studying the South to provide narratives explaining their continued presence. 

Much of the scholarship thus far has been through the eyes of White authors.  Winberry in 1983, Cox in 2003, and Brown in 2019, all of whom approached the issue through their perspective as White historians. It is relevant to mention that all three authors missed, or failed to note, what would become for the Black community the lightning rod issue of these Confederate Monuments.

In December 1966 the Confederate Monument in Tuskegee, Alabama was defaced by angry citizens after an all-White jury issued a not-guilty verdict for Marvin Segrist, a White man, in the murder of Samuel Younge, Jr., a Black man. The Black students at Tuskegee Institute, estimated at 500, gathered in protest around the Confederate monument and painted the hands and face of the Confederate soldier statue black, painted a yellow stripe down his back, and wrote the words “Sam Younge” and “Black power” on the statue’s base.[20]

The Southern Courier was started in 1964 as an alternative Black-run paper in the South to distribute news that would not be carried in the mainstream white press.[21]  Their lead article was on the protest, with a photograph, while a search of other papers in Alabama during the same time listed references to the murder, but only one mentioned the protest and the defacement of the monument. No contemporary historians could be located in the sources referencing this event. 

Nineteenth-century Black historian Frederick Douglass as early as 1868, according to David Blight’s 1989 treatise on him, expressed to a colleague that he needed to “make myself a little more familiar with history.”[22] In 1870, Douglass declared that “monuments to the Lost Cause will prove monuments to folly.”[23] By 1883, he began to realize that the reconciliation of the North and South was coming at the expense of justice and liberty for Blacks. Blight, a Sterling Professor of History at Yale and a specialist in African American studies, devotes an entire chapter on Douglass’s struggle for societal memory in the post-Civil War era, lamenting the fact that Black freedom and justice was losing the history narrative to the Lost Cause narrative. Douglass spoke into the 1890s insisting that slavery caused the war, and that reconciliation or rehabilitation of the Southern Lost Cause myth did not deserve any credence. By this time, however, most White historians had moved their discussion toward acceptance of the Lost Cause mythology. 

There were Black historians raising alarm bells in the scholarly universe.  Lawrence Riddick’s career as an African American historian spanned the 1930s through the 1970s, and his work exposed many of the Lost Cause myths and hypocrisy that existed in the historiology of the South.[24] Riddick’s challenge of his Doctoral Advisor, Avery Craven, an ardent pro-Southern and even pro-slavery historian at the University of Chicago, and subsequent scathing reviews of Craven’s work, pointed out the prejudices that biased much of White scholars’ work during the Civil Rights Era.[25] It is impossible to overstate the importance of Black scholars in the growing understanding of racial bias in Civil War memory and the symbols representing that collective memory, which almost wholeheartedly ignored the Black perspective. 

No greater example of this change in thinking and an insertion of an understanding of racial bias in Civil War history can be shown than in Karen Cox’s transformation in her follow-up book to Dixie’s Daughters.  Published in 2021 and coming on the heels of tectonic upheavals in Civil War iconography, No Common Ground delves deeply into the meaning of Confederate statues through the decades, particularly in the twenty-first century. Her detailed analysis of their mythology and relevance as symbols of opposing narratives across the U.S. provides a new view of their place in the era of anti-racism. Resistance to their presence and resistance to their removal across the South leads to her conclusion that there is little space for compromise over this issue. What is most striking about her work is the emphasis she gives to the fact that these monuments are mired in racial inequality and that Black resistance to them has been instrumental in reimagining their place in U.S. history.[26]

As more Social Science professionals began to understand that there was a story in this narrative, and events like the 2017 Charlottesville monument-removal protests made headlines, scholars such as Lucy Britt and her team began to research public attitudes to these monuments. Examining the perceptions of Confederate monuments on Black and White populations of the South through the lens of political science and social science research was the goal of Britt’s article. Their study identified a decreased sense of belonging in Black subjects when state-sponsored legislation protected Confederate monuments, and ascribed racial injustice/slavery as the predominant meaning associated with Confederate monuments for Black respondents.[27] Their study also identified and quantified White sub-categories in the meaning of these monuments, and their results follow predictable patterns: racial resentment toward Blacks is the single largest identifier of positive meanings associated with Confederate monuments, while Whites who strongly identify with the South are more likely to believe the monuments represent history or past events that can be learned from. Britt and her team have studied memorials from Rwanda to Australia, and their research into the American South and Confederate monuments and legislation protecting them adds a great deal of context to the discussion, especially in quantifying beliefs and developing a sense of belonging among residents, both White and Black, who interact with these monuments in their communities.

As historians began to reimagine the landscape of the American South without Confederate iconography, another movement was afoot, led by West Point historian Ty Seidule. Seidule used his standing as the former historian of the U.S. Army’s West Point Academy and his credentials both as a graduate of Washington and Lee University and a 40-year career as an Army officer to lay out his personal journey from a Lost Cause advocate to a critic of the myth of Robert E. Lee and the neo-Confederate cause. While not the first in identifying the absurdity of the cult of Lee hero-worship, Seidule is the most public-facing, and his best-selling book, Robert E. Lee and Me, has given rise to an excellent narrative for use in countering the pervasive Lost Cause culture in the United States.[28] 

The swing in scholarship toward monument removal, and a general resistance to the dismantling of the Lost Cause mythology, has not gone without controversy and historical scholarship resisting that direction. Karen Cox discusses in No Common Ground that noted historian John Boles, the editor of the Journal of Southern History, argues against “sanitizing our history,” a common position when statue removal is discussed.[29] Even Ken Burns, the noted historical documentary filmmaker, is on the record in support of some remembrance of the Civil War.[30] 

Most notably, the response across the South has been the advent of “Heritage Laws,” protecting Confederate monuments by legislating their protection in the courts with hefty fines and penalties, including jail.[31] An excellent example of these laws is North Carolina’s “Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act.” Designed to prevent local authorities from removing or relocating any monuments, it ultimately takes the decisions out of the hands of locals and places them with the North Carolina Historical Commission. 

Even with these state-wide bans on monument removal, the controversial nature of Confederate Monuments in public spaces continues to attract attention. Concerns for public safety around these symbols is common for local communities to deal with, particularly at the local level of government.[32] Safety worries for writers, historians, politicians, activists, and others taking controversial stands are also prevalent around this topic.[33]

An excellent example of this controversy on modern historians lies in Brian Murphy and Katie Owens-Murphy’s work Public History in the Age of Insurrection: Confronting White Rage in Red States. Their article states with clear-eyed language the challenges of taking on the Lost Cause myth in a small town in the South: Florence, Alabama. Their call to action for public historians to counter White supremacy in our public history narratives and cultural sites is compelling and cautionary.[34]  As historians and public history practitioners, they document the challenges and backlash that is occurring as the views of history have changed over the last hundred and fifty years in the South. The Murphys document what it is like to put this new counter-narrative to the test in the 2020s in Alabama. The results are informative and frightening and demonstrate that history is always evolving and that reactionary forces will fight for their old beliefs. 

Confederate monuments and their place in history are just one aspect in the culture wars racking America in the twenty-first century. Demographically, the country is seeing the White population lose its majority status,[35] and as this progresses, symbols of White racial identity will continue to be controversial, as several minority groups view their past treatment at the hands of the White minority with resentment. 

Black historians, for example, have always viewed these monuments through the prism of slavery, oppression, and White racial dominance. As the Civil Rights, Black Lives Matter, and now Afrocentric and anti-racist eras have unfolded, Black historians are becoming more mainstream after decades of their voices being suppressed or being underrepresented in traditional university history departments. Not until 1940 could a Black historian contribute a book review to the Journal of Southern History, and not until 1955 could Black historians’ articles be published in that journal.[36] The impact of Black historians and authors emerging from African American Studies programs influence attitudes about Confederate monuments, even while not discussing them directly. Literature searches reveal few Black authors mentioning Confederate monuments in scholarly works, but the underlying issues of race inequity lie at the root of the monument issue and that is where Black scholars are focusing their efforts. Authors such as Ibram X. Kendi, Molefi Asante, Delores Aldridge, and Alton Hornsby, all historians in African American Studies programs across the country, have much to say on race relations through history, and their scholarship will undoubtedly have an impact on Confederate iconography.

These new ideas emerging from African American scholarship may contrast sharply with norms in place for decades as Western-oriented scholarship crashes against the rise of multiculturalism and oral-history traditions. Rules and standards of scholarship may be changed by this new landscape of historical interpretation. As an example, Black scholarship on this subject for the first seventy years after the Civil War relies primarily on two scholars:  W.E.B. DuBois and Frederick Douglass. However, that does not encapsulate the whole Black experience, and African American studies are filling that void.  Will their scholarship prove different from that produced by historically White-centered universities? For example, readers can feel the frustration of reviewer and historian Chad L. Williams as he laments the omissions in a volume of historiographic essays published in 2005 by some of the leading Black historians.[37] But that literature will undoubtedly influence public attitudes toward Confederate monuments.

Confederate monuments continue to be reflective of race relations in the United States and remain a bellwether of public opinion. They offer opportunities for healing or controversy, as do all politically charged symbols in the culture wars of the twenty-first century. As universities and scholars develop more interest in African American Studies and less and less historians embrace the Lost Cause narratives of the last two centuries, the study of Confederate monuments may begin to take on new dimensions, and the push to dismantle or relocate them may take on added importance. Commissions in place to monitor them for Heritage Laws, like the North Carolina Historical Commission, will more and more be made up of Public Historians of the likes of Karen Cox, Ty Seidule, Brian Murphy, and Tracey Burns, a Black Public Historian who today sits on North Carolina’s Historical Commission. It will be interesting to see where this next generation of historians takes this subject, and whether the public will join them or fight them on this journey.

Notes

[1] Brian Murphy and Katie Owens-Murphy, “Public History in the Age of Insurrection,” The Public Historian, 44, no. 3 (August 2022) 139–163. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2022.44.3.139

[2] Thomas J. Brown, T. J., Civil War Monuments and the Militarization of America. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019), Kindle.

[3] Ibid., 7.

[4] Ibid., 38.

[5] Ibid., 45.

[6] Ibid., 53.

[7] Ibid., 55.

[8] Ibid., 65.

[9] Ibid., 107.

[10] Ibid., 187.

[11] Ibid., 199.

[12] Ibid., 294.

[13] John J. Winberry, “‘Lest We Forget’: The Confederate Monument and the Southern Townscape,” Southeastern Geographer, Published by The University of North Carolina Press 23, no. 2 (1983): 107–21, https://doi.org/10.1353/sgo.1983.0008.

[14] Jonathon Leib and Gerald R. Webster, “On Remembering John Winberry and the Study of Confederate Monuments on the Southern Landscape.” Southeastern Geographer, Published by The University of North Carolina Press 55 (1): 9-18.

[15] Ibid., 5.

[16] Ibid., 8.

[17] Ibid., 10.

[18] Ibid., 10-13.

[19] Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2003). 66.

[20] Mary Ellen Gale, “The Trial…and After,” The Southern Courier, “Volume II, No. 51,” The Southern Courier, December 17, 1966, http://www.southerncourier.org/low-res/Vol2_No51_1966_12_17.pdf.

[21] Scotty E. Kirkland, “The Southern Courier,” in Encyclopedia of Alabama, December 7, 2010, https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/the-southern-courier/.

[22] David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1991). 222.

[23] Ibid., 230.

[24] Karen L. Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2021).

[24] Jerry Gershenhorn, The Scholar and the Struggle: Lawrence Reddick’s Crusade for Black History and Black Power, by David E. Varel. The American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (March 31, 2023): 524–25, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad091.

[25] Jerry Gershenhorn, The Scholar and the Struggle: Lawrence Reddick’s Crusade for Black History and Black Power, by David E. Varel. The American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (March 31, 2023): 524–25, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad091.

[26] Karen L. Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2021), 2.

[27] Lucy Britt, Emily Wager, and Tyler Steelman, “Meanings and Impacts of Confederate Monuments in the U.S. South,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 17, no. 1 (1989): 105–23, https://doi.org/10.1017/s1742058x2000020x.

[28] Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause, Kindle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2021).

[29] Karen L. Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2021), 133.

[30] Ibid. p 134.

[31] Ibid. p 157.

[32] Karen L. Cox, No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice (Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books, 2021), 171.

[33] Ibid. p.177.

[34] Brian Murphy and Katie Owens-Murphy, “Public History in the Age of Insurrection,” The Public Historian 44, no. 3 (August 1, 2022): 139–63, https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2022.44.3.139.

[35] US Census Bureau, Demographic Turning Points for the United States: Population Projections for 2020 to 2060, Current Population Reports, 2018, Rev. 2020. P25-1144.

[36]Jerry Gershenhorn, The Scholar and the Struggle: Lawrence Reddick’s Crusade for Black History and Black Power, by David E. Varel. The American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (March 31, 2023): 524–25, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad091. 524.

[37] Chad L. Williams, review of A Companion to African American History Edited by Alton Hornsby, Jr., Delores P. Aldridge, and Angela M. Hornsby. The Journal of Southern History, August 2006. https://doi.org/10.2307/27649152.