revoltedstates: “A Great White Monument Towering to the Sky:” Confederate Monuments
revoltedstates: “A Great White Monument Towering to the Sky:” Confederate Monuments in the Words of the Men who Placed them There.The Confederate monument issue has been weighing on me, not just as a Civil War nerd, but as an American and a human being. I’ll admit, while I’ve long been obsessed with this chapter of our history, I’ve spent very little time studying the way it was remembered and evoked into the early twentieth century. While I understand the importance of honoring American veterans, the stamp of the Jim Crow South seems indelibly imprinted upon so many of these monuments. But are we simply tainted by our “modern” moral high ground and demonizing what were actually innocent attempts by Southerners to remember their fallen? Or are many of these monuments indeed beacons of the cause of white supremacy as so many folks today are claiming? Seeking to find evidence on the true motivations of some of the leaders involved in erecting and dedicating these monuments, I decided to flip through the Library of Congress’s newspaper archive to read their original words. Much of what I found is downright revolting. But don’t take my word for it, read for yourselves……shall [Ulysses S. Grant’s] monument arise quicker than our monument, the monument of us, the homogenous, us, the best expression of the all-subduing, the Anglo-Saxon race; us, the most capable, because the most inspired; us, the most obligated, because the most blessed; us, who love our public men, because we make them and they are a part of us; us, who are inspired by their examples, because, like the south wind upon a bank of violets, which steals and gives their odor, we teach them what to inspire. WHAT SHALL IT BE CALLED What, then, is our monument, and by the name of what one of us shall it be called, although it be the monument of every one of us? It shall be a monument to Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America… -Gen. Peyton Wise, speaking on behalf of the Jefferson Davis Monument Association (of Richmond, VA) in 1895. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85038614/1896-06-30/ed-1/seq-11/ My fellow countrymen, our people had been tried as by fire. You, Confederate Veterans found our State governed by the malice of the North, by fraud, duress. The Constitution was amended to make the blacks equal with the whites. In those days the Confederate Veteran was a ‘Pillar of Fire by Night,’ to the women and children of the South. The carpet-bagger came, extravagance crime stalked abroad. The women and children felt danger and by magic an ‘invisible empire sprung up—the Ku Klux. Yes, in those times the women of the South leaned on the Confederate Veteran and found their trust well placed. When I look at the Confederacy I am glad the leaders in War became the leaders in peace…. I want to see a great white monument towering to the sky erected in [the Southern woman’s] honor. And on it, I care not what else is written but this, 'The dark days of reconstruction never found a scalawag among the women.’ I congratulate you, that you who saw the day when the North attempted to perpetuate a party to make the races equal, have lived to see it nullified. When this white race has climbed to the mountain peak and looks down upon the races below, historians will wonder how the South stood it so many years. It is the inevitable triumph of right, the survival of the fittest. You have seen the white man knock at the door of the yellow man in the East, and have seen it open; you have seen him come in contact with the black man, and beheld the black man kneel and make obeisance to him; you have seen the red man, too, give place. It is not in the power of all Constitutions ever drawn, or dreamed of, to make the races equal. It is a consolation to you, I know, that your sons are here to stay, and control forever and forever. -William Walton Kitchin, Governor of North Carolina, speaking at the dedication of the Confederate Monument in Henderson, NC, November 10, 1910. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn91068402/1910-11-24/ed-1/seq-3/ On the smoldering ruins of a hallowed past the Southern man, upheld by the love of a Southern woman, began to build anew. Together they wrought out the grandest chapter in American history. Though they had been overpowered, they refused to be degraded, Though cast down they refused to be destroyed. They swore they would not touch the pitch, and that pitch should not touch them. They defied the bayonets and laughed at statutes. Immutable as the rocks and glorious as the stars they stood for a white civilization and a white race, and today North Carolina holds in trust for the safety of the nation the purest Anglo-Saxon blood to be found on the American shores. And the nation is beginning to realize how well you served it when, in the hour of utter desolation you refused to be defiled…. The New York Sun, a paper of strong Northern prejudices, but edited with matchless scholarship, has declared that the Fifteenth Amendment was the most colossal blunder and crime in the history of the civilized world. Everywhere the people are beginning to recognize that the South, and only the South, is competent to deal with the race question, and the doctrine of 'Let the South alone’ is in the saddle in the very heart of the North. -Thomas Walter Bickett, Attorney General of North Carolina (and later its Governor), speaking at the dedication of the Confederate Soldiers’ Monument in Monroe, NC, July 4, 1910. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn91068476/1910-07-19/ed-1/seq-7/ -- source link