FAQ Page

Confederate Memorials: Or Historical Literacy 

By Monica Swank and Kyle Kusuda

The Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Image Source.  

Q: What are Confederate Memorials?

Confederate memorials can take the shape of physical monuments, like statues, or honorific names given to spaces, buildings, or even ships.

Nominally, these memorials commemorate the Confederacy and those who fought for secession from the United States in the Civil War. Most of these memorials were created many years after the war between the 1890’s and 1910’s. The creation of these memorials can be divided into two major phases. The first, smaller phase, occurred immediately after Reconstruction. The second, most relevant phase, began with the formation of white supremacists organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1894, and the recodification and legitimization of Jim Crow policies by the Supreme Court in 1896.     

The earliest Civil War memorials were smaller in scale, both physically and topically. Following Reconstruction, Southerners dedicated monuments to their communities, listing things like local people who may have died or served in the war. These monuments also marked battlegrounds and related combat actions. These monuments usually took the form of a simple obelisk that could be commonly found in cemeteries. 

After Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the Supreme Court upheld racial segregation, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), an organization dedicated to the strengthening of Jim Crow policies, began to organize the building of monuments and development of curriculum that promoted the Lost Cause ideology. The UDC purposefully pushed for Confederate monuments to be built in public and civic spaces. Unlike earlier monuments, statues created during this era were often made in the images of soldiers and generals like Robert E. Lee, and took on more explicitly martial and heroic characteristics.  

Q: What is the ”Lost Cause?”

The Lost Cause is a popular myth which arose in the south just after the Civil War. While it is a slightly amorphous idea, proponents of the Lost Cause focus primarily on the notion that the war was not precipitated by the issue of slavery; rather, it was a war of northern aggression that sought to violate the ideals of states’ rights and self-determination, ideals which the south heroically defended. Additionally, the Lost Cause plays down the brutality of slavery, sometimes going as far as asserting that slaves enjoyed being slaves and happily accepted their position in the hierarchy of a slave-society. These ideas underpinned the Jim Crow south and the reestablishment of a racial hierarchy bound in law.

Of course, the ideas found in the narrative of the Lost Cause run counter to basic and readily available facts. Even so, these ideas spread rapidly through the help of popular literature and organizations like the UDC who pushed this historical disinformation into school curriculum. 

Going into the 20th century, the Lost Cause myth and honoring of confederate leaders was also perpetuated for political motivations. An example of this includes President Woodrow Wilson’s naming of major military bases after confederate leaders as a means of appeasing and rallying his southern voters. 

Q: Why are Confederate memorials being challenged?

Confederate memorials have faced unprecedented challenges since the 2017 “Unite the Right rally,” in which neo-nazis, Ku Klux Klan members, and others of the far right protested the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. The events culminated in the killing of counter-protestor Heather Heyer and the injury of many others.

Events like these and the general rise of far-right extremism in the United States has forced many Americans to reckon with our nation’s battle with systemic racism and its history. A growth in historical literacy has illuminated the true context surrounding these memorials, a context always understood by black Americans. Current challenges to confederate memorials are mounted on the firm historical basis that they were built as part of a campaign to rehabilitate the old white supremacist order in a post slavery context. 

Defenders of these memorials claim they are part of our heritage, and their removal would be a destruction of history. This position disregards the intent of these memorials to convey a very specific type of history, one that projects the white supremacist ideology of the Lost Cause into public and civil spaces. In his article, “The Problem with ‘Confederate’ Monuments on Our Heritage Landscape,” William Lees points out that most confederate memorials have no explicit connection to the area in which they are placed (1004). They often do not mark a specific battleground or event that occurred in the area. This calls into question their value as communicators of history. 

Outro

Confederate memorials, in their romanticization of the Confederacy, have shown to be rallying points of hate and symbols of racist factions in our current time. This reminds us that the ideology behind these statues is not relegated to the past, but is a part of a living history we must face.   

While there are Confederate memorials that still stand across the country, many steps have been taken to begin the process of removal. Created in 2022, the Congressional Naming Commission assesses Defense Department items that celebrate or commemorate the Confederacy at West Point as well as the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD. The committee has also re-examined two U.S. Navy vessels and 9 Army bases that previously honored Confederate soldiers and have recommended them new names. This commission’s role and recommendations in removing Confederate names and imagery aids our nation in confronting its racist past. The new names for the Navy vessels and Army bases reflect ideals of inclusion and the diversity of our service members.

Podcast

https://share.descript.com/view/A9dNRSZPVG1

Sources

Blight, David W. “Europe in 1989, America in 2020, and the Death of the Lost Cause.” The New Yorker, 1 July 2020, www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/europe-in-1989-america-in-2020-and-the-death-of-the-lost-cause.

Cameron, Chris. “How Army Bases in the South Were Named for Defeated Confederates.” The New York Times, 2 Dec. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/us/politics/army-base-names-south-confederates.html.

Chamberlain, Adam, and Alixandra B. Yanus. “Monuments as Mobilization? The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Memorialization of the Lost Cause.” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 102, no. 1, Oct. 2020, pp. 125–39, https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12875.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “What This Cruel War Was Over.” The Atlantic, 22 June 2015, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-this-cruel-war-was-over/396482/.

Cooper, Helene. “New Names Recommended for 9 Army Bases That Honor Confederate Leaders.” The New York Times, 24 May 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/05/24/us/politics/army-bases-confederate-names.html?smid=url-share.

Graham, David A. “The United States of Confederate America.” The Atlantic, 5 Oct. 2022, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/confederate-monuments-survey-race-religion-education-divide/671639/.

Hale, G. E. “The Lost Cause and the Meaning of History.” OAH Magazine of History, vol. 27, no. 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 13–17, https://doi.org/10.1093/oahmag/oas047.

Holpuch, Amanda. “West Point to Remove Confederate Monuments from Its Campus.” The New York Times, 24 Dec. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/12/24/us/west-point-confederate-symbols.html.

Lees, William. “The Problem with ‘Confederate’ Monuments on Our Heritage Landscape.” Social Science Quarterly, vol. 102, no. 3, Apr. 2021, https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.12962.

Parker, Alison M. “Opinion | When White Women Wanted a Monument to Black ‘Mammies.’” The New York Times, 6 Feb. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/06/opinion/sunday/confederate-monuments-mammy.html.

Schmall, Emily. “Stripping Confederate Ties, the U.S. Navy Renames Two Vessels.” The New York Times, 11 Mar. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/03/11/us/navy-ship-confederate-robert-smalls.html.

Smith, Clint. “Why Confederate Lies Live On.” The Atlantic, 10 May 2021, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/06/why-confederate-lies-live-on/618711/.

TEDx Talks. “A Southern Historian’s Lost Cause | Roy Wisecarver | TEDxUAMonticello.” YouTube, YouTube Video, 12 Apr. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7y3pJCufFU.

Vox. “How Southern Socialites Rewrote Civil War History.” YouTube, YouTube Video, 25 Oct. 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOkFXPblLpU.