Statues seem to be the news in the aftermath of Charlottesville 2017. Two of our finest historians recently grappled with the issue of removal of statues honoring those who attempted to destroy the United States of America (1861-1865). The issue of equating the removal of those hate-symbols from prominent places with the removal of Founding Fathers (Washington, Jefferson, et al.) is specious nonsense (a daily specialty of the Traitor-in-Chief). None of the Founding Fathers participated in a treasonous act. That cannot be said for Jefferson Davis all of the way down to the Johnny Rebs in the ranks. As one of our greatest historians, Carl Becker, wrote that "...history is what the present chooses to remember about the past." And in this blog, every man woman and child who supported the attempt to destroy the United States of America right up to this moment is a T-R-A-I-T-O-R. If that is the (fair & balanced) historical truth, so be it.
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[1] First Take: Eric Foner On Statue Removal
[2] Second Take: Jon Meacham On Statue Removal
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Confederate Statues And "Our" History
By Eric Foner
TagCrowd cloud of the following piece of writing
President Trump’s Thursday morning tweet lamenting that the removal of Confederate statues tears apart “the history and culture of our great country” raises numerous questions, among them: Who is encompassed in that “our”?
Mr. Trump may not know it, but he has entered a debate that goes back to the founding of the republic. Should American nationality be based on shared values, regardless of race, ethnicity and national origin, or should it rest on “blood and soil,” to quote the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, VA, whom Trump has at least partly embraced?
Neither Mr. Trump nor the Charlottesville marchers invented the idea that the United States is essentially a country for white persons. The very first naturalization law, enacted in 1790 to establish guidelines for how immigrants could become American citizens, limited the process to “white” persons.
What about nonwhites born in this country? Before the Civil War, citizenship was largely defined by individual states. Some recognized blacks born within their boundaries as citizens, but many did not. As far as national law was concerned, the question was resolved by the Supreme Court in the infamous Dred Scott decision of 1857. Blacks, wrote Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (a statue of whom was removed from public display in Baltimore this week), were and would always be aliens in America.
This was the law of the land when the Civil War broke out in 1861. This is the tradition that the Southern Confederacy embodied and sought to preserve and that Mr. Trump, inadvertently or not, identifies with by equating the Confederacy with “our history and culture.”
Many Americans, of course, rejected this racial definition of American nationality. Foremost among them were abolitionists, male and female, black and white, who put forward an alternative definition, known today as birthright citizenship. Anybody born in the United States, they insisted, was a citizen, and all citizens should enjoy equality before the law. Abolitionists advocated not only the end of slavery, but also the incorporation of the freed people as equal members of American society.
In the period of Reconstruction that followed the war, this egalitarian vision was, for the first time, written into our laws and Constitution. But the advent of multiracial democracy in the Southern states inspired a wave of terrorist opposition by the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups, antecedents of the Klansmen and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville. One by one the Reconstruction governments were overthrown, and in the next generation white supremacy again took hold in the South.
When Mr. Trump identifies statues commemorating Confederate leaders as essential parts of “our” history and culture, he is honoring that dark period. Like all monuments, these statues say a lot more about the time they were erected than the historical era they evoke. The great waves of Confederate monument building took place in the 1890s, as the Confederacy was coming to be idealized as the so-called Lost Cause and the Jim Crow system was being fastened upon the South, and in the 1920s, the height of black disenfranchisement, segregation and lynching. The statues were part of the legitimation of this racist regime and of an exclusionary definition of America.
The historian Carl Becker wrote that history is what the present chooses to remember about the past. Historical monuments are, among other things, an expression of power — an indication of who has the power to choose how history is remembered in public places.
If the issue were simply heritage, why are there no statues of Lieutenant General James Longstreet, one of General Robert E. Lee’s key lieutenants? Not because of poor generalship; indeed, Longstreet warned Lee against undertaking Pickett’s Charge, which ended the battle of Gettysburg. Longstreet’s crime came after the Civil War: He endorsed black male suffrage and commanded the Metropolitan Police of New Orleans, which in 1874 engaged in armed combat with white supremacists seeking to seize control of the state government. Longstreet is not a symbol of white supremacy; therefore he was largely ineligible for commemoration by those who long controlled public memory in the South.
As all historians know, forgetting is as essential to public understandings of history as remembering. Confederate statues do not simply commemorate “our” history, as the president declared. They honor one part of our past. Where are the statues in the former slave states honoring the very large part of the Southern population (beginning with the four million slaves) that sided with the Union rather than the Confederacy? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery or to the hundreds of black lawmakers who during Reconstruction served in positions ranging from United States senator to justice of the peace to school board official? Excluding blacks from historical recognition has been the other side of the coin of glorifying the Confederacy.
We have come a long way from the days of the Dred Scott decision. But our public monuments have not kept up. The debate unleashed by Charlottesville is a healthy re-examination of the question “Who is an American?” And “our” history and culture is far more complex, diverse and inclusive than the president appears to realize. # # #
[Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of American History at Columbia University (NY). Foner's most recent book is Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History (2017). See all of Foner's books here. He received a BA summa cum laude (history) from Columbia University, another BA (history) from Oxford University (UK), and a PhD (history) from Columbia University; Richard Hofstadter chaired Foner's dissertation committee.]
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Why Lee Should Go, And Washington Should Stay
By Jon Meacham
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I grew up on Missionary Ridge, a Civil War battlefield overlooking Chattanooga, TN. In my childhood we could still find minie balls from the battle in which a young Union soldier, Arthur MacArthur, the father of Douglas, received the Medal of Honor. The war’s relics were real and tangible — I still have a few on my desk as I write — and so were the war’s perennial and tragic consequences.
I remember the smoke rising from downtown riots in 1980 after an all-white jury acquitted two Ku Klux Klansmen in the drive-by shotgun shootings of four black women. (A third Klan defendant was convicted only of reduced charges.) It was a stunning verdict. “Good God,” my grandfather, a retired judge, remarked of the jurors. “They didn’t let the facts get in the way.”
Facts, as John Adams said, are stubborn things — and, for Southerners, they are also often uncomfortable. If we don’t face them forthrightly, we risk living in worlds of fantasy and fable, subject not to reason, the greatest of gifts, but susceptible to passion, the most dangerous of forces. In such alternative realities, the Civil War was not about slavery but about what neo-Confederates refer to as “heritage.”
So let’s talk facts. From Baltimore to New Orleans, cities across the South are removing statues of Confederate figures from public property — memorials often built as emblems of defiance to federal authority in the post-Reconstruction period and in the Warren Court years of the 1950s and ’60s. The white-supremacist and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, VA, this month was occasioned by the city’s decision to take down a Robert E. Lee statue.
In the ensuing chaos, President Trump spoke of the “many sides” of the debate and defended the neo-Confederate view. “I wonder,” Mr. Trump said, “is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really have to ask yourself, where does it stop?”
To me, the answer to Mr. Trump’s question begins with a straightforward test: Was the person to whom a monument is erected on public property devoted to the American experiment in liberty and self-government? Washington and Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were. Each owned slaves; each was largely a creature of his time and place on matters of race. Yet each also believed in the transcendent significance of the nation, and each was committed to the journey toward “a more perfect Union.”
By definition, the Confederate hierarchy fails that test. Those who took up arms against the Union were explicitly attempting to stop the American odyssey. While we should judge each individual on the totality of their lives (defenders of Lee, for instance, point to his attempts to be a figure of reconciliation after the war), the forces of hate and of exclusion long ago made Confederate imagery their own. Monuments in public places of veneration to those who believed it their duty to fight the Union have no place in the Union of the 21st century — a view with which Lee himself might have agreed. “I think it wiser,” he wrote in 1866, “not to keep open the sores of war.”
Of course, Lee lost that struggle, too, and my home state is dealing with just this issue at the moment. In 1973, the Sons of Confederate Veterans raised money to install a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Southern cavalry commander and early leader of the Klan, in the state capitol.
It’s ahistoric to judge figures from the past by our own moral standards. Yet we need not contort ourselves to find Forrest wanting as an object of veneration. He was condemned for outrages and atrocities in his own time. One example: the massacre at Fort Pillow in April 1864, in western Tennessee, where Forrest’s men “cruelly butchered every colored soldier they could lay hands upon,” according to a report in The Chicago Tribune not long after.
More than a century and a half on, the battle over Forrest’s memory here may offer lessons for others. Taken as a whole, my state was always ambivalent about the Confederacy. In February 1861 a majority of its voters opposed a proposed secession convention, with pro-Union sentiment particularly strong in the more mountainous eastern region of the state. Then came Fort Sumter and the federal call to fight the secessionists, and secession carried the day at last.
By the end of the war, 120,000 Tennesseans had fought for the Confederacy, but a significant number, 31,000, took up arms for the Union. As historians have noted, that meant Tennessee alone provided the federal forces with more soldiers than all other seceded states combined.
Given its history during the Confederate era, then, Tennessee has the capacity to be more reasonable in the neo-Confederate one. According to a 2016 law, the removal of a monument like the one to Forrest requires either an act of the General Assembly or a two-thirds vote of the state’s historical commission, most of whom are appointed by the governor. And the position of Governor Bill Haslam, a popular Republican, is clear: It’s time for the Forrest bust to go. “I don’t believe Nathan Bedford Forrest should be one of the individuals we honor at the Capitol,” he said. “That history should be put in a museum, not in a place of honor.”
“There will never be peace in Tennessee,” Union General William T. Sherman once said, “until Forrest is dead.” Like his more celebrated remark that war is hell, Sherman was onto something. The good news in this grim period of 2017 is that reasonable Southerners may be ready to give peace a chance. # # #
[Jon Meacham is a Visiting Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University (TN). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and of the Society of American Historians. Meacham won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2008 biography American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House. See other books by Jon Meacham here. He received a BA summa cum laude (English) from the University of the South (TN).]
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