Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz is an acclaimed member of those who write and teach history from the mid 20th century to our present day. He offers some powerful words about US historical monuments. However, that said, Wilentz equivocates on the removal of those Confederates who attempted to defeat the United States of America (1861-1865) as well as those figures who were, and are, symbols of white supremacy and racial animus. This wobbly conclusion does not bring clarity to the struggle against divisiveness in the US of 2020. If this is (fair & balanced) disappointment with a failure of historical judgment,, so be it.
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"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
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Monuments To A Complicated Past
By Sean Wilentz
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On the evening of July 9, 1776, after a public reading of the newly adopted Declaration of Independence, some 40 Americans gathered at Bowling Green in lower Manhattan, lashed ropes to a statue of an imperious King George III on horseback and pulled it to the ground, where it shattered. The patriots melted down the shards and made them into musket balls to fight the American Revolution.
The building of Confederate statues and monuments began as a counterrevolution in historical memory with deep political significance. Starting in the 1890s, hundreds of monuments appeared across the South in honor of the defeated Confederacy. Ostensibly designed to glorify the “Lost Cause” of secession, the monuments’ actual purpose was to celebrate the violent overthrow of Reconstruction and the re-subjugation of the formerly enslaved and their progeny into the economic peonage and racial caste system of Jim Crow. For more than a century, those fraudulent, oppressive monuments stood undisturbed, until the removal of statues of Robert E. Lee in New Orleans and Charlottesville, VA, in 2017 touched off a major controversy. Since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, that controversy has exploded into an escalating crisis of national self-understanding.
At one extreme stands President Trump, who has proclaimed himself a champion of the disgraced Confederate symbols and lashed out at all who would remove them as unhinged leftists out to “desecrate our monuments, our beautiful monuments.” To Mr. Trump, who has weaponized the Lost Cause mystique for his own purposes, an attack on Confederate symbols is no different from an attack on America itself. His ignorant rendering of history exalts the defenders of slavery who fired on the Stars and Stripes to instigate the country’s bloodiest war. He equates their treason with American valor.
At the other extreme are scattered bands of nihilists, anarchists and simply uninformed protesters who have defaced or destroyed monuments dedicated to Americans, from revolutionaries like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to antislavery leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant—and even, in one incident, the radical abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier.
No less than Mr. Trump, these desperadoes equate the southern “Slave Power” that fomented secession with the rest of the nation. They, however, see the American republic at its core as a racist empire of violence and greed, and consider its professions of equality and democracy nothing but mendacious covers for white supremacy. In this long debunked understanding, recently refurbished as radical truth-telling, knocking down King George’s statue in 1776 was really just a blow to protect slavery; and in the Civil War, one set of racists defeated another before the two sides made up and joined hands to dominate the world.
Between the extremes, a majority of Americans now rejects Mr. Trump’s embrace of the Confederacy and sympathizes with removing monuments to slavery and racism. Given history’s complexities and contradictions, though, where should we draw the line?
In the starkest contradiction, Thomas Jefferson, the revolutionary who pronounced the American democratic ideal as the self-evident truth “that all men are created equal,’’ also bought, sold and exploited human beings his entire adult life. On one occasion, he wrote racist speculations about the inferiority of Africans at the same time that he denounced enslaving blacks as an indefensible offense to the Almighty. Should Jefferson’s image therefore be spray painted and trashed, as it was last week in Portland, OR, as an embodiment of racist evil, little different from Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee? Or should the spirit of democratic equality that his image proclaims be taken seriously, as Martin Luther King did when he quoted the Declaration of Independence at length at the March on Washington in 1963?
Intentions as well as history help to clarify these matters of memory. There can be no doubt that statues of Davis, Lee, John C. Calhoun and others are tributes to slavery, secession and racial domination. They were built for precisely those reasons. They have no other possible meaning, apart from transparent euphemisms about states’ rights and federal tyranny.
But the same is not true of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, DC, with its paeans to universal enlightenment, equality and religious freedom. It is not true of the Lincoln Memorial, a living monument that for decades has been a touchstone for the nation’s freedom struggles.
Ulysses S. Grant, for his part, was raised in an abolitionist family; when he received a slave from his slaveholding father-in-law, Grant immediately released him from bondage. Those who know little about Grant hold this against him. Instead, we should honor him for crushing the Confederacy and then, as president, breaking up the Ku Klux Klan, advancing the 15th Amendment and signing the Civil Rights Act of 1875—the first of its kind and the forerunner of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Andrew Jackson is heavily and accurately criticized for his Indian removal policies, although historians still dispute how much those policies arose from tragedy, intention or previous federal policies. But no monument to Jackson celebrates the Trail of Tears or the fact that he owned slaves. He is honored for two lasting accomplishments. As a general, he repelled a massive British invasion at New Orleans in 1815; and as president, he secured the Union by standing up to Calhoun and his militant proslavery supporters, the forerunners of the secessionist slavocracy, during the Nullification Crisis in 1832-33. Somewhere, Calhoun’s shade, embittered by the decision to remove his monument in Charleston, SC, is smiling grimly at the attacks on his greatest antagonist.
Unless we can learn from history the difference between persons who preach and practice evil and those who at best imperfectly extricate themselves from evil yet achieve great good, we might as well cease building monuments to anyone or anything, and cease teaching history except as dogma. Unless we can outgrow the conception of history as a simplistic battle between darkness and light—unless we can seek understanding of what those in the past struggled with, as we hope posterity will afford to us—we will be the captives of arrogant self-delusions and false innocence.
The past offers lessons about how to handle great shifts in perception as well as power. Although the destruction of political symbols goes back a long way in our history, the current attacks on Confederate monuments have a specific origin in events that occurred during the Civil War. Those incidents involved the destruction of the emblems and structures of the slaveholders’ regime and their replacement by new symbols honoring the Americans who fought against racial oppression.
One powerful example occurred in May 1861. Following Virginia’s decision to join the Confederacy, Union troops seized the Arlington plantation and mansion owned by Robert E. Lee, whose wife had inherited it as a member of the Custis family, related by marriage to George Washington. The site was of military importance, offering an unobstructed view of Washington across the Potomac.
General Montgomery Meigs, the Union’s quartermaster general, considered Lee an abject traitor and was determined that neither he nor his family would ever inhabit the place again. On May 13, 1864, a year and a half after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he and Meigs inspected the Union military encampment at Lee’s mansion. Meigs won Lincoln’s approval for using the plantation as a burial ground for Union soldiers and for constructing a Freedman’s Village on the grounds, complete with frame houses, schools and churches, where some 1,500 former slaves soon settled and farmed the land.
Thus was born Arlington National Cemetery, hallowed American ground expropriated from the leading general of the slaveholders’ rebellion. Meigs commissioned the creation of monuments and statues there, the first ones to memorialize those who sacrificed their lives for what Lincoln called ”government of the people, by the people and for the people.” In this way, he erased the soiled legacy of its previous Confederate owner.
The revolution in historical memory that we are experiencing today will remain incomplete unless we can build something new upon what has been undone. We might start by creating new monuments to the hundreds of men, women and children who devoted and often sacrificed their lives to the cause of racial equality. This ought to be done with deliberation and accountability, with public and private support, at the local as well as the national level, but it ought to be undertaken as soon as possible. In a century or two, some of these heroes may appear less than perfect, even highly imperfect, for reasons that we cannot foresee. But they deserve to be honored now and will deserve to be honored then. ###
[R.(obert) Sean Wilentz is the George Henry Davis 1886 professor of American History at Princeton University., where he has taught since 1979. He received a BA (history) from Columbia University (NYC) and received another (also history) from Oxford University )UK) as a Kellett Fellow. Wilentz then received a PhD (history) from Yale University (CT). In addition, he won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award (OAH, 1985), the Annual Book Award (Society for the History of the Early American Republic, 1985), and the Albert J. Beveridge Award (AHA, 1984) for his first book: Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working Class: 1788-1850 (1984). His most recent book is No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures) (2018). See other Wilentz books here.]
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