Why Tearing Down Confederate Monuments Is Not “Erasing History”

In case you haven’t already heard, the United States has a lot of monuments honoring the Confederate States of America, as well as the individuals most closely associated with it, such as Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson. According to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), there are currently 780 monuments and statues across the United States honoring the Confederacy and people associated with it.

According to The Washington Post, about one in every twelve Confederate monuments is in a Union state, which is absolutely baffling when you consider that the Union actually won the war. My home state of Indiana, which was a Union state through and through, currently has several Confederate monuments. Even Massachusetts, one of the most vociferously pro-Union states, had a Confederate monument until just a few years ago.

Most people reading this are probably already well enough aware that there is a great deal of controversy over these monuments. Many people (myself included) believe these monuments should be taken down. Defenders of the monuments, however, insist that removing them is “erasing history.” In this article, I intend to show how this insistence is a form of false framing. Taking down Confederate monuments is objectively not “erasing history” at all, but rather simply refusing to glorify people who fought to defend the institution of slavery.

What a monument means

First of all, building colossal monuments is not how you make sure that a historical event or person is remembered. No one is building colossal monuments to Adolf Hitler to make sure the horrible deeds he committed are remembered. You remember a historical event by writing about it, teaching students about it in schools, and preserving historical artifacts related to it in museums.

This is the reason why, instead of building monuments to Hitler, we write books about him, make students learn about him in history class, and preserve artifacts related to him in museums like the United States Holocaust Museum. These are all perfectly appropriate ways of making sure future generations remember the horrible things Adolf Hitler did. Erecting colossal statues of Hitler depicting him in a glorified manner is not an appropriate way of making sure future generations remember the horrible things he did.

Building monuments is not how you remember someone or something; it is how you honor and glorify them. Confederate monuments are not around because the people who built them wanted to make sure people knew about the Confederacy’s existence; they are around because the people who built them wanted to glorify the Confederacy and exalt the racist ideology behind it.

If you have a monument to the Confederacy standing in front of your courthouse or your school, that does not just tell people, “The Confederacy is a part of our history.” It tells people, “The Confederacy is a part of our history that we are proud of.” That tells people, “We are proud that our ancestors tried to break away from the United States so they could preserve their beloved institution of slavery.” That statue tells people, “Our ancestors were white supremacists and we are proud of them because we still support white supremacy today.”

ABOVE: Photograph of a Confederate statue in front of a courthouse in Louisiana

This may not be the message you think that a Confederate statue sends, but it is the message that the statue actually sends to most people and it is the message that the people who originally erected these monuments clearly intended to send. Some monuments are even inscribed with messages explicitly endorsing the cause of the Confederacy to defend slavery. For instance, a monument erected in Abbeville, South Carolina, in 1906 is inscribed with the following epitaph, explicitly declaring that the Confederacy’s mission was right:

“The world shall yet decide, in truth’s clear, far-off light,
that the soldiers who wore the gray, and died with Lee, were in the right.”

It is worth noting that the vast majority of Confederate monuments were erected during the twentieth century—long after the Civil War—by supporters of segregation and Jim Crow laws who opposed extending civil rights to non-whites.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has tabulated the dates when Confederate memorials were established. The largest spike in the erections of Confederate monuments came in the early twentieth century when Confederate soldiers were getting old and starting to die off. Curiously, though, the establishment of Confederate memorials gradually died off as the last of the Confederates died off. Between 1944 and 1947, there were no Confederate memorials established at all that the SPLC was able to keep track of.

The building of Confederate memorials picked back up when the Civil Rights movement began in the 1950s. Fascinatingly, immediately after the Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown vs. the Board of Education in 1954, there was a huge spike in schools being named after Confederate generals. Then, corresponding with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, there was an even larger spike in the construction of Confederate memorials.

ABOVE: Chart from Wikimedia Commons based on data from the Southern Poverty Law Center showing the establishment dates of Confederate memorials.

The true cause of the Confederacy

Now, at this point some people have probably already begun to use the old excuse that the Confederacy was really about “states’ rights” and not about slavery. The Confederates themselves adamantly disagree. Mississippi’s Declaration of Causes for Secession explicitly and unambiguously states near the very beginning:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”

You cannot get any more explicit than that.

In the infamous “Cornerstone Speech,” delivered on March 21, 1861 at the Athenaeum in Savannah Georgia, Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederate States of America, unambiguously declared:

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

“This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind—from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity.”

Again, you cannot possibly get any more explicit than this. This is Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederate States of America, clearly and explicitly stating in a public speech that the entire foundation of the Confederacy is the idea that all blacks are naturally intended to be enslaved. He furthermore declares that anyone who continues to think that blacks do not deserve to be enslaved are fanatical extremists and delusionally insane. This is white supremacy in its most blatant, unvarnished form.

In other words, according to the Confederates themselves, slavery was the primary reason for their secession from the Union. Anyone who says the Confederates were not fighting to defend slavery is either misinformed or trying to whitewash history.

ABOVE: Photograph of Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederate States of America, who made it very clear in his “Cornerstone Speech” that the Confederacy was all about preserving slavery

“Heritage”?

Now some people insist that Confederate monuments are supposed to represent their “heritage.” This is silly, since the Confederate States of America only existed for four years and it represents only a tiny fraction of Southern history. Let me use Virginia as an example. Jamestown, Virginia, the very first English colony in the American South, was founded in 1607. The Fifth Virginia Convention declared Virginia a free and independent state on May 15, 1776.

The Constitution of the United States was officially ratified on June 21, 1788. Virginia seceded from the United States on April 17, 1861. Virginia was recaptured by the Union in April 1865 and it formally rejoined the Union in 1870. That means that Virginia has existed for 412 years. For 222 of those years, it has been a state in the United States of America. For 169 of those years, it was an English colony. It was only part of the Confederacy for four years.

The Confederacy itself only existed from 1861 until 1865. It only existed for four years. Why do people insist on celebrating those four years when the Confederacy existed as “their heritage”? There is much more to Southern history than just the Confederacy, just like there is so much more to German history than Nazi regime.

Southerners could find all kinds of other things to celebrate about their heritage other than the Confederacy; all they need to do is look. For instance, did you know that one of the first modern anesthesias, the first electric hearing aid, and the first tow truck were all invented by Southerners?

• One of the first modern anesthesias was diethyl ether, which was first used for surgery on a human patient in 1842 by the doctor Crawford Long (lived 1815 – 1878), who was from Danielsville, Georgia.
• The akouphone, the first electric hearing aid, was invented by Miller Reese Hutchison (lived 1876 – 1944), who was from Montrose, Alabama, in around 1895.
• The tow truck was invented by Ernest Holmes Sr. (lived 1883 – 1945), who was from Hobbs Island, Alabama, in 1916.

If you want to celebrate “Southern heritage,” why don’t you celebrate these inventions and others like them, instead of celebrating the Confederacy?

ABOVE: Advertisement from c. 1902 for the akouphone, the first electric hearing aid, invented in around 1895 by Miller Reese Hutchison

Conclusion

Taking down Confederate monuments is not in any way about us trying to “erase history,” but rather about us not wanting to honor and glorify people who fought to defend the abhorrent practice of slavery. If we take down Confederate monuments, no one is going to suddenly forget that the Confederacy existed; all that will happen is we will stop glorifying it.

There is a certain irony in all this. People claim that taking down Confederate monuments is “erasing history,” but, in reality, it is the monuments themselves that are distorting history. The monuments are distorting history by portraying an inaccurate and glorified image of the Confederacy. So long as people see these monuments and think they represent a true image of the Confederate South, we are substituting an alternative narrative in the place of real history.

We do not even have to destroy the monuments. Instead, we can simply move them to museums where they can be put on display as historical artifacts, with signs putting them in their proper historical context. In a museum, these monuments would no longer be sending a message of support for white supremacy, but would instead be seen as relics of a past era.