Defenders of statues of Confederate generals and politicians argue that to remove those statues would be to sanitize or ignore history. Newt Gingrich wrote recently that to take the statues down would be tantamount to “eliminating large parts of American history.”
This is simply not true. Those statues aren’t history, and in removing them, we would be more faithful to real history than in leaving them where they now stand. Historians favor the erection of monuments to identify the location of historical events. I spent much of my professional life tracking and visiting historic sites of many kinds, including everything from ancient ruins to Muslim, Jewish and Christian holy sites and Nazi extermination camps. Preserving and memorializing places like these, even if only with simple roadside monuments, is a good way to remember and learn from the past.
In our country, Civil War battlefields and other historic buildings and places are moving reminders of real history at the locations where important things happened. But statues of Confederate elites serve an entirely different purpose. Very few Americans can name a general currently serving. In addition, many can’t name the senators and members of Congress who represent them. This situation is not significantly different from how it was in the Southern states just before the Civil War.
In the highly charged political atmosphere of the 1850s, some common people in the South could name elected officials, but many others could not, being more concerned with their day-by-day efforts to make a living. As for the Civil War generals, most were living in obscurity then, unknown to the vast majority of their fellow citizens.
So why do we know the names of Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee today? We know them only because of their involvement in the Civil War. These were not important or famous Americans whose accomplishments before the war made them renowned and admired.
These were not builders, creators or visionaries who moved society forward. Instead, we know them because they committed treason against the United States of America, violating the oath they swore to bear allegiance to the United States, to defend it against its enemies, and to obey the orders of their superior officers, including the president of the United States.
Nor are they heroes. Southern politicians, clergy and newspaper editors convinced thousands of their fellow white citizens that the rebellion was a noble cause, as a result of which they joined to fight in a war that wasn’t about them but about the elites themselves, who profited so much from the free labor of enslaved Americans. Most of the white Southerners who went to war, whether they died or were wounded or not, were also victims.
Statues of Confederate generals and politicians are not memorials to high ideals or to the long history of the Southern states. They’re not even memorials to the four years of the Civil War. They were erected in the decades following the war as political propaganda to show continued defiance of the United States and to bolster the white-supremacist system those men had fought to maintain. The statues were power symbols to remind African-Americans that they were still under subjugation.
If we are going to have statues to represent the sad part of American history that we call the Civil War, let’s build statues to commemorate the victims, not the perpetrators — statues to honor the many generations of enslaved African-Americans and statues to honor the 750,000 people who died in a disastrous war because of the wrongdoing of others.
Take the Confederate statues down. Put some of them on battlefields or in museums, but remove them from the public spaces where the descendants of those enslaved Americans and others have to see them today.
Kent P. Jackson is a retired professor who lives in Orem, Utah.