{"id":1063,"date":"2010-07-05T22:59:36","date_gmt":"2010-07-06T03:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1063"},"modified":"2010-07-06T22:00:30","modified_gmt":"2010-07-07T03:00:30","slug":"the-case-of-the-missing-monuments-or-none-dare-call-it-treason-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=1063","title":{"rendered":"The Case of the Missing Monuments, or None Dare Call It Treason"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u00a0(Published in the Daily Record<\/em> July 6, 2010)\u00a0<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Recently my travels took me through several Southern states on US Route 1, which runs up the Eastern seaboard from Key West.\u00a0 As with most of the highways that had been locally named \u201ctrails\u201d but changed to the standard US numbering system around 1926<\/a>, pre-existing names also continue to be attached to parts of US-1, and incorporated into the signage.\u00a0 For example, sometimes US-1 is the Dixie Highway, sometimes the Federal Highway.\u00a0 Nothing wrong with that. But I found myself taking exception when I discovered that long stretches of it are named the Jefferson Davis Highway.\u00a0 Now, there is much federal money invested in this road,[1]<\/a> some of which I saw used in construction projects I passed.\u00a0 And Davis is not being commemorated for his service to the federal<\/em> government (in the U.S. Congress or in the Franklin Pierce administration<\/a>): he is remembered primarily for having been the president of the Confederacy<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
Confederate Monument & Stars and Bars<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And the last time I checked, the Confederates were rebels against and traitors to the federal government.\u00a0 (Levying war against the United States is treason, under Art. III, \u00a7 3 of the Constitution<\/a>.)\u00a0 Davis himself was actually charged with treason after he was captured in 1865, though President Andrew Johnson, exiting his office, granted Davis a pardon<\/a>, so that Johnson\u2019s successor Ulysses Grant could not prosecute him.\u00a0 But what does it mean that the man is honored at all?<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My bemusement grew as I visited the state capitals of South and North Carolina and Virginia, all of which also lie astride US-1.\u00a0 The overwhelming impression one would get, from touring the capitol grounds in the Carolinas and looking at the monumentation, is that: a) the Civil War was a glorious affair, whose causes for some reason no one remembers; b) the South seems to have won the Civil War, though the details are vague; c) there never was such a thing as slavery; d) there was never a significant African American or Native American population in these states; and e) very little happened after the Civil War except for other wars, to which the gallant South sent (white) heroes.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There is one monument among the 27 surrounding the Columbia, SC capitol that explicitly acknowledges African Americans.\u00a0 The place of honor in front of the capitol, to be sure, is given over to a Confederate soldier on a pillar, close to a flagpole from which the Stars and Bars flutter.\u00a0 (It took a well-publicized fight in 2000 to remove them from the capitol dome.)\u00a0 But halfway between there and the Strom Thurmond memorial, you can see the African American History Monument.\u00a0 It was placed there in 2001 only after a colossal political struggle<\/a>.\u00a0 And its promoters were not permitted to acknowledge any specific person, though there have been many nationally-prominent African Americans to emerge from the Palmetto State, including Dizzy Gillespie and Mary McLeod Bethune<\/a>.\u00a0 Out of the 12 monuments on the grounds<\/a> there that depict the human form, this monument is the only one with non-white faces.\u00a0 (And I\u2019m not even counting the Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee highway monuments.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In North Carolina the exclusion is even more profound.\u00a0 On the grounds are 14 monuments.\u00a0 Score: Whites 14, Others 0. <\/a>\u00a0Confederate figures depicted: 4.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Virginia came late (2008) to the notion that African American history deserved mention in the monumentation around a state capitol.\u00a0 But when they did it, they did it much better.\u00a0 For one thing, there are only six monuments altogether.\u00a0 The Civil Rights Memorial is thus far more prominent.\u00a0 And the Memorial is focused on a particular event, the Virginia lawsuit that, together with cases from four other states, became Brown v. Board of Education<\/em>, and on certain individuals, including the two lawyers who brought the suit, Oliver Hill and Spottiswood Robinson.\u00a0 (It\u2019s always gratifying to see monuments commemorating lawyers.)\u00a0 The positioning is a bit weird, two monuments down from Stonewall Jackson.\u00a0 But the monument at least acknowledges the existence of a deep problem in Virginia\u2019s history, and some of the efforts to address it.\u00a0 And though it is the object of some competition from the one true Civil War monument, the aforementioned Jackson, it is not drowned out by Confederate and Jim Crow nostalgia, as is the African American History Monument in South Carolina.\u00a0 And just the fact that it exists distinguishes Virginia from North Carolina.<\/p>\n

\n
\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
Civil Rights Memorial: One Face<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n
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\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
Civil Rights Memorial Plaque<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 That said, large stretches of \u201cJefferson Davis\u201d Highway are superimposed on US-1 in Virginia.\u00a0 So the Old Dominion State is hardly free of inappropriate Confederate commemoration.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 History, we are told, is written by the victors; apparently there\u2019s an exception for the South, where the commemorated history barely includes the victory, and consistently omits slavery, the casus belli<\/em>.\u00a0 This peculiar history written by the vanquished apparently extends to the law. In this Cloud Cuckoo Land of Confederate commemoration, it does not seem to matter that the CSA came about through treason, secession being illegal, and existed primarily and fundamentally to perpetuate one of the worst human rights abuses in history.\u00a0 (There were 4 million slaves in the South at the outset of the Civil War<\/a>.)\u00a0 The federal government poured out lives and treasure to establish that secession was illegal, and that slavery must be abolished.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is all very well to strive for reconciliation, but there is no justification for pretending that the sides were morally or legally equivalent.\u00a0 Even the truism that one man\u2019s rebel is another man\u2019s freedom fighter applies, if at all, only at the outset of a conflict.\u00a0 If the dispute has been settled against the insurgents by war, the pejorative label of rebel becomes more objectively certain, and arguments to the contrary more frivolous.\u00a0 As Ulysses Grant wrote of the purported legitimacy of secession: \u201cThe right of a state to secede from the Union [has been] settled forever by the highest tribunal \u2013 arms \u2013 that man can resort to.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And that truth explains the fundamental perversity of the inscription on yet another statue, this in the middle of the campus at Chapel Hill: \u201cTo the sons of the University<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Chapel Hill Monument<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0who\u00a0entered the War of 1861-65 in answer to the call of their country … \u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 With all due respect, it wasn\u2019t a country.\u00a0 It tried to be one, but failed.\u00a0 And it tried to be one first and foremost in order to preserve slavery, a system that should have evoked nothing but shame in its defenders.\u00a0 Those \u201csons of the University\u201d gave their devotion and their lives for worse than nothing.\u00a0 Their cause was so unworthy, their valor ought to forfeit any claim to commemoration, in statutes, on highway signs, or anywhere else.\u00a0 Especially while all the offsetting monuments \u2013 to the slaves, to the Underground Railway, to those who fought Jim Crow, to prominent descendants of slaves \u2013 are mysteriously missing.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A hundred and fifty years after the fact, we have apparently not learned that lesson.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a>. Typical federal funding for highways in one year alone can be seen in http:\/\/www.fhwa.dot.gov\/ohim\/hwytaxes\/2008\/f106.cfm<\/a> .<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a>. Quoted in http:\/\/jimostrowski.com\/articles\/secession.html<\/a> , Note 93, citing D. Tipton, Nullification and Interposition in American Political Thought (University of New Mexico Press, 1969) at 50.\u00a0 (Citation to Ostrowski should not imply agreement with his arguments.)<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cruising US-1 through the South (aka the Jefferson Davis Highway in places), way too much Confederate commemoration, way too fuzzy on actual history, and virtually no offsetting commemoration of slavery and its aftermath.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[1056,1041,1062,1049,1072,1066,330,1068,1069,1044,1061,1070,1060,1071,1036,1057,1079,1035,1075,1034,1054,1080,1039,1038,1078,1037,1058,1053,1051,1052,1074,1067,1063,1059,1042,1043,1045,1076,1046,1081,1064,1048,1050,1065,1047,1055,1040,1032,869,1077,1073,1033],"class_list":["post-1063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigpicture","tag-african-american-history-monument","tag-andrew-johnson","tag-brown-v-board-of-education","tag-capitols","tag-chapel-hill","tag-civil-rights-memorial","tag-civil-war","tag-cloud-cuckoo-land","tag-cloudcuckoo-land","tag-columbia-sc","tag-confederacy","tag-confederate-states-of-america","tag-confederates","tag-csa","tag-dixie-highway","tag-dizzy-gillespie","tag-federal-aid-highways","tag-federal-highway","tag-freedom-fighters","tag-highway-1","tag-highway-names","tag-james-ostrowski","tag-jefferson-davis","tag-jefferson-davis-highway","tag-jim-crow","tag-key-west","tag-mary-mcleod-bethune","tag-monumentation","tag-monuments","tag-monuments-at-state-capitols","tag-nationhood","tag-old-dominion-state","tag-oliver-hill","tag-palmetto-state","tag-president-andrew-johnson","tag-president-ulysses-grant","tag-raleigh-nc","tag-rebels","tag-richmond-va","tag-slavery","tag-spottiswood-robinson","tag-stars-and-bars","tag-state-capitols","tag-stonewall-jackson","tag-strom-thurmond","tag-trail-names","tag-treason","tag-u-s-highway-system","tag-ulysses-grant","tag-underground-railway","tag-university-of-north-carolina","tag-us-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1063"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1081,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1063\/revisions\/1081"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}