Confederate “Heritage” Month 2024, April 28: Confederate icons were not popular nationally for decades after the Civil War

The Guardian reported in 2022 about history professor who had a decades-long career in the US Army, Ty Seidule.

Speaking specifically to US military facilities named for Confederate figures like Robert E. Lee, Seidule says:

“The first thing to know is that in the 19th century, most army officers saw the Confederates as traitors.

“That’s not a presentist argument. That’s what they thought. And particularly about Lee, who renounced his oath, fought against this country, killed US army soldiers and as [Union general and 18th president Ulysses S] Grant said, did so for the worst possible reason: to create a slave republic.

“So in the 19th century, they would not have done this … the first memorialisation of a Confederate at West Point is in the 1930s. So, why is that? [It’s about] segregation in America. The last West Point black graduate was 1889. The next one was in 1936. West Point reflects America. [The first memorials] were a reaction to integration.” [my emphasis] (1)

The civilian monuments to traitors who held leadership positions in the Confederacy began decades earlier. But what Seidule says applies to the civilian and military versions, when he rejects the notion that they could be seen a symbols for reconciliation among Americans:

“The problem with that is it was reconciliation among white people, at the expense of Black people.

“There had already been reconciliation. Magnanimously, the United States of America pardoned all former Confederates in 1868 … reconciliation is sort of an agreement among whites that Black people will be treated in a Jim Crow fashion. So no, it’s not a reconciliation based, I would say, on an America we want today.” [my emphasis]

More specifically it was Andrew Johnson, the first President to ever be impeached, who Abraham Lincoln chose for his running mate in 1864 as a “Union Democrat” but who was not at all friendly to serious Reconstruction in the South nor to holding high Confederate officials legally responsible for their crimes, who issued the pardons.

John Wilkes Booth had a serious effect of US history by his assassination of Lincoln.

Seidule is the author of Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (2021).

He discusses his general view in this video, on which I did a double-take because it’s from the conservative PragerU. Because most conservative Republicans today would not be thrilled with his puncturing of the Lost Cause narrative. (2)



Notes:

(1) Pengelly, Martin (2022): ‘Confederates were traitors’: Ty Seidule on West Point, race and American history. The Guardian 09/05/2022. <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/05/confederates-traitors-seidule-west-point-race-history-ku-klux-klan-plaque-naming-commission> (Accessed: 2024-28-04).

(2) Was the Civil War About Slavery? PragerU YouTube channel. 08/10/2015. <https://youtu.be/pcy7qV-BGF4?si=R2qGkv3U8Y1ZGw0p> (Accessed: 2024-28-04).

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 29: Celebrating the US victory in the Civil War

Brian Beutler made a good suggestion in Make the Confederacy’s Defeat a National Holiday New Republic 04/06/2015:

This week provides an occasion for the U.S. government to get real about history, as April 9 is the 150th anniversary of the Union’s victory in the Civil War. The generous terms of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House foreshadowed a multitude of real and symbolic compromises that the winners of the war would make with secessionists, slavery supporters, and each other to piece the country back together. It’s as appropriate an occasion as the Selma anniversary to reflect on the country’s struggle to improve itself. And to mark the occasion, the federal government should make two modest changes: It should make April 9 a federal holiday; and it should commit to disavowing or renaming monuments to the Confederacy, and its leaders, that receive direct federal support. [my emphasis]

He puts this in the context of reframing the popular historical narrative over slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction and discrediting the persistent effects of the Lost Cause ideology.

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 12: New resource on Confederate history

The SPLC has created a new online information source to assist in a realistic look at Confederate history in the US, SPLC launches digital initiative to promote honest discussion of Confederate history 04/09/2019.

It includes a reminder that Confederate "Heritage" Month is unfortunately still officially celebrated:

Multiple Southern states proudly devote public time, energy and resources to celebrate the Confederacy each year. North Carolina and South Carolina celebrate “Confederate Memorial Day” on May 10. Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee celebrate it on June 3. Texas celebrates on Jan. 19, while Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and – recently – Livingston, Tennessee, dedicate all of April to “Confederate History Month.” Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi also celebrate “Confederate Memorial Day” on various dates in April. [my emphasis]

The SPLC has been giving a lot of attention to the fight over Confederate monuments, discussed in this report, Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy 02/01/2019.

The report recalls how a racist mass murder provided new intensity to the debate over Lost Cause public monuments, which actively continues four years later, "The 2015 massacre of nine African Americans at the historic 'Mother Emanuel' church in Charleston, South Carolina, sparked a nationwide movement to remove Confederate monuments, flags and other symbols from the public square, and to rename schools, parks, roads and other public works that pay homage to the Confederacy."

The defenders of monuments promoting a Lost Cause version of history that celebrates treason in in defense of slavery include a number of very fine people dubious characters:

White supremacists have also taken up the cause, staging hundreds of rallies across the country to protest monument removals. We saw a dramatic display of their anger in August 2017 when hundreds of racists marched with torches and shouted Nazi slogans in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a young, anti-racist counterprotester was killed.

President Donald Trump has sided with those who want to continue honoring the Confederacy, calling the removal of “beautiful” monuments “foolish” and tweeting that it is “[s]ad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart.”

The Lost Cause monuments provide a continuing example of the way that current political priorities and historical understandings and historical symbolism can be intricately connected:

There is no doubt among reputable historians that the Confederacy was established upon the premise of white supremacy and that the South fought the Civil War to preserve its slave labor. Its founding documents and its leaders were clear. “Our new government is founded 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,” declared Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens in his 1861 “Cornerstone speech.”

It’s also beyond question that the Confederate flag was used extensively by the Ku Klux Klan as it waged a campaign of terror against African Americans during the civil rights movement and that segregationists in positions of power raised it in defense of Jim Crow. George Wallace, Alabama’s governor, unfurled the flag above the state Capitol in 1963 shortly after vowing “segregation forever.” In many other cases, schools, parks and streets were named for Confederate icons during the era of white resistance to equality. [my emphasis]