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These monuments were also built in an effort to reinforce white supremacy at a time when Black communities were being terrorized and Black social and political mobility impeded.
These monuments served as physical embodiments of the terror campaign directed at Black communities. Another spike in construction of these statues came in the 1950s and 1960s, coinciding, not coincidentally, with the civil rights movement.
In eleven states there are a total of twenty-three Confederate holidays and observances. As of 2020, in both Alabama and Mississippi there is Robert E. Lee Day, Confederate Memorial Day, and Jefferson Davis’s birthday; in South Carolina there is Confederate Memorial Day; in Texas there is Confederate Heroes Day. In both Alabama and Mississippi, Robert E. Lee’s birthday is celebrated on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The Lost Cause was not an accident. It was not a mistake that history stumbled into. It was a deliberate, multifaceted, multi-field effort predicated on both misremembering and obfuscating what the Confederacy stood for, and the role that slavery played in shaping this country.
But as Levin notes, the characterization of Poplar having “attached” himself as a “servant” seems to indicate that he was not enlisted as a soldier. Poplar’s 1886 obituary suggests that he was a cook for the soldiers, not someone engaged in combat.
The myth of Black Confederate soldiers emerged in the 1970s, pushed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. This story was a response to changing public perceptions of the Civil War in the years after the civil rights movement—away from Lost Cause mythology and toward recognition that slavery was central to this conflict.
The idea of using enslaved people during the war had been suggested by Confederate general Patrick Cleburne, but the proposal was scoffed at by the majority of Confederate leadership because it undermined the entire basis upon which the war was being fought. Leadership found themselves in a position in which they could choose to perpetuate slavery or give everything they had to win the war and secure independence—a choice many Confederate leaders were unwilling to accept. Robert M. T. Hunter, a senator from Virginia, is reported to have said, “What did we go to war for, if not to protect our
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Mississippi: Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.
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.
Louisiana: The people of the slaveholding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.
Texas: We hold, as undeniable truths, that the governments of the various States and of the Confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependant [sic] race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
Constitution of the Confederate States, which avows in Article IV, Section 3: In all [new] territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.
but, so far as representation was concerned, were discriminated against as a lower caste, only to be represented in the numerical proportion of three fifths.
according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Sons of Confederate Veterans has been suffused with internal discord between those interested primarily in the preservation of history and those who want to use the group as a mechanism to propagate hate.
based society with no ‘Northernisms’ attached, a hierarchical society, a majority European–derived country.”
As historian Karen L. Cox remarks in her book Dixie’s Daughters, “UDC members aspired to transform military defeat into a political and cultural victory, where states’ rights and white supremacy remained intact.”
president of the UDC’s Mississippi chapter, published The Ku Klux Klan; or, Invisible Empire, which effusively praised the Klan and engaged in the worst of racist tropes. “The negro considered freedom synonymous with equality, and his greatest ambition was to marry a white wife,” she wrote. “Under such conditions there was only one recourse left, to organize a powerful Secret Order to accomplish what could not be done in the open. So the Confederate soldiers, as members of the Ku Klux Klan, and fully equal to any emergency, came again to the rescue, and delivered the South from a bondage worse
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“was unanimously endorsed by the United Daughters of the Confederacy” and that “co-operation pledged to endeavor to secure its adoption as a Supplementary Reader in the schools and to place it in the Libraries of our Land.”
teachers, and placed pro-Confederate books in schools and libraries across the South. They told the children that slavery was an institution that benefited both Blacks and whites alike, and that it was rare for there to be a cruel enslaver. They held essay contests in which students would regurgitate these falsities.
Lincoln claimed: I will say…that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain
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According to Lincoln, white racism was so deeply entrenched that Black people would never have the chance to be equal members of society. Lincoln’s position was similar to that of many throughout the North, those who believed slavery should be abolished but who did not want to share a society with or live alongside free Black Americans. As Foner notes, “For many white Americans, including Lincoln, colonization represented a middle ground between the radicalism of the abolitionists and the prospect of the United States existing permanently half-slave and half-free.”
It should be noted that Lincoln’s position began to change after he signed the Emancipation Proclamation and after he saw two hundred thousand Black soldiers fight on behalf of the Union.
There also is ample evidence that white Southerners who did not own enslaved people were often still deeply committed to preserving the institution. Historian James Oliver Horton writes about how the press inundated white Southerners with messages about why fighting to prevent the abolition of slavery was essential to preventing enslaved and formerly enslaved people from, in the words of the Louisville Daily Courier, rising “to the level of the white race.” Without slavery, these papers argued, there would be no difference between poor whites and free Blacks. The Louisville Daily Courier
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Horton finds plenty of examples of Confederate soldiers saying this for themselves. As he notes, one Southern prisoner of war told the Union soldier standing watch, “[Y]ou Yanks want us to marry our daughters to niggers.” An indigent white farmer from North Carolina said that he could not and would not stop fighting, because Lincoln’s government was “trying to force us to live as the colored race.” A Confederate artilleryman from Louisiana said that his army had to fight even against difficult odds because he would “never want to see the day when a negro is put on an equality with a white
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Or as historian Charles Dew said, “If you are white in the antebellum South, there is a floor below which you cannot go. You have a whole population of four million people whom you consider, and your society considers, inferior to you. You don’t have to be actively involved in the system to derive at least the psychological benefits of the system.”
As Greg Stewart, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told the New York Times in the aftermath of the 2015 Charleston massacre, “You’re asking me to agree that my great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents were monsters.” Accepting such a reality would, for them, mean the deterioration of a narrative that has long been a part of their lineage, and the disintegration of so much of who they believed themselves to be in the world.
document that is widely misunderstood, Lincoln’s proclamation was a military strategy with multiple aims. It prevented European countries from supporting the Confederacy by framing the war in moral terms and making it explicitly about slavery, something Lincoln had previously backed away from. As a result, France and Britain, which had contemplated supporting the Confederacy, ultimately refused to do so because of both countries’ anti-slavery positions. The proclamation allowed the Union Army to recruit Black soldiers (nearly two hundred thousand would fight for the Union Army by the war’s
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encompassing document that it is often remembered as. It applied only to the eleven Confederate states and did not include the border states that had remained loyal to the US, where it was still legal to own enslaved people.
During an 1861 Texas political convention in which the state formally decided to secede from the Union, Houston refused to swear an oath to the Confederacy, writing, “In the name of my own conscience and manhood…I refuse to take this oath.”
As historian W. Caleb McDaniel has said about the days, weeks, and years following Juneteenth, “Slavery did not end cleanly or on a single day. It ended through a violent, uneven process.”
Former Confederates across the South were unwilling to allow formerly enslaved Black folks to transition smoothly and safely to freedom. They often turned to violence, believing they should have been, at the very least, compensated for their loss of property. A woman named Susan Merritt of Rusk County, Texas, reported that “lots of Negroes were killed after freedom…bushwhacked, shot down while they were trying to get away. You could see lots of Negroes hanging from trees in Sabine bottom right after freedom. They would catch them swimming across Sabine River and shoot them.”
Al’s comment made me think of Frederick Douglass’s famous Fourth of July speech in 1852, in which he stated: Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.—The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine.
As Sue pointed out, the risk is that Black Americans understand our history as beginning in bondage rather than in the freedom of Africa that preceded it.
In 2015, the State Board of Education and publisher McGraw-Hill Education came under fire for providing students with a textbook that described how the transatlantic slave trade brought “millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” It seemed to many to be a deliberate obfuscation of the fact that Africans were forcibly and violently stripped from their homelands, not people who were just “workers” who simply agreed to come help cultivate North American land. In April 2018, eighth graders at Great Hearts Monte Vista North charter school in
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“Racism is first and foremost a social practice, which means that it is an action and a rationale for action, or both at once. Racism always takes for granted the objective reality of race…so it is important to register their distinctness. The shorthand transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.”
Two of Bank of America’s predecessors, Southern Bank of Saint Louis and Boatmen’s Savings Institution, listed enslaved people as potential collateral for a debt in 1863. Citibank also had ties to chattel slavery.
The country’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, was the most deeply entwined in the slave trade. A 2005 statement from the company read as follows: “JPMorgan Chase completed extensive research examining our company’s history for any links to slavery…we are reporting that this research found that between 1831 and 1865 two of our predecessor banks—Citizens Bank and Canal Bank in Louisiana—accepted approximately 13,000 enslaved individuals as collateral on loans and took ownership of approximately 1,250 of them when the plantation owners defaulted on the loans.”
“Law did not merely reflect popular attitudes, it also reinforced them, lending a new explanatory power to race. It was becoming unnecessary to argue why black people were inferior; blackness itself was becoming sufficient cause for assuming inferiority.”
Damaras also told us about the damage that researchers found in the bodies of young people—including cases of osteoarthritis, a condition that normally doesn’t affect people until they are beyond their fifties. But here they saw osteoarthritis in the remains of children as young as sixteen.
justify the human plunder. In order to rationalize taking a person from their home, separating them from their family, and shipping them across an ocean to work in a system of intergenerational bondage, Eloi said, these Europeans could not see these Africans as people. “They considered Black Africans not as human beings but as a simple merchandise. If they consider Africans as merchandise, that is because they understand the necessity to dehumanize Africans in order to work for the acceptance by all the Europeans. The necessity to use Africans because Africans are not human beings.”
