Introduction

The American Civil War has dominated the historical landscape—and for the past century, it has often decorated the literal landscape of the United States. With the military surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, the battle over the retelling of the war and the reframing of the conflict began. Alternate and clashing visions of this era have been a staple within American historical curriculum and contribute to the continuing boom in Civil War studies. Revisionism and memorialization has become a prolonged and often contentious process that once involved thousands of dedicated veterans—those who had been on the front lines, as well as those on the home front.

Indeed, veterans of the home front were most closely involved in issues of memorialization, particularly within the defeated Confederate states. Legions of men and women were dedicated to valorizing those sacrificed, cheering returning heroes, and fashioning public spaces into elaborate and permanent reminders of heroic deeds. This was the launching of the Lost Cause, a multigenerational initiative that shone the spotlight on the Confederate bid for nationhood and the glorified white southerners who had declared independence and fought to maintain racial slavery.¹

White southerners were distressed by Reconstruction. In addition to the rise of paramilitary organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, white southerners banded together to form associations such as the United Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and Ladies Memorial Associations. These groups were vigilant, trying to rephrase the conflict into a “War for Southern Independence” or more infamously the “War of Northern Aggression.” Granite and marble embellishments became a noble cause for many veterans and their descendants, as this monument movement effectively redecorated public squares, courthouse entrances, and parks across the nation, but most particularly the former Confederate states in the South.

During the past fifty years, since the Civil War centenary, debates over these memorialization efforts have escalated. The impact of these marble men, with white gleaming arms and armaments, remains a source of bitter division. Conflicting opinions have given much offense and in some cases led to violence—and even loss of life.

Mary Boykin Chesnut, Augusta Evans, and many other scribbling southern white sisters who endured Confederate surrender only wanted the fighting to stop. But with Yankee rule, and a general malaise, many women were drafted or volunteered to take up the pen, as men had taken up the sword. Chesnut and her cohorts decided they would write themselves out of defeat. In a sense they fought to “win the peace” after losing the war. By embellishing the plantation epic, by vigorous pursuit of sentimental yet partisan memoirs, they resurrected and reinvigorated their claim on the Civil War’s legacy. They proposed the battle over slavery had been only a sidebar for the “brother’s war” to preserve antebellum values against Yankee encroachments and depredations.

This band of sisters set out to create a literary canon that would preserve and perpetuate this Confederado point of view. For the next half-century, and into the twentieth, southern fiction and memoir highlighted white women’s distinctive roles, discussed in detail in Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore: Studies of the Literature of the American Civil War (1960), Anne Goodwyn Jones’s Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 (1981), Sarah Gardner’s Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937 (2003), and Caroline Janney’s Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (2013).²

With Confederate defeat, Augusta Evans proclaimed in October 1865, “I shudder at the bitter, bitter feelings I find smoldering in my heart. … I feel that I have no country, no home, no hope in coming years, and I brood over our hallowed precious past.”³ She wrote indignantly to a friend in October 1866, a friend who suggested the war might have been a mistake: “The right of Secession is more holy than five years ago,—for now it has been sanctified—baptized anew, with the blood of our Legion of Liberty’s Martyrs.”⁴ Her devotion to this cause was religious, unwavering. As Gaines Foster and Charles Reagan Wilson have demonstrated, this evangelical fervor would only grow in the months and years that followed the war’s bitter close. Meanwhile, a rising generation of white southern men would see the war as a crisis they would remedy through regional nationalism and white supremacy.⁵

The rise of social media, combined with a changing political climate, has accelerated the involvement of historians in the contemporary debates over memorialization. Yet not everyone has welcomed historians’ engagement with these topics. Some have criticized historians both for making generalizations and for making false analogies to the past, arguing that historians ought to focus their attention on nuanced arguments in books and not try to cram their analysis into abbreviated commentary, such as op-eds, blogs, and podcasts. Others disagree; in fact, the Washington Post hired a cadre of young historians to lead a new online commentary section, Made By History, that draws on deep historical analyses to situate contemporary news (articles from which are included in both the bibliography and on our “Top Ten” list). Additionally, many historians have placed traditional publishing agendas on hold to create their own podcasts, blogs, and web pages. A new generation may curate their faculty profiles to make them more media savvy.

Professional organizations have also established special sessions at their annual meetings to discuss the increased role of historians as public intellectuals. History in the Headlines began as a feature at the Southern Historical Association (SHA) in November 2016 and continues to highlight scholars engaged with contemporary issues.⁶ The Southern Historical Association at its origins was indeed one of the organizations that contributed to the perpetuation of the Confederate project. The organization’s early leadership overinvested in the perpetuation of a “southern way of life,” a perspective that included glorification of the Confederate cause and a predilection for white supremacy. In recent years, the SHA has done much to counter this early focus, mounting campaigns to place civil rights and fights for social justice at the forefront of organizational strategies for historical revisionism.

The role of historical studies has expanded exponentially over the past few decades. The ways and means of creating a platform for greater awareness of ongoing trends allows for dramatic developments. Younger scholars, working on their PhDs, might create more-informed decisions about current affairs. This is one of the most fertile eras for those who want to connect the past to the present, with multiple media platforms available to glean the widest possible audience.

Certainly the intertwining of topical issues and historical controversies has had an engrossing effect. Electronic history lists have developed traction, with H-NET (Humanities and Social Sciences Online) emerging roughly twenty-five years ago. Among the networks developed in H-NET, none has been more robust and exciting than H-CivWar. During its early days and for its first decade, the moderators of this online network would regularly suggest that another thread on Black Confederates be retired. Turf wars, not just online but in university classrooms and town squares, have erupted with regularity. And no issue has seemed more pressing for southern historians than the issue of what to do about Confederate memorialization, as all American historians puzzle over the Civil War’s mighty and multiple legacies.

Confederate memorialization was a major project by veterans’ organizations, women’s clubs, and civic movements within the former Confederate states particularly during the early decades of the twentieth century. The expansion of this movement was particularly dynamic for women. As Jacquelyn Dowd Hall explains, these groups were determined

This aggressive battle to retake public space was spearheaded by neo-Confederates and continues to be an ongoing struggle via flags and parades, all too familiar problem tools.⁸ Disputes and debates over statuary in public spaces have taken center stage in the past few years, as scholars and citizens, governments and voluntary organizations have clashed bitterly on the question of resolving historical conflicts through removal, relocation, or destruction.

Questions about legacy and legitimacy continue to bedevil. Most significantly, as the scholars in the following round table insist, statues and memorials tell us more about those who create these commemorations than they do about those being honored.

The pulling down of a Confederate statue by an angry crowd in Durham, North Carolina, on August 14, 2017 (captured on film), symbolized the growing frustration of many with the movement to reform and refashion public spaces.

The ongoing crisis on the Chapel Hill campus of the University of North Carolina over what to do with the statue of “Silent Sam,” tumbled to the pavement by student protestors in August 2018, reflects the levels of conflict such matters evoke: clashes between authorities and protestors, faculty and administrators, alumni and campus community, and many more incendiary intersections.

History in the Headlines brought together a distinguished group of scholars to discuss not only the immediate issues of the day (November 10, 2017) but also how advocates of heritage might clash with best practices in history, how the role of public history shapes current historical sensibilities, and what scholars can do to respond to contemporary topics. A round table offers the possibility of both information and conversation, its informality an advantage to the casual reader. By bringing together diverse experiences and viewpoints, it provides a spirited discussion that allows for the free flow of opinion and a smorgasbord of suggestions.

All across America local governments are grappling with how to address Confederate statues. Most recent removals have not occurred in response to vandalism but have been voted on by state, county, and city officials. To avoid protests by those opposing relocation, most removals have taken place unceremoniously in the dead of night—well past midnight, often around 2:00 a.m.

Challenges to Confederate memorialization are long standing. Even before the organization of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1918, there were movements to protest the revisionist agenda of neo-Confederate forces at work in former rebel states—and around the nation generally. The glorification of Confederate partisans was only part of the passion for women in bronze and marble men on horseback. In addition to the preponderance of whites portrayed in celebratory statuary, Civil War monuments sometimes featured persons of African descent, most often portrayed in limited and stereotyped roles. Beginning in 1997, with Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America a steady stream of scholarship began challenging earlier twentieth-century interpretations of Civil War figures, reevaluating such artistic representations as demeaning and racist.

Some investigators have gleaned crucial insight by examining key aspects of memorialization campaigns, including failed attempts to erect statues. Tony Horwitz, for example, once explored the 1923 case of white southern Congressmen suggesting that the federal government fund a statue in the nation’s capital “in memory of the faithful slave mammies of the South.”⁹ The suggestion was in no way a progressive tribute to African Americans—as these same politicians allowed a filibuster to defeat an antilynching bill. African Americans raised strategic objections, and one black newspaper argued that instead of simply a Mammy, the statue of a “White Daddy” be included, showing a Mammy looking on helplessly while a young black woman was being assaulted. Several models were proposed, and an image of a Mammy with an infant at her breast (presumably white) won the contest.¹⁰ But the massive outpouring of protest from African Americans derailed the memorial scheme, as Mary Church Terrell suggested prayer might ensure “lightning will strike it and the heavenly elements will send it crashing to the ground.”¹¹ The statue never came to be, but the prospect of it mobilized a generation to agitate against such assaults.

Literature and popular culture cast Mammy as the inner core of a mountain of material producing, exporting, exploiting racism, and Foucault suggested we might dig deeper to excavate buried treasure.¹² Mammy as an instrument of racial hegemony provides a powerful undercurrent within scholarship that critiques Civil War–era nostalgia—demonstrating the potency of her presence. At the same time, the depiction of “bowing and scraping” black bondsmen—the valet, the coachman, the artisan, or the enslaved field-worker—equally demeaned black men in the literary canon. The demonization of black bodies after the Civil War was particularly damaging and effective propaganda—resulting in the “black beast” mythology that cast men of color as sexual deviants and potential rapists. The antidote to this racist trope was to introduce another, undermining the fear of African American males’ physical prowess by emasculating black men by any means possible. White sculptors often decorated their compositions of Civil War figures with “kneeling” or supplicant African American males. Thus participants in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as other contemporary activists rightly resist white hegemony and intimidation—embodied in images of heroic Confederates, white supremacists, and the occasional black bondsman.

Dilemmas concerning Confederate statues and memorialization confront twenty-first-century scholars of the Civil War and the American South regularly—in their boardrooms, in their classrooms, in their communities. Media outlets frequently challenge historians to answer calls and field queries that present complex and contradictory elements. Often historians are asked only for sound bites, and increasingly scholars are training the next generation to prepare themselves for “elevator spiels”: a succinct summation of the most riveting qualities of one’s research in less than one hundred words. The dilemmas regarding memorialization posed to historians are increasingly tied to social policy and current affairs, challenges that must be met by today’s politicians and citizens.

The round table of four distinguished scholars took place at the eighty-third meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Dallas, Texas, on November 10, 2017, less than three months after a deadly car attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, took the life of Heather Heyer, a young woman who was protesting racism in the wake of torchlight rallies opposing the removal of Confederate statuary. This escalation of violence and subsequent loss of life, this acute sense of confrontation, hung over us as we traversed a wide swath of territory.

During the round table, we explored not only the broad issue of statues and removal but larger questions regarding memorialization and historical responsibilities, raising as many other questions as answers. Historians, particularly those working on race and memory, or on citizenship and the Civil War, have been given unprecedented opportunity to testify to the connections between the past and present. As the agitation for social justice continues, scholars struggle to prompt it as well as to reflect.

Each voice that follows—whether it be in the comments and responses of the distinguished panel or in the editorials and speeches from respected and diverse scholars—affords a cascade of fascinating data and bracing debates. All the contributors try to offer creative insights and practical solutions to the conundrums such issues raise.

Our efforts are not meant as an intervention but as a contribution to the continuing dialogue on the important and incendiary topic of Confederate memorialization.

As long as historians connect their work to compelling dynamics, as long as scholars struggle to reveal layered truths not only for today’s audience but for the readers of tomorrow, our work will thrive. Writers toggle between two goals: attempting to remain both relevant and above the fray. In an era of tweets and hashtags, we must be vigilant to get our own truths heard, lest those that are self-evident be forgotten.

1    See Rollin G. Osterweis, The Myth of the Lost Cause, 1865–1900 (New York: Archon Books, 1973); Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1982); Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); and Karen L. Cox, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003).

2    Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962); Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981); Sarah Gardner, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Caroline Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

3    Elizabeth Moss, Domestic Novelists of the Old South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 8.

4    A Southern Woman of Letters: The Correspondence of Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, ed. Rebecca Grant Sexton (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 131.

5    Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy; C. R. Wilson, Baptized in Blood.

6    For the record, this initiative was created and piloted by the SHA president for 2016 and her program cochair, Jim Downs, coeditors of the series.

7    Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “ ‘You Must Remember This’: Autobiography as Social Critique,” Journal of American History 85 (September 1998): 450.

8    For an interesting piece on Confederate flags and college dormitories. see Brooklyn Brown, “Confederate Flags in Dorm Rooms: What Students Think,” Teen Vogue, 30 August 2017, https://www.teenvogue.com/story/confederate-flags-in-dorm-rooms.

9    Tony Horwitz, “The Mammy Washington Almost Had,” The Atlantic, 31 May 2013.

10  Mammies are always depicted as old and overweight, contrary to all evidence that child minders were often young girls in the plantation household. See Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 201–3.

11  Horwitz, “The Mammy Washington Almost Had.”

12  Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, Mammy: A Century of Race, Gender and Southern Memory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 3.