Southern States Revere Civil War, Cling to Lie That States Rights, Not Slavery, Was the Cause
Across the country, symbols of the Confederacy have been toppled but many remain as in Florida, where the south lives on proudly especially on April 26, when many celebrate a legal holiday known as Confederate Memorial Day.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) issued a statement condemning the observance of the holiday and said that Confederate symbols have long been used as “tools of racial terror” by white supremacists.
The day memorializes the surrender of the last major Confederate field army at Bennett Place, N.C. In addition to Confederate Memorial Day, other legal holidays in Florida include Jan. 19, the birthday of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee; and June 3, the birthday of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
Five states have kept Confederate Memorial Day a legal holiday, although not all states set the date as the last Monday of April.
The defeat of the south led to a frenzy of mostly southern states to rename public places to keep alive the memory of the war. More than 700 monuments and memorials have been created on public land, mostly in the South during the era of Jim Crow laws from 1877 to 1964.
Hundreds of symbols throughout the nation include monuments and statues, flags, holidays and other observances, and the names of schools, roads, parks, bridges, buildings, counties, cities, lakes, dams, military bases, and other public structures.
The 1925 commemorative silver half-dollar portrays Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and the words, “Stone Mountain.” Robert E. Lee has been commemorated on at least five postage stamps. One 1936–37 stamp featured Generals Lee and Stonewall Jackson with Lee’s home Stratford Hall.
Support of Confederate monuments remains strong. In a December 2018 special report, Smithsonian Magazine said that “over the past 10 years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments — statues, homes, parks, museums, libraries and cemeteries — and to Confederate heritage organizations.”
The state flag of Arkansas includes a blue star which represents the Confederate States of America and is placed above stars for Spain and France to which Arkansas belonged before statehood. The state flag of Florida contains the St. Andrew’s Cross, considered to be in memory and support of the Confederacy. The addition of the Cross was proposed by Gov. Francis P. Fleming, a former Confederate soldier, who was strongly committed to racial segregation.
Many Confederate monuments were erected in the early part of the 20th Century but at least 32 were dedicated between 2000 and 2017, including at least seven re-dedications.
Monuments have been erected in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, North Carolina, South Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia. Most remain standing, dedicated in granite, to what many in the south refer to as the “War Between the States” and not the Civil War.
“Since Reconstruction, Confederate symbols have been used by white supremacists as tools of racial terror. The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans erected hundreds of memorials to the Confederacy across the United States as part of an organized propaganda campaign, created to instill fear and ensure the ongoing oppression of formerly enslaved people,” the SPLC statement said.
Calls to remove memorials increased after the Charleston, S.C. church shooting in 2015, the Unite the Right rally in 2017, and the murder of George Floyd in 2020.
On June 17, 2015, nine African Americans were killed by a neo-Nazi during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.
The Unite the Right rally was held Aug. 11–12, 2018, by white supremacists and neo-Nazis to protest the Charlottesville City Council’s decision to remove the Robert E. Lee statue as well as the renaming of the statue’s park to Emancipation Park. One protester was killed when a white supremacist drove his car into a group. President trump later said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Floyd, an African America, was murdered on May 25, 2020, by a Minnesota police officer during an arrest made after a store clerk suspected Floyd had used a counterfeit $20 bill.
In 2020, 170 Confederate symbols were removed from the U.S. landscape. In 2021, another 31 Confederate memorials were removed or were pending removal, the SCLC said. Laws in various Southern states also restrict or prohibit removal of statues and memorials and the renaming of parks, roads, and schools.
“We recognize that removing these symbols is only the first step. We must work for racial justice and an honest reckoning with our country’s past and present. That cannot be accomplished by removing a memorial or renaming a school, but it is a necessary step,” the SCLC said.
In Florida, Democratic state Sen. Lauren Book has introduced legislation in three straight years to remove all memorializations of the Confederate States of America, including the designations of the birthdays of Lee and Davis. Each time, Book’s bill has died in committee.
Confederate monuments were not built simply to honor those who died in the war. The monuments were part of widespread campaigns to promote and justify Jim Crow laws in the South. The American Historical Association reported that the erection of Confederate monuments during the early 20th century was “part and parcel of the initiation of legally mandated segregation and widespread disenfranchisement across the South.”
The association said that memorials to the Confederacy “were intended, in part, to obscure the terrorism required to overthrow Reconstruction, and to intimidate African Americans politically and isolate them from the mainstream of public life.”
“Far from simply being markers of historic events and people, as proponents argue, these memorials were created and funded by Jim Crow governments to pay homage to a slave-owning society and to serve as blunt assertions of dominance over African-Americans,” said a report in Smithsonian Magazine.
Confederate Memorial Day dates back to the spring of 1866 when the Ladies Memorial Association of Columbus, Ga., voted to annually memorialize the 258,000 Confederate soldiers who died in military service. Eight years later, the holiday was officially proclaimed by the Georgia legislature.
Georgia removed Confederate Memorial Day from its official calendar after the 2015, Charleston, S.C., church shootings. The day, however, remains designated a state holiday.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans are primary sponsors of various events to honor the dark days of the confederacy.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy coordinates confederate Memorial Day services around the south. It was established on Sept. 10, 1894, in Nashville, Tenn., 29 years after the south surrendered at Appomattox. The organization remains active with 19,000 members and is based in Richmond,Va.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy is a neo-Confederate hereditary association for female descendants of Confederate Civil War soldiers. The organization commemorates ancestors, funds monuments and promotes the pseudo-historical “Lost Cause” ideology and white supremacy.
The Lost Cause is a myth that claims the cause of the Confederate States during the Civil War was just, heroic, and not centered on slavery but on states rights. First enunciated in 1866, it has continued to influence racism, gender roles, and religious attitudes in the South.
Lost Cause proponents claim that enslaved people were treated well and that their condition was not the central cause of the war. They frame the war as a defense of states’ rights to protect their agrarian economy against supposed Northern aggression.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy venerated the Ku Klux Klan during the first half of the 20th century and funded the construction of a monument to the Klan in 1926.
In 1896, the organization established the Children of the Confederacy to impart similar values to younger generations through a mythical depiction of the Civil War, the Confederacy and white supremacy.
After the Civil War, associations were founded throughout the south to organize burials of Confederate soldiers, establish and care for permanent cemeteries, organize commemorative ceremonies, and sponsor monuments as a permanent way of remembering the Confederate cause and tradition.
In 1933 the Tennessee branch of United Daughters of the Confederacy donated $50,000 for the construction of a Confederate memorial hall on the campus of the George Peabody College for Teachers which merged with Vanderbilt University in 1979.
The group sponsors essay and poetry compositions but participants are not to use the phrase “Civil War,” and instead refer to the “War Between the States.”
The Children of the Confederacy is an auxiliary organization to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Children are taught Lyon Gardiner Tyler’s “Catechism on the History of the Confederate States of America, 1861–1865,” which says that “Northerners did away with slavery because the climate was unsuitable, that they had no intention of ever paying the South for its slaves after abolition, that slaves in the South were faithful to their owners, who were caring and gentle people: cruel slave owners existed only in the North.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) considers the United Daughters of the Confederacy as part of the Neo-Confederate movement, intrinsically white supremacist, that began in the early 1890s. The SPLC says the group promotes “a reactionary conservative ideology that has made inroads into the Republican Party from the political right, and overlaps with the views of white nationalists and other more radical extremist groups.”
In August 2018, the United Daughters of the Confederacy website still noted that “Slaves, for the most part, were faithful and devoted. Most slaves were usually ready and willing to serve their masters.” At its 1913 annual national convention, the United Daughters of the Confederacy unanimously endorsed The Ku Klux Klan.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Ladies’ Memorial Association, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, and other related groups have put up monuments throughout the south.
Among many examples, the Confederate Soldier Memorial was erected in 1905 on the Madison County courthouse grounds in Huntsville, Ala. It is inscribed “In memory of the heroes who fell in defense of the principles which gave birth to the Confederate cause erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy.” The statue was relocated in 2021 to the Maple Hill Cemetery in Huntsville.
Another statue, the Confederate Memorial Monument to soldiers and seamen, was dedicated in 1898 at the Alabama State Capitol, Montgomery. The memorial includes a poem, that reads, in part:
“THESE SEAMEN OF CONFEDERATE FAME / STARTED THE WONDERING WORLD; / FOR BRAVER FIGHT WAS NEVER FOUGHT, / AND FAIRER FLAG WAS NEVER FURLED.
THE KNIGHTLIEST OF THE KNIGHTLY RACE / WHO SINCE THE DAYS OF OLD, / HAVE KEPT THE LAMP OF CHIVALRY / ALIGHT IN HEARTS OF GOLD.”
The Pine Bluff Confederate Monument was erected in 1910 on the grounds of the Jefferson County Courthouse in Pine Bluff, Ark. The inscription reads, in part, “IN LEGEND AND LAY / OUR HEROS (sic) IN GRAY / SHALL FOREVER LIVE OVER / AGAIN FOR US.”
The Bentonville Confederate Monument, dedicated in 1906 in Bentonville, Ark., is dedicated to soldiers who “FOUGHT FOR HOME AND FATHERLAND / CONFEDERATE.”
The Johnny Reb Confederate Monument in Ocala, Fla., was dedicated in 1905, to “EVERY BRAVE SON / WHO FOUGHT TO PRESERVE / OUR LIBERTIES, / GUARANTEED BY THE FATHERS / UNDER THE CONSTITUTION.”
The Wilcox County Confederate Monument erected in 1909 in Abbeville, Ga., pays homage to soldiers “WHO FEARED NO FOE, BUT/FACED THE FRAY — /OUR GALLANT MEN WHO WORE THE GRAY.”
A statue of Jefferson Davis was dedicated in 1936 at the Kentucky State Capitol in Frankfort. It was removed from the capitol in 2020 and moved to the Jefferson Davis State Historic Site in Fairview.
The Confederate Monument in Murray, Kent., was dedicated in 1917. Some called for removal of the monument after nationwide protests were sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 in Minneapolis, Minn. In July, 2020 the Calloway County Fiscal Court voted unanimously to leave the monument in its present location.
The Johnson’s Island statue in Ohio was dedicated in 1910 in memory of the southern prison on the island during the “War Between the States.”
The Fannin County (Texas) Courthouse, dedicated in 1905, bears the words, “The great war unrivaled in history for bravery, gallantry, daring and dash.”
The Spirit of the Confederacy Confederacy Monument in Houston, Texas, was dedicated in 1908 “To all heroes of the South who fought for the principles of states rights.”
A Confederate monument was erected in 1926 in Seattle, Wash. The monument was toppled on the July 4, 2020 weekend, by persons unknown.