Confederate veterans, Lost Cause apologists, and other supporters of Confederate monuments viewed them at the time of their erection and dedication as political tools within a larger struggle over the memory of the Civil War. In other words, the notion that Confederate monuments can only be narrowly viewed as reminders of the past completely devoid of politics is simply untrue. In summarizing the significance of this rhetoric and the erection of Confederate monuments more broadly, Cox argues that “the most enduring monument to the Confederacy was a population of white southerners educated to defend both the memory and the principles for which stood” (51).
President Grover Cleveland’s Secretary of the Navy, Hilary Herbert, also a Confederate veteran, followed Jones and remarked that “we build monuments to heroes so that future generations may imitate their example.” For Jones, those ancestors had not fought to preserve slavery but states’ rights, which in his mind was the true underlying message of Confederate iconography. Former state governor and Confederate veteran Thomas Jones stated during the monument’s dedication that “our duty is not ended with the building of this monument,” which served as a means to “stimulate youths to admire and to. I was particularly struck by reading about the dedication of a Confederate monument in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1898.
One particularly noteworthy aspect of No Common Ground that I appreciate lies in how Cox clearly describes the ways Confederate monuments have always been inherently political.
This is a particularly important point given the popular impulse to assume that this particular debate only started in 2015 with the horrific massacre of the Charleston Nine, when in reality that tragic event accelerated an already long-standing debate over the appropriateness of Confederate monuments, statues, and flags in public places. In particular, she clearly demonstrates that mass protest against Confederate monuments in public places is nothing new, particularly among Black Southerners who were often left out of the decision-making process to install these icons in public spaces in the first place. Although I have been pretty invested in the Confederate monuments debate for a while, Cox’s scholarship has been very enlightening for me. I’ve kicked off 2022 by reading historian Karen Cox’s new book No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice.
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