Statues are not Historical Records

When I was very young, the major thing I understood about the Civil War was that it was fought over slavery. Most of the major contexts surrounding the war were lost on my young mind, but first and foremost I understood that owning black people was wrong, and the south was wrong for thinking they could do just that. Was it a simplistic understanding of history? Was it reductive in the sense that it compressed years of national tensions down into a single issue? Absolutely, but the most important thing that limited understanding accomplished was that it still placed historical attention on the sole issue that deserved it. 

How we think about history is just as if not even more important than what we remember. It is one thing to seek to gain a more holistic view of one of the most pivotal moments in American history, but how that information is framed has a dramatic impact on what we do with the knowledge that we obtain. 

Once I reached high school, the topic of the Civil War became significantly more nuanced. The answer to the question “what was the Civil War fought over” was no longer “because of slavery.” There are only so many ways you can make a history lesson more “challenging,” and by the time I was taking 11th grade AP (which stands for advanced placement, essentially a high school course taught as if it were a college credit,) United States History, we were evaluating underlying social causes and influences for major world events that we only thought we knew. At this point in my historical education, regurgitating facts about what happened and when was no longer sufficient to get a good grade; now I had to understand why things happened the way they did, and it wasn’t until further reflection that occurred long after I had left the classrooms of my old High School that I began to realize that the “nuance” that was valued had largely whitewashed slavery’s impact both on the war and its effects afterwards. 

“States rights” was a more acceptable answer to the question of why the Civil War happened. We learned about things like the disparities between the economies of the north and the south. We learned just how devastating the removal of slavery would be to the south. We learned about the differences in their cultures and mannerisms. We even learned about how, while Robert E. Lee was technically a secessionist, he only fought for the south due to his loyalty to his home state of Virginia and not because he aligned himself with the overall cause of the south. The end of slavery was turned into a byproduct of the end of the war and not its primary function. After all, another piece of historical nuance we were taught was that Lincoln, then-hailed as the champion who definitively ended one of the darkest periods in our nation’s history, wrote in 1862 to Horace Greeley that “I would save the Union… If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.” After years of being taught that Lincoln’s crowning achievement, the Emancipation Proclamation, had freed the slaves, we were now told that it was more of a morality-signaling gesture that wasn’t necessarily binding, and that Lincoln himself placed the abolition of slavery behind the preservation of the Union itself. Seemingly, even Lincoln himself believed that the Civil War was one over States Rights, with slavery taking the role of a lesser priority. 

And I present this anecdote not to say that say that it is wrong to learn historical nuance, or that there is no value in being comprehensive in our understanding of why history happened the way it did. However, I am also of the opinion that it is our responsibility to be cognizant of the impacts that our framing of history can have. Being taught in school that the south’s gripes with the north were deeper and more complex than simply wanting to own black people makes it easier to distance the Confederacy from the moral abhorrence of slavery. As a result, slavery becomes just one minor thing they did wrong rather than the very foundation of their existence. So if the confederates are not to be remembered primarily as slave owners, what image is there to fill the void? Troublingly, the emerging narrative amongst many on the right seems to be that the Confederacy was comprised of doomed, albeit heroic, rebels in much the same way that the United States as a whole was founded by an act of rebellion. 

This is the image that Donald Trump seeks to preserve when he refuses to rename military bases named after confederate generals, or when he criticizes activists who move to topple statues of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson. And Trump’s perspective isn’t unique, as the Confederate Battle Standard is still prevalently displayed in many of the states that were once part of the Confederacy. The official state flag of Mississippi features the confederate standard, in its entirety, in the upper left area of the flag. The city of Trenton, Georgia, features the battle standard on more than half of he entire flag itself, with this design being identical to the one used by the state of Georgia up until 2001. The confederate battle standard was flown outside the South Carolina state capital up until 2015, when it was removed by activist Bree Newsome following the Charleston Church shooting. During the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, many white supremacists in attendance proudly held the confederate flag aloft as they marched through the city. 

The history of the Confederate States of America deserves to be inextricably linked to the institution of slavery, but the gradual decoupling of the two has, either intentionally or unintentionally, created a sense of plausible deniability shared amongst its supporters. We are at a point where overt white nationalists can proudly bear the flag aloft and do so in support of their “rebel” ancestors. If black Americans express discomfort at the presence of the flag, they can simply be told that it either doesn’t stand for the subjugation of blacks or that slavery, and all its impacts, definitively ended along with the Civil War anyway. It’s the same kind of argument as one that claims that the Civil Rights Movement ended discrimination, and therefore it is those that protest in the face of police brutality and racial discrimination that are the ones who are truly inflaming racial tensions across the country. Because it’s easy for white people to make arguments like that when history is watered down for our comfort. It is only ever spoken of in the past tense, not as an ongoing phenomenon that continues to impact various minorities in this country in wildly different ways. It is just as ludicrous to believe that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. somehow “fixed” racism as it is to believe that the Emancipation Proclamation suddenly put all blacks in the country on the exact same equal footing as all the whites in the country. There was a lot of work to be done after that, and there is still work to be done, but we’re hesitant to have that conversation because history is history and, by definition, it is past and not present. 

So if even a good faith attempt at remembering history can produce harmful misunderstandings or presumptions of critical contexts, just imagine the kind of damage that can be done by statues. The function of a statue is not to provide comprehensive insight into history, yet time and time again whenever we come back to the discussion about removing a monument to a controversial figure, the defense always relies upon an appeal to history, as if the erasure of shaped stone somehow whitewashes historical record. Trump himself made this argument in 2017 when there existed a legitimate fervor to tear down statues of Confederate generals. Trump attempted to employ a “slippery slope” argument, positing not only that the removal of Confederate statues were demolitions of American history, but also that, if this behavior were to be allowed, it wouldn’t be long before statues of the nation’s founding fathers would be on the chopping block. Fast forward to 2020 and now, in the midst of a national conversation about accountability and race relations in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, and statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have indeed been targeted by vandals. 

At its surface, it would certainly appear that Trump is right; political correctness has resulted in a revisionist push that judges our historical figures out of the context of their own times, and so they must be removed. Jefferson may well have been crucial in the founding of our nation, but he actively engaged in the institution of slavery and fathered children with one of his slaves. And so his statues are targeted, as are those of George Washington who was also a slaveholder, and Andrew Jackson for his role in the infamous “Trail of Tears,” and a statue of Teddy Roosevelt in front of the Museum of Nawtural History for showing him triumphantly riding upon a horse while a black man and an indigenous man feebly grasp each side for support, as if being led into the new era by the white man. 

Unlike museums or school lesson plans, statues don’t exist to teach us history, they exist to glorify history. I disagree with the notion that Thomas Jefferson should ever be wiped from our historical records, or that we should cease our appreciation for his role in our founding. But historical nuance is something that is physically impossible if history is only ever learned through the lenses of monuments designed with the intent of flattery. The massive asterisk that deserves to be permanently affixed to Jefferson’s name, that born from his incredibly problematic relationship with the institution of slavery, will be forever absent from any form of depiction from him. Jefferson was an incredibly flawed human, a “man of his time” many would argue, but these flaws that we should be remembering are rendered impossible to depict through the artistic impetus that births these statues. How are we to acknowledge the good Jefferson did while truly grappling with his problematic aspects if all that is being presented to us is a massive bust of his head, arranged in noble countenance, carved into a mountain that is now considered one of our nation’s great landmarks? The answer to the question of how to deal with problematic aspects of historical figures has, thus far, been simply to ignore them. And, like the flawed lesson plans in school classrooms, the result of this erasure has fueled ignorance about the fact that slavery has been baked into the DNA of America from the moment of its conception. Failing to acknowledge that means failing to be able to fix it, which in turn just leads to a cyclical pattern of history. 

And the problem of statues works both ways as well, even if the figure in question is judged to be “moral” by the standards of our time. We love to evoke the name of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when we talk about the Civil Rights Movement. It is generally accepted that Dr. King was a positive figure in our nation’s history, and only an overt racist would take issue with his memorialization. We erect flattering statues of him across the country, we take from his speeches frequently in our curriculums, and we stablished a national holiday in remembrance of his work. And yet, while the intentions here were perhaps pure, we still feel plenty of negative impacts as well. In a sense, Dr. King has been canonized as the official leader of the fight for equal rights and his stance whitewashed to the point where it is reduced simply as that of “nonviolence.” In contrast with other civil rights leaders, such as Malcolm X, Dr. King is presented to us as the leader who was “right.” What is significantly less talked about, however, is the fact that Dr. King stopped short of denouncing riots altogether and the fact that, in his lifetime, he was so reviled by the general public that his popularity dipped to around 25% according to a 1968 Harris poll. Again, how we remember history matters, and the unfortunate reality of Dr. King’s memorialization without full context has led many to turn his image into a prop. Racism is over, isn’t that why we honor Dr. King? Segregation is over, doesn’t that mean everyone’s equal now? Isn’t that why we study his famous “I Have a Dream” speech? Wasn’t that the moment that heralded the end of racism? 

This is not to say that great men don’t deserve statues, or even that complicated or problematic men don’t. I find it difficult to engage in an argument that posits that we should just become a nation that doesn’t honor what is worthy of being honored. I cannot argue in good faith that we should tear down the Lincoln Memorial or that we should blast Mount Rushmore into smithereens; the time for that has long passed. What I do believe, however, is that our revenue for statues as symbols of history has reached a truly unhealthy point. At best, they are extremely biased and limited views of history that make no effort to instruct a viewer on necessary context; at worst, they are pieces of dangerous propaganda. There is a sculpture of Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, known as “Thomas Jonathan Jackson,” located in the Charlottesville and Albemarle County Courthouse Historic District in Charlottesville, Virginia. It depicts Jackson in his uniform, grasping at the reigns of his horse mid-stride. At the base of the sculpture are two angels, both facing in the same direction of Jackson, wings unfurled and bodies pressed together as their arms stretch behind them to embrace the sculpture. 

In what sense is this a representation of history? What is the message to be gained by gazing upon this monument? Is the implication that divinity guided the cause of the Confederacy? That, although their cause was doomed, their heroism was due to divine providence? We don’t need statues to be reminded that Stonewall Jackson was a man who existed at one point in time, and their presence allows sympathizers of the antiquated and abhorrent morals of the Confederacy to rationalize a grotesque justification that their actions were in any way heroic. 

Stonewall Jackson is not a founding father. He did not make America great; in fact, he fought to end it. Honoring him is offensive to any black American whose family history is irrevocably marred by the shadow of slavery. The same goes for Robert E. Lee and any other Confederate general whose preservation lies upon that hill that the far right is so eager to die on. And yes, there are plenty of reasons why Americans today would take offense at the actions of those “great men” who we once believed possessed images that were untouchable. The idea of statues need not be eradicated from our cultural consciousness altogether, but we at least need to be willing to entertain the discussion that these very public representations of what we value in our culture may be falling short in representing what they are meant to represent. I will never support the vandalism of public or private property, but at the same time I detest the argument that statues must be protected solely for historical merit. There are better, more comprehensive ways of remembering history, and fostering the drive to seek additional historical contexts is something we will need to do if we ever want to make an honest attempt at fixing the social ills that ignorance has wrought.