Over the past five months, historians have endeavored to demonstrate that something other than respectful recognition of a fallen foe was at play when Confederate monuments began popping up all over the South in the early decades of the 20th century. Many historians, in fact, have spent their careers demonstrating that Confederate commemoration tells us precious little about the Civil War and the men who fought it.
Rather, the statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the rest tell us a great deal about how a cultural industry worked in tandem with a political movement to legitimate white supremacy. Installing Confederate monuments coincided with the rise of Jim Crow, a legal, political, and cultural system that denied African Americans their place in the American polity.
In the years surrounding the turn of the 20th century, Southern states passed laws that segregated public spaces and disfranchised black voters. The Supreme Court upheld these laws, but it was not the only institution to blame for this betrayal of American liberty. Confederate monument building was the culmination of a deliberate campaign to write the history of the Civil War from the Southern point of view. That memory industry began almost immediately after the Confederacy’s defeat.
This Southern version portrayed the Confederate cause as just and slavery as a benevolent institution. This narrative claimed the Civil War was a “brothers’ war,” and most of all, it insisted that the South fought to defend the Constitutional principle of “states’ rights” rather than slavery.
