America’s ghosts stir up struggle on battlefields of the past
In the main street of Lexington, Kentucky, an imposing statue of John C Breckinridge, the Confederate secretary of war, stands on what was once America’s biggest slave market. Thousands of men, women and children were bought and sold in the courthouse square, often before being transported to a life of fear and servitude in the Deep South.
But, a week after neo-nazis rallied around a statue of Robert E Lee, in Charlottesville, Virginia, Breckinridge, who has occupied his pedestal since 1887, is coming down.
So is a likeness of John Hunt Morgan, a Confederate general, who sits on his horse further down the high street next to a wine bar.
The fate of Breckinridge and Morgan was decided at a passionate three-hour council meeting last week. People overflowed on to the balcony of City Hall and passing motorists honked horns in support. To applause and cheers, the 15-strong council voted unanimously to banish the Confederate leaders to an as yet unknown location.
“This is really about standing up, stepping up, speaking out. Don’t sit back, don’t be silent,” said Jim Gray, Lexington’s mayor. “It’s about our core fundamental American values of justice and freedom.”
Across the US, mayors like Mr Gray are filling what many see as a vacuum of leadership left by Donald Trump, following the president’s equivocal comments condemning white supremacist violence in Charlottesville.
Some 240 mayors have signed a joint pledge to “speak out against hate”. Many believe this is a chance to finally break with the spectre of slavery, America’s “original sin”, that still looms 154 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
In Kentucky the divisions are deeper than in most places. It was the only state to remain neutral in the Civil War. Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president, lived in Lexington as a young man. Lincoln’s wife, Mary, was born and grew up there.
The decision to move Breckinridge and Morgan has also made Lexington a potential flash point. A leading white nationalist group has already said it plans to march, and some local people are nervous. The FBI and Secret Service are advising local officials.
“We’re prepared, we have to stand up to fear,” said Mr Gray, a Democrat who ran for the Senate against Rand Paul, the libertarian Republican, last year. “If there are outsiders coming in to demonstrate they will be greeted and welcomed with an overwhelming police presence.
“I know this decision is going against the grain. There are still many people with a different point of view, who think that this is erasing or hiding our history. But I think we are doing the right thing in the right way.”
Breckinridge became the youngest vice-president, aged 36, before joining the Confederacy. Morgan, a raiding soldier, reached further into the North than any other Confederate general.
Jonah May, 48, a local worker who walks past their statues every day, said: “For good, bad or worse, they’re still part of history. Those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat it. I think they should stay there to remind people.” But John Davidson, 52, another local, said: “Why don’t we just build statues of Adolf Hitler?”
Despite the decision, and moves by mayors around the country to dismantle statues, a national poll taken after Charlottesville showed 62 per cent of Americans believe Confederate statues should remain, with 27 per cent saying they should be removed. Only six per cent of Republicans thought they should be taken down.
Those in the other camp include two great-great-grandsons of Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general. They have applied for a statue of their ancestor in Richmond, Virginia, to come down, saying they were “ashamed of an overt symbol of racism and white supremacy”. The Rev Robert Wright Lee IV, a descendant of Robert E Lee, believes the same.
Gen Lee’s journey to far-right icon began long after his death when Southerners adopted “The Lost Cause”, a revisionist historical narrative that cast him as having led a heroic struggle to preserve the Southern way of life and states’ rights, minimising both the evils of slavery and its role as a cause of the Civil War.
Many years after the war, amid a background of segregation laws and rising Ku Klux Klan violence, statues of him went up and he became a symbol of white supremacy.
Many other Confederate figures are now expected to be dismantled. At 2am on Saturday a flatbed truck and crane arrived at the State House in Maryland to remove a statue of Roger B Taney, the segregationist Supreme Court justice behind the 1857 Dred Scott pro-slavery decision. In Arizona, a plaque commemorating Jefferson Davis was tarred and feathered. A statue of Confederate soldiers in Leesburg, Virginia, was spray painted. By contrast, a bust of Abraham Lincoln was set on fire in Chicago. Steve Adler,
the mayor of Austin, Texas, said: “Only the Statue of Liberty should be carrying a torch these days.”
However, the US National Park Service said Confederate monuments at Gettysburg, the battlefield visited by 3.7million tourists a year, would remain in place.
Barb Adams, a volunteer at Gettysburg, where 7,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died in the bloodiest ever battle on US soil, said the removal of statues would break her heart.
“It’s just so upsetting to me,” she said. “These men, these soldiers, fought for what they believed in.”