LET’S USE CONFEDERATE STATUE TALK TO GROW OUR CITY

It hasn’t been that long ago that this page gave a nod to discussions of removing divisive Confederate statues from shared, public spaces other than national military parks that pay homage to the sorrows of battle on both sides of America’s Civil War.

We still encourage those discussions, especially here, because dialogue widens understanding.

That said, the one and only Civil War statue — certainly the only Confederate one we’re aware of in Chattanooga outside of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park sites — may soon make for a very excellent conversation.

That’s because the bust of Confederate Gen. Alexander “A.P.” Stewart stands on the Hamilton County Courthouse lawn not because he was was originally a Chattanooga son or because he embodied the old slave-owning stereotype of the Confederacy. He was none of those things. It’s true he did fight in the Battle of Chickamauga, but he also took part in most of the other major Civil War battles.

His bronze likeness stands in front of our courthouse because he was instrumental in the late 1890s and early 1900s — long after the war — in planning and creating of the nation’s first military park. He sought to mend our divides.

Two men were appointed civilian “commissioners” to create the park, a former Union man, Gen. Joseph S. Fullerton, and a former Confederate — Stewart.

Years later, the Daughters of the Confederacy paid for the Stewart statue and had it placed at the courthouse in 1919.

A rational question is why a corresponding statue of the Union commissioner was not placed at the courthouse by a Union descendants group. But perhaps that’s more fodder for the discussion sought by the Chattanooga chapter of the NAACP. The NAACP, led by President Elenora Woods, plans to write letters to local leaders asking for the Stewart statue to be moved.

“We are trying to get collective support,” Woods said. “We are going to ask [officials] to join us, so this will be more of a community effort versus an antagonistic, us-against-them kind of thing.”

Woods says that the statue is a painful reminder of the history of blacks, noting that Stewart’s statue, like many others in the South, was erected during the Jim Crow era when the Confederacy was glorified.

After the tragic mass church shooting in Charleston, S.C., by white supremacist Dylann Roof in 2015, there have been renewed calls across the South to remove endorsements of the Confederacy from shared, public spaces.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam broke with some members of his own party and joined leaders like South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley in removing Confederate battle flags. Haslam called the flag “something people are ready to see moved to museums.” As for a Tennessee Capitol statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, who has become an enduring and controversial symbol of the Confederacy, Haslam has said Forrest “would not be one of the Tennesseans I would honor.”

Nonetheless, in 2016 in Tennessee there were more memorials for Nathan Bedford Forrest in public spaces than there are combined for Andrew Jackson, James Polk, and Andrew Johnson, the three U.S. presidents from Tennessee. In fact, the Volunteer State has more honors for Forrest than any other state has for any other person, and more historic markers for Forrest than Virginia has for Gen. Robert E. Lee or than Illinois has for President Abraham Lincoln. And the General Assembly passed a law making it harder to remove the Confederate reminders.

So Woods has a point, and we commend her for seeking a reasonable discussion about Stewart. We will also commend rational officials who also will take up discussion, because A.P. Stewart is not Nathan Bedford Forrest. Forrest was a slave trader and later became a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Stewart’s biographer, Sam Davis Elliott, wrote in “Soldier of Tennessee: General Alexander P. Stewart and the Civil War in the West”:

“Stewart, never repentant about the justification for or role of the Confederacy in American history, also asked the rhetorical question: ‘Why did the South fail?’ The answer was not in who had the bigger armies or who was in the right or wrong, but in God’s own design: ‘The one sole reason why the South failed — you may see it in the events transpiring around us today — was that Almighty God had need of this Union. He presided at its birth; all these years He has held it in the hollow of his hand; He still needs it for the accomplishment of His great designs.’ ”

Still, Stewart was not without stain, and Elliott’s biography of him was unblinking:

“Although Stewart owned no slaves, his sense of social order, his ideological bent regarding the priority of states’ rights and regarding the Constitution as it was written, his visceral belief in the inferiority of people of African descent and distaste for blacks’ being on an equal social footing with whites, his resistance to what he perceived to be northern political and social aggression, and his desire to stand with his fellow southerners all played a part in his decision [to join the Confederacy]. Like many other Tennesseans who never owned slaves, Stewart answered Governor Harris’ call in 1861 for the defense of the legal rights he deemed protected by the Constitution.”

Our history is our history, but that doesn’t make it right to use memorials of the past as continuing needles. Let’s have this discussion as rational Chattanoogans looking to make sure we put history where it belongs — in history, not in subtle bully pulpits.