Historians assess Confederate monuments at Gettysburg
Scott Hancock often rides his bike through the Gettysburg National Military Park, regularly passing tourists as they look at the memorials sponsored by the former Confederate states along Seminary Ridge, from which their troops launched a doomed assault 157 years ago this month.
Nearly a million people visit the battlefield each year, and as they read the words and view the heroic images, Mr. Hancock wonders: “What are they taking away from that?”
What are they taking from the Mississippi memorial’s praising its sons for fighting for their “righteous cause”? From the South Carolina memorial’s tribute to their “abiding faith in the sacredness of states rights”?
Do they notice the lack of any mention of slavery as the organizing principle of Confederate society — or even in its manifestation at Gettysburg in the thousands of enslaved Black persons brought by the Army of Northern Virginia to serve them in the invasion of Pennsylvania?
“It seems to me what they (the tourists) are taking away is, ‘This was a glorious struggle,’” said Mr. Hancock, professor of history and Africana studies at Gettysburg College. “I admit it’s a bit poking the bear” to say, but “the Confederacy in the cultural and spiritual sense actually won the Battle of Gettysburg. They have been successful in rewriting the history of the Civil War, that it wasn’t about slavery.”
The monuments, put up by the 11 former Confederate states between 1917 and 1983, comprise just a fraction of the more than 1,300 statues, monuments and markers in the Gettysburg National Military Park, honoring individual military units, people and events. The sheer number of monuments makes the Gettysburg battlefield one of the largest outdoor statuary parks in the world, said Jason Martz, public affairs officer for the park.
And that’s just one of the superlatives attached to the epic threeday battle in 1863, which is credited with decisively turning the war toward eventual Union victory. The verdant fields and woods on the outskirts of the Adams County seat were home to the Western Hemisphere’s largest battle on record, and the battle produced more casualties than any other in the Civil War, with thousands killed and tens of thousands more wounded, captured or missing.
President Abraham Lincoln, in his famous address there later in 1863, sought to impose meaning on the Union men’s sacrifice for “a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
His words, eloquent as they were, were not the final ones on
Gettysburg.
Soon after the war, Union veterans and others began the process of putting monuments on the site. “Pretty much every single one of them has historical significance in some form or fashion to those who fought during the three-day battle,” Mr. Martz said.
Beginning in the early 20th century, those commemorating the Confederacy began putting up their own monuments, saluting the nobility of their troops — and by extension, their cause. The tributes came in both word and image: The towering Virginia memorial heroically depicts an equestrian Robert E. Lee and his troops. The Louisiana memorial portrays a muscular, allegorical Spirit of the Confederacy in a balletic leap, sounding a trumpet and holding a flaming cannonball.
“I’m not an artist or a sculptor, this not a professional opinion, but in terms of sculpture, they have to be some of the best statues in the battlefield,” Mr. Hancock said.
In these past few weeks, statues of Confederate icons have been coming down throughout the South and beyond — Confederate President Jefferson Davis from the capitol of his native Kentucky, Gen. Stonewall Jackson from Richmond’s Monument Avenue, South Carolina Sen. John C. Calhoun from a public park in Charleston.
Such removals began in earnest in the wake of the 2015 massacre of nine Black worshipers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston (located on Calhoun Street near the former statue), carried out by a white supremacist photographed with Confederate symbols. And the removals accelerated after the May 25 killing of George Floyd beneath a Minneapolis police officer’s knee, which forced a reckoning of systemic, state-sponsored violence against African-Americans. Some
monuments are being removed after deliberations by local or state officials, others torn down peremptorily by protesters.
Most of the challenged monuments were placed in courthouse squares and other public spaces beginning more than a century ago, corresponding to the rise of the Jim Crow regime. In a 1983 memoir, the Charleston native Mamie Garvin Fields said the Calhoun statue, honoring a leading antebellum advocate of slavery, sent a clear message to African Americans like herself: “N—, you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place.”
Many of the Confederate monuments in Gettysburg were authorized by Congress, and the oldest ones have historic status, so they’re not likely to be removed without an act of Congress, said Mr. Martz. Nor is there a huge clamor for their removal, and the park has long been vigilant against vandalism.
The monuments honor the war dead, often at the exact spot where a particular state’s soldiers massed on Seminary Ridge for their catastrophic assault on the battle’s final day.
But “we’re not just talking about the Battle of Gettysburg,” Mr. Martz said. Interpreting them requires explaining the Civil War as a whole, and the eras when the monuments went up — later generations when Americans were fighting new wars, and also when the Jim Crow era of white supremacy was resurgent.
“We’re talking about all of American history,” Mr. Martz said.
“We’re talking about all of American history,” he said.
If there’s ever a place to memorialize the Confederate dead, wouldn’t it be where they died?
Mr. Hancock said he can understand having historical markers for where regiments fought and soldiers died.
“I would identify myself as a follower of Christ and a Christian,” Mr. Hancock said. “All human life is made in the image of God and valuable, whoever they were fighting for. The loss of life is tragic.”
But, he added: “The state monuments fall into a different category.”
Southern context
The Confederate monuments can hardly be understood without understanding what was happening when they were erected.
The South Carolina memorial, for example, was dedicated in July 1963, at the 100th anniversary of the battle. But there was also a contemporary conflict. One of the invited speakers at the dedication was Gov. George Wallace — even though he was from Alabama.
The previous month, Gov. Wallace had stood in a University of Alabama doorway, making a show of resistance to federal enforcement of desegregation.
Earlier that spring, there were scenes off Birmingham police dogs and firehoses turned on civil-rights protesters as young as children.
At the monument dedication, Gov. Wallace and the South Carolina politicians were so defiant that the Gettysburg Times reported on July 3, 1963: “For a brief moment it seemed as though the Civil War might start all over again.” Gov. Wallace defended segregation in barely coded language, saying that “South Carolina and Alabama stand for constitutional government and that millions throughout the nation look to the South to lead in the fight to restore constitutional rights and the rights of the states and the individuals.”
Even after the civil rights breakthroughs of the 1960s, Confederate state monuments continued to go up, honoring their soldiers for
“performing their duty as they understood it,” in the words of the Tennessee memorial, the last to be erected in 1982.
A 12th monument, put up in 1994 by the border state of Maryland — which remained in the Union but contributed troops to each side — honors all who fought “in defense of the causes they held so dear” and shows two wounded soldiers helping each other, one from each side, “Brothers again.”
Reconciliation incomplete
Many Civil War memorials, not just Confederate ones, emphasize that theme of national reconciliation — though the imagery of “brothers” is usually limited to whites.
“Not that there’s some truth” to the acts of reconciliation, but “it obscures how deeply those (Civil War) divisions were, and those divisions lasted for a long time,” Mr. Hancock said. “They were really fighting for two fundamentally different visions of what the country was going to be like.”
Said historian John Fea from Messiah College in nearby Mechanicsburg: “These monuments scream white supremacy, states rights, the Lost Cause, and the culture of Jim Crow. They are indeed troubling, but I believe that an encounter with the past should trouble us.”
He added: “As a history teacher who has been bringing history students to Gettysburg for 20 years, I do not want these monuments removed.
“They give me an opportunity to explain what they mean and why they were erected when they were erected. If they are removed, we are missing the opportunity for students to see a symbol of racism. We miss the opportunity to talk about this.”
The Confederate state memorials don’t mention slavery. They don’t mention the beatings, the rapes and killings of enslaved African Americans.
Nor was slavery an abstraction at Gettysburg itself.
“Anywhere between 6,000 and 10,000 enslaved people supported in various capacities Lee’s army in the summer of 1863,” wrote historian Kevin Levin in Smithsonian Magazine in 2019. “Many of them labored as cooks, butchers, blacksmiths and hospital attendants, and thousands of enslaved men accompanied Confederate officers as their camp slaves, or body servants.”
In fact, during the 1863 invasion, the Confederates kidnapped about 100 African Americans who had living in freedom in Pennsylvania, Mr. Levin wrote.
Mr. Hancock said he hopes the park administration can do something to add context to the statues, providing information on the history of the monument making, not just on the battle the monuments commemorate. It may be difficult to counter the visual power of the heroic statuary, but “people much more creative than I am could come up with ways to do that,” he said.
And even in one of the world’s largest statuary parks, there should be room for at least one more monument honoring the presence of African Americans brought or captured as slaves in the Gettysburg campaign, Mr. Hancock said.
And from Gettysburg’s lookout tower, a sign could be set up, pointing visitors’ gaze to the mountains to the west, once used by fugitive slaves escaping across the Mason-Dixon line.
“That’s another way to inform visitors what the war was about,” he said, “and why there was a battle here.”