There is a proposal on the table in Raleigh North Carolina, to require one half of one percent of all capital projects to be spent on public art. No sooner had this been proposed than an article appeared in the local paper saying that some of that money should be used to remove the confederate memorial from the grounds of the old capitol building. After all, the writer says, the statue memorializes people who were fighting for the right to own other people and was built in as part of an ugly past at the turn of the last century. The memorial, the reasoning goes, legitimizes and memorializes a dark and hatelfull past.
No doubt future articles on the topic will argue the memorial is historical and to remove it is to erase part of our proud southern history. There is nothing proud about slaves or slavery. It was an odious institution, whose human and cultural cost are still being paid today. The reality is the Southern moonlight and magnolia culture was built on a human chattel foundation.
But if the memorial is taken down we lose an opportunity to shine a searchlight in the moonlight, and wake up from the cloying perfume of the magnolias. With the memorial gone, there will be nothing there to remind the future the awful price paid for failures of the past. The civil war will recede even further in people’s memories and if they do think about it, it will be in the painless bodice-ripper presentation of Gone With The Wind. If this happens we will not learn from our past and we will fall into the same traps in the future.
We all learn from our experience. We sometimes learn the most from our most embarrassing experiences. I don’t think there is a single person who doesn’t have something in their past they would rather forget, but who also understands that that very thing taught them their most valuable lesson.
History is experience – and recent history is full of mistakes we made because we didn’t take time to study and learn. Had congressional leaders studied how the Bush Administration rushed and sold the vote to authorize war with Iraq, they would have recognized the same techniques when the Bush White House was selling the bank bailout in September. Republicans missed the lesson that all of Bush’s tax cuts did little to stimulate the economy and were not a jobs creation engine. The Democrats have not learned that debt must be paid.
The nation is in crisis. Yet this crisis has it predecessors in the panic of 1873 and the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Each of these economic events provides us a guide for what steps are effective and what steps not to take in resolving a crisis of this magnitude. But we will never re-learn these steps if we simply play political football these events and not sit down together and make an honest assessment of what they can teach us. If we don’t learn these lessons from the past people will suffer needlessly as this economic crisis drags on longer than it has to. If we do not make an honest assessment of how we got in this predicament we cannot make a decent plan on how to get out
The confederate memorial, also has lessons for today’s politicians as they search for a way out of the current crisis. That lesson is what the tragic consequences are when political factions are more interested in defending their positions and scoring points off the opposition rather than coming together to resolve a national crisis.
So rather than taking the memorial down, we should build around it. We should build out ways that people can see the awful price paid by both sides in this conflict. People should ask themselves how national leaders could fail so badly that the equivalent of 5 million people from today's population died in four years. Are we making the same mistakes today?
When the Soviet Union fell, it was hard for the Russians to get back on their feet and find their way because every piece of history that did not support the propaganda of the moment was cut from the news and hidden away. Whenever a piece of the past became inconvenient the authorities would simply airbrush the person who represented that piece out of the annual May Day picture of the leaders lined up on Lenin’s tomb. The Russians did not have the lessons of the past to draw on to help them through the transition of from repression to democracy. As they did not have the lessons of the past to call on it was much harder for them to stumble forward.
Let’s not repeat their mistake either.
We have this past - let’s learn from it.
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Rather than banish the Confederate memorial, we should put it in context. The memorial is not to the slaveholders but to the men who fought in the Confederate armed forces, and their history is far more "inconvenient" than most Americans realize. Not only were those men not slaveholders, it is highly likely that a majority of them were anti-slavery, pro-unionists. As happened in Tennessee, the popular vote in North Carolina went against secession, by a tally of 47,323 to 46,672 - - which seems close until you consider that only white males were allowed to vote. Like Tennessee, North Carolina was later manipulated into the Confederacy politically, against the will of the people.
About one out of three Confederate soldiers was a North Carolinian. The reason for this disproportionate representation is little known: Tar Heels, because of their pro-union background, were drafted into service in great numbers. (Tennesseans and western Virginians were much better situated to avoid impressment.) Actual North Carolina volunteers were low in number. Men were dragooned from the pro-union Piedmont and mountain counties and taken to Raleigh where they were counted as having "enlisted."
One of my great-etc-grandfathers, who lived in Randolph County, NC, was among those impressed into service. Before the war, he was what we now call a "conductor" on the Underground Railroad. He built into the attic of his house a hidden room to harbor runaway slaves. Ironically, during the Civil War he used that room to hide from the Confederate press gangs. He was eventually caught and forcibly "enlisted." He fought in one battle, was wounded and captured, then paroled and shipped to Georgia in a prisoner exchange; ordered to return to his unit, at some point in or near Charlotte he got off the train and walked home. In the last year of the war, that was how many thousands of surviving North Carolina conscripts repatriated themselves.
Many of the conscripted soldiers did not live to have "AWOL" written in their records. They died of disease, privation, and wounds suffered in battle. When you see a Confederate monument, think of them - - they are the ones we should remember.
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