Some Thoughts on Monuments - TTG

There is much hysteria lately about monuments. To various people they assume the mantels of symbols of Southern heritage or ugly reminders of slavery, segregation and white supremacy. I, however, have never been prone to hysteria. Whether it was engaging in a fifty foot free fall onto lava rock or being bracketed by naval gunfire, I remained calm. It’s probably a brain defect.

Yesterday’s Free Lance-Star ran a ran a front page story on calls on the Fredericksburg City Council to move the slave auction block at the corner of William and Charles streets to a museum. The other side of the debate contends that the auction block should remain where it is. “We need to sometimes feel shock, pain and remorse to know how far we’ve come, what has been done, what has been sacrificed,” one city council member said. The debate is heart felt, respectful and calm. I am very proud of that fact.

I am of the firm conviction that the auction block should stay where it is, but with a more meaningful and appropriate marker than the one that exists now. I first saw the auction block in the Summer of 1988 when I first moved to the area. It gave me a depressed and uneasy feeling. I felt the same thing when I walked through Dachau several years later. This artifact of Fredericksburg’s history must stay in place and bear witness to our past.

During this visit in 1988, I also visited the sunken road and the Kirkland Memorial commemorating the story of South Carolina Sergeant Richard Rowland Kirkland bringing water to wounded Union soldiers lying in front of Confederate positions at the sunken road during the first battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862. Although the story of “The Angel of Marye’s Heights” may not be historically accurate, the memorial is a moving tribute to a soldier’s compassion for another soldier. The monument was erected and dedicated during the Civil War Centennial in 1965. I know of no demonstrations occurring for or against this memorial. I would hope that anyone trying to stage a political spectacle near these monuments  in these turbulent times would be run out of town. The same goes for the Meade Pyramid on Prospect Hill or any of the Confederate monuments within the Confederate cemetery. The annual lighting of luminaria in this cemetery and in the nearby National cemetery remain respectful and moving commemorations. Things are as they should be in Fredericksburg.

——————————————

The situation in Richmond is quite different. Here the potential for strife and violence is real. It was not always the case. As late as last May, Civil War historian Kevin Levin wrote “What Richmond Has Gotten Right About Interpreting Its Confederate History.” At that time Mayor Stoney still ruled out the removal of any of the Confederate monuments along Monument Avenue. Rather, in recent years, Richmond chose to bring in other monuments to balance the significant and quite beautiful Confederate commemoration sites. Although not at all related to the Civil War, the Arthur Ashe monument was installed on Monument Avenue in 1996. Many white Virginians were aghast that a monument to a black tennis player would be placed on what they consider hallowed ground. Many black residents of Richmond were upset that a monument to their native son was so close to monuments to slave holders. But Arthur went up without violence and now presides over the annual Confederate commemoration parade along with Davis, Lee, Jackson and Stuart.

In April 2003 a life-sized statue of Lincoln and his son Tad sitting on a bench was installed on the site of Tredegar Ironworks. Behind Lincoln and his son is a wall with Lincoln’s words “To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds” inscribed upon it. Although this monument memorializes the historically significant event of Lincoln’s visit to Richmond just days after it fell to Union forces in April 1865, there was loud opposition to the monument’s installation. Bragdon Bowling, then president of the Virginia division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) was one of the leaders of the opposition. He described the Lincoln monument as "a slap in the face of brave men and women who went through four years of unbelievable hell fighting an invasion of Virginia by President Lincoln.” He further said the statue "is a not-so-subtle reminder of who won the war, and who our heroes should be." There were several hundred protesters at the event, many wearing Confederate uniforms and carrying the confederate battle flag. Bowling saw the monument as “a painful reminder of who won the war.”

Well, whether you call it the Civil War, the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression, it is a fact that Lincoln’s Union won that war. That fact is also part of the city’s heritage. Perhaps Bragdon Bowling should heed his own words when he offered advice for those who oppose Confederate monuments “turn your head if you don’t like it.” I think this Lincoln memorial, far more modest and contemplative than the Confederate statues on Monument Avenue, is a fitting addition to Richmond. 

There are several other recent additions to Richmond’s acknowledgement of her heritage. There is the Richmond Slavery Reconciliation Statue installed in Shockoe Bottom in 2007. Identical statues stand in Liverpool, England and in the Republic of Benin. Efforts to preserve Lumpkin’s Slave Jail and create a Slavery Memorial Park in Shockoe Bottom around that archeological site and a nearby African burial ground are underway. I’d much rather see this go forward than see Richmond or Virginia expend resources moving any Confederate statues from Monument Avenue. Given our current legal statutes, that idea is a non-starter anyways.

There is one other event that I would like to see memorialized in a grand manner in Richmond. It consists of the events described in this dispatch from the front.

City Point, VA., April 3, 1865—11 a.m.

Hon. E. M. Stanton, Secretary of War:

General Weitzel telegraphs as follows:

We took Richmond at 8.15 this morning. I captured many guns. The enemy left in great haste. The city is on fire in two places. Am making every effort to put it out. The people received us with enthusiastic expressions of joy.

T. S. Bowers, Assistant Adjutant-General.

The events of that moment are well described in this account from Mark St. John Erikson, a reporter for the Daily Press out of Newport News. Whenever I visit my younger son, I pass the two highway plaques that now commemorate that event. I also remember passing the Surrender Tree, a massive white oak that stood close to the spot where Richmond Mayor Mayo surrendered the city to advancing Union troops. It fell during a derecho in 2012. Luckily, my son’s house escaped damage other than losing a few shingles.

   

The first Union infantry unit that marched into Richmond was the 36th Infantry Regiment, US Colored Troops. Many of the infantrymen in the 36th were former slaves from the Tidewater Virginia region. It was these former slaves who were greeted by the black residents of Richmond, slaves and freedmen, with such enthusiasm on what became Emancipation Day in Richmond. I would like to see this event memorialized in a grand way at a prominent location in Richmond. It would be a fitting counterpoint to the statues memorializing the Confederacy on Monument Avenue. History should be remembered.

TTG

P.S. - The photo at the top of this post is the Soldier's Monument in Prospect, Connecticut. I grew up in the house, a former glebe house, visible behind the monument. That soldier and I have had a close relationship as far back as I can remember. In first grade I marched around him with my classmates wearing shakos made from construction paper, carrying our American flags and singing patriotic songs. The tree at the far left is a scion of Connecticut's Charter Oak. I often climbed it as a youth. 

Comments

[Stephanie]

"US Grant was a pre-war slave owner."

True, with a couple of notes to place that fact in context. As I'm sure you know, Grant came of an abolitionist family although he was not an abolitionist himself. (His father disapproved of his marriage into a family of slaveholders and did not show at the wedding; Longstreet, a relative of Julia Dent’s, was there.) For awhile Grant worked on a Dent family farm with slaves owned by his father-in-law. He sometimes worked alongside them. Later he acquired a slave also formerly owned by his father-in-law and freed him after a year or two. By freeing the man and not selling, Grant was walking away from at least $1,000, and he and his family needed money badly.

[kao_hsien_chih]

And those who brought war into our country were ardent "justice seekers" on all sides.

[kao_hsien_chih]

Not that forgotten. When Yatsenyuk, the most democratic man in Ukraine (TM) reminded the Westerners that Stalin invaded Europe through Ukraine in 1944, everyone clapped.

[mike]

The iconoclasts in Charlottesville should go north and tear down those monuments to the old slave trading families of New England, and the bankers in New York that financed their slave ships.

Brown University in Providence RI was named after the Brown brothers who ships brought slaves to the new world. They also had slaves working in their RI factories. Brown University was founded by Ezra Stiles, an early abolitionist who also profited from the slave trade. He eventually freed his slave but forced that slave’s two year old son into indenture until he was 24. Why not go after memorials at Brown, or Stiles’ house in Newport, or the college building at Yale named after him? By the way, most if not all of the old mansions in Newport were built from profits of the slave trade. Tear them down, or at least label them for what they are.

The multi-million dollar Cabot family of Boston got their seed money ten generations ago through the slave trade and the opium trade. They later made huge grants to Harvard, MIT and Norwich Universities to get respectable and sanitize their past.

Fanueil Hall in Boston, known tongue in cheek as the Cradle of Liberty, was named after Peter Fanueil, a slave trading Boston merchant.

Connecticut was as much a slave state as VA or MS. Connecticut had many slave-worked farms (i.e. plantations). On the eve of the American Revolution in Connecticut ”…half of all the ministers, lawyers, and public officials owned slaves, and a third of all the doctors.” The many textile mills there (as well as in RI & MA) relied on cotton harvested by southern slaves.

Even before the African slave trade, New England merchants made money by selling Indian slaves to the plantations of the Caribbean. They also sold some criminal whites into slavery in Jamaica; nice way to zero out any cost of penal institutions and actually make money from it.

[mike]

K_H_C -

Great thinking on that joint memorial to Sherman & Johnston. I concur. And why not joint memorials to Lee and Grant like the famous painting of them shaking hands?

Someone a lot smarter than all of us here once said "The only thing civil about the terrible war between the Union and the Confederacy was its climax. On Palm Sunday 1865, General Ulysses S. Grant strode into the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s farmhouse in Appomattox Court House, Virginia, and shook hands with General Robert E. Lee."

[Fred]

mike,

The revisionists are doubling down. DeBlasio is going after Columbus because those Europeans....
http://nypost.com/2017/08/23/de-blasio-says-removing-columbus-statue-is-on-the-table/

[mike]

Fred -

Mayor de Blasio may lose his job in the 2017 elections if he moves that statue, due to the influence of the Knights of Columbus and the large Italian contingent in NYC. He is Italian himself, isn't he? I suspect the KofC will talk to him behind the curtain and he will flip on this issue.

On the other hand, Columbus did NOT discover America. The fable that he did discover America is a bit of revisionism in itself. And I have never been a fan of Columbus: the first European slaver in the new world.

[Nancy K]

If Americans did not like drugs so much, maybe we would not have to send in the Marines to destroy the fields. We are the largest abusers of drugs in the world. I haven't a clue what can be done. Obviously just say no didn't work, nor did having a Drug Czar.

[Fred]

mike,

"the first European slaver in the new world." The native version was better. Kind of like Boko Haram's with "our girls" only with human sacrifice.

[SR Wood]

Good point, but out here on the high plains (SD &NE) I can not imagine the state government telling a locality whether or not to take down a statue. But then again we don't have the history the southern states do.

[mike]

Fred -

The same human sacrifice was practiced in Europe by Romans, Greeks Celts, Germans, and Slavs.

In the Americas, conquistadores quite often massacred all the males in villages and pulled a boko haram on the women and children. We Americans may not have done the boko haram routine, but as Colonel Chivington said: "Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice."

[Mark Logan]

Nightsticker,

I believe you have mis-interpreted by statement. What I am saying is not all removal of symbols is an attempt to "erase history". I pondered what the Hindus thought of what the hell happened to the Swastika, but they were forced to largely shun that too. It's what happens when clowns mis-appropriate them. Nothing fair about it, this is not advocacy.

I've done a fair bit of reading on the topic, mainly with an interest in sorting out how the people felt at the time. Has anyone done that better than our host? I think not. Nevertheless, I believe your warning is most wise, and have determined to run and hide behind Shelby Foote, who is equipped with much thicker armor for such accusations: "The great shame of the Confederate flag is it has been desecrated by those who now wave it."

It appears that symbols must be curated with exceedingly great care...if they are going to represent history.

[Bob]

"At least the slaves are free. I'm still waiting for some folks to say thanks for the freedom; it's only been 150 or so years; maybe next Juneteeth."
Nope, not racist.
"...I shouldn't mention that to you since the Democratic Party is the party that enacted all those Jim Crow laws, succeeded for years to disenfranchise black voters and whose longest serving Senator and mentor to Hilary was a KKK member."
Sure, pretend none of us are aware of the political alignment that occurred in the 1960's, changing the electoral map of the former Confederacy from solidly blue to solidly red. What could possibly have caused that?
"..on second thought, "dishonoring the US flag)" That's Colin Kaepernick"
Because kneeling during a song that contains the verse "No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave" dishonors the American flag more than carrying alongside Nazi and Confederate flags (you know, people who fought and killed US citizens) while chanting "blood and soil" and "Jews will not replace us".

[Cortes]

Give us a reputable authority on that aspect of the conquistadors' behaviour, please, Mike.

[LeaNder]

Thanks, Pat.

Seems the plate was added in 1984, thus early enough for TTG to take a closer look. Not sure what the HFFI at the bottom of the plate refers to.

http://www.getawaymavens.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Slave-Auction-Block-Fredericksburg-VA.jpg

Interesting anyway. I hoped I would find a little context?
A local historian that can tell me a little bit more about the block. In a nutshell a much longer struggle around the block, aural history plus at least eight historical traces of slaves sales in front of what was once the planter's hotel, and at least one instance of a possible property auction at the same location. Good historical image collection too:

https://fredericksburghistory.wordpress.com/2010/06/04/hello-world/

In any case concerning Ms Cooper I was wrong, rude? Sorry, Ronnette Cooper. Trade matters, I should have realized must indeed be very hard to trace. Except if family archives wind up in libraries.

[Fred]

Bob,

That's right, thanks for noticing. Now you are beginning to understand the cause of the agitators. Perhaps you should run for office to fix all that and bring about the 'new man' utopia.

[Fred]

Mike,

That's hard to believe since the conquistadors had a great number of native allies and most of the deaths were from smallpox, which the locals had never been exposed to. The intermarriage to the native population wasn't done by kidnapping girls out of government run schools.

[mike]

Cortes –

Here are a few that I know of: Check out the Napituca and Mabila massacres by de Soto, the Tiguex massacre by Coronado, the Acoma and Tompiro massacres by Onate, and the Zia Pueblo massacre by de Cruzate.

These were all documented by the perpetrators themselves or by the padres that accompanied them. They plus others are on record in the Crown archives in Madrid. There are also numerous books in English on the subject that were researched in Madrid.

You should do your own homework.

[Babak Makkinejad]

Read the Journals of Bernal Diaz.
A satanic order was smashed thanks to Spaniards.

[The Twisted Genius]

LeaNder,

You've taken quite an interest in the Fredericksburg slave auction block. I commend your curiosity. Check out the Lumpkin's slave jail archeological site in Richmond. That site came very close to being lost when the city was thinking about putting the new baseball stadium in that location. Luckily, that idea was discarded. Public parking is already tough in the Shockoe Bottom area. A stadium would have made it impossible. The proposed slavery memorial park is a good fit for the location. It is near the newly renovated Main Street railroad station and the soon to be expanded historic farmers market which often hosts various street fests. The new Stone Brewing Co. Brewery will also be building a beer garden on the James River with the Capitol bike trail running through it. My younger son takes that trail to work every day. Come to think of it, you'd probably feel right at home in Richmond.

http://www.smbw.com/project/main-st-station/

http://www.richmond.com/digital/richmond-bacon-festival/collection_6d008cae-d13d-11e2-94b6-0019bb30f31a.html#1

[mike]

Fred -

Intermarriage? Kidnapping girls into forced concubinage is the same whether they were kidnapped from schools, pueblos, or Yezidi villages.

[turcopolier]

LeaNder

No one pays much attention to the auction block. It was actually used for the auctioneer to stand on so that he could see who was bidding. Virginia likes auctions. I have been to many. Other kinds of property were auctioned there as well as slaves. there is a city museum that deals with slavery as well as other things. "Fast Fred" as the town is jokingly called is a pretty little place with a wealth of shops along Caroline Street. Mary Washington Univerity is there and the town is always infested with students and their parents. They are a very good source of income in bars and restaurants. 50 miles from DC, "Fast Fred" is about at the limit of comfortable commuting by car from DC but there is a train. IMO the best thing in the town is Carl's soft ice cream stand where they make the best soft ice cream I have ever experienced. Farm auctions are the best. These happen when the old folks die or go to "the home" and the heirs don't want the farm or quarrel over it. Such auctions are festive affairs. everything comes out of the barn and house, th accumulated acquisitions of a family over generations. When that is gone the house and farm land is sold. The women's association of some country church serve lunch; country ham biscuit sandwiches and home baked pies are the order of the day. Just lovely. pl

[LeaNder]

You've taken quite an interest in the Fredericksburg slave auction block.

It was a bit of a Pavlovian response, TTG. I am sure you realized. The interest in the auction block was more a result of that Pavlovian response. I needed something easy and fast for the argument? ...

In a nutshell: Richmond is a much more complex "context", it feels, I preferred to avoid therefore. ;)

Arbitrary choice: Who decided or campaigned for the Ashe statue to be put up in monument row. Apparently in semi-distance to others on Monument Avenue? City council decision in 1996?

Babbling mode: I sure remember strong inner resistance toward earlier centuries' monumental expressions over here, the soldier/rider/emperor type of raised statues. As a close friend later I became to love the weathering of e.g. the Bronze statues, or the patina.

My basic field is literature and film. I miss the necessary art history, or a comparative approach to statues as cultural expression over the ages. In "context". But what exactly did the artist force to keep the visual raising onto a column above commuter's perception in his celebration of Ashe? What would Ashe have said? I do understand that it doesn't show on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_Avenue#/media/File:Arthur_Ashe_Monument.jpg

I am aware I also semi-ridiculed the idea of Emancipation Park. Maybe I shouldn't have? What exactly could emancipation mean today? How could we ever emancipate from the rules that dictate our lives today, versus at the times in question? ...

Let me ask a rather innocent question. Why didn't Paul DiPasquale do some research on unknown soldiers and add one? That would have been a true juxtaposition to the respective monumental expressions. No column raising the average soldier above the perception level of the commuters? ... The Ashe statue a ore whimsically choice, an idea that was easy to sell? No harm meant to DiPasquale. I am aware as artist you have to be to 50% good in art and to 50% good in marketing.

Understand my avoidance? The relic is I found out a semi-disputed piece of history for much longer. Art although, Kant assumed it shouldn't be, is usually disputable. And maybe should be since it often is linked via an "umbilical cord" to both money and power.

******
Interview with Paul DiPasquale. The motivation for the Ash monument. The reason why he worked on the statue, he met him and recognized Ashe had been largely ignored in his home town. around 1:50. What's the exact history of the whole story how the statue made it via the City Council decision in 1996 onto Monument Avenue?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=errz_bR2BS4

DiPasquale seems to concentrate on public art. At least as far as the little I can find out about him is concerned. The public approach may have somewhat dictated his rather conventional approach, as lover of art, if I may?

[LeaNder]

to love the weathering of e.g. the Bronze statues

hoping there aren't more linguistic blunders as a result of trying to keep this short, no idea where became" was heading in this specific "linguistic context".

[Fred]

mike,

While it is a violation of the current sjw narrative there was actual intermarriage of Spanish immigrants with natives in the new world over the centuries.