New Monument News

There is good news on the monument front.

This article by Professor Michael Nelson, a political scientist at Rhodes College, states “The Conservative Case for Moving Forrest’s Bust.” Regarding the Nathan Bedford Forrest bust in the Tennessee State Capitol, Professor Nelson writes, “The standard debate on the bust runs along familiar ideological lines.  Conservatives say the state should honor Forrest as a great military commander, while liberals want to dishonor him as a slave trader and slaughterer of African American soldiers fighting for the Union. The ‘great commander’ view of Forrest inspired Memphis Civil War historian Shelby Foote to describe him as one of the two ‘authentic geniuses’ to emerge from the conflict, the other being Abraham Lincoln. It also inspired Union generals Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman to pay tribute to Forrest’s military prowess. Grant described Forrest as ‘brave and intrepid.’  Sherman considered him ‘the most remarkable man our civil war produced on either side.’ Forrest’s astonishing elevation during the war from private to Lieutenant General, his innovative use of cavalry to harass and tie down Union forces in Tennessee and Mississippi, and his unfailing bravery and audacity in battle all attest to his reputation as a warrior.  Forrest ‘used his horsemen as a modern general would use motorized infantry,’ wrote Civil War historian Bruce Catton.” As Dr. Nelson tells us, “Admiration for Forrest as one of ‘the nation’s most amazing military figures’ is what motivated longtime conservative Democratic State Senator Douglas Henry to persuade the Tennessee General Assembly to add the Forrest bust to the Capitol’s “Hall of Heroes” in 1978, according to Kenneth P. Paul, who worked with Henry. The Capitol already had a bust of Admiral David Farragut, the inventive Tennessee-born Union naval commander during the war.  Henry thought it made perfect sense to complement it with one portraying the state’s equally exceptional Confederate army general.  Critics of the decision to install the bust—at the time and ever since—seldom dispute Forrest’s reputation on the battlefield.  Their view instead is that his dishonorable life as the leading slave trader in Memphis, his army’s slaughter of surrendering black soldiers after the battle of Fort Pillow was won, and his postwar service as an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan outweigh any other considerations.” He then moves on to state his case: “To the extent that the arguments of both Forrest’s liberal critics and conservative defenders are valid, the debate about how to remember him is a hard one to resolve. But are the arguments of his defenders valid? I’m a conservative who’s not so sure. Consider what actually happened at Fort Pillow in 1864 in purely military terms. The Union-held fort contained about 600 soldiers, more than half of them African Americans, many of whom had escaped plantations on which they were previously enslaved.  Because the fort had virtually no strategic importance by the time of the battle, one can’t help but question Forrest’s judgment in attacking it rather than deploying his forces elsewhere. As a military backwater, Fort Pillow was, not surprisingly, weakly defended and poorly led.  In a battle that began early in the morning of April 12 and was effectively over a few hours later, many of the overrun Union soldiers fled down the bluff to the Mississippi River, hoping to be rescued by a nearby gunboat. Forrest’s men showed no mercy, especially to the black combatants.  Nearly two-thirds of the slain soldiers were members of the United States Colored Troops. Sgt. Achilles Clark of the Confederacy’s 20th Tennessee Cavalry wrote, ‘The slaughter was awful. Words cannot describe the scene.  The poor deluded negroes would run up to our men, fall upon their knees, and with uplifted hands scream for mercy, but they were ordered to their feet and then shot down. . . . Blood, human blood, stood about in pools, and brains could have been gathered up in any quantity.’ As Rhodes College historian Timothy Huebner observed in his book Liberty and Union: The Civil War Era and American Constitutionalism, ‘It is hard to escape the conclusion that raging Confederates, blinded by racial hatred, deliberately massacred black soldiers as they were attempting to surrender.’  Forrest himself observed, ‘The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for 200 yards.’ It isn’t clear whether Forrest knew about the slaughter while it was taking place.  He said he didn’t. But does it matter?   If he knew, he stands justly condemned for condoning conduct that violated all the rules of war concerning the treatment of surrendering warriors. If, as he later maintained, he didn’t know, he was guilty of gross negligence. And think of the consequences—the military consequences—when northern publications ran stories on ‘The Massacre at Fort Pillow’ and Congress’ Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War distributed 60,000 copies of a report describing in detail ‘a scene of cruelty and mercy without parallel in civilized warfare.’ In one fell swoop, Fort Pillow intensified northern resistance to any effort to end the war short of complete surrender, encouraged Union officers to treat southern captives cruelly, and built support in the North for President Lincoln’s previously controversial decision to invite tens of thousands of liberated slaves to take up arms as soldiers. As Grant noted, by 1864 the Confederacy’s ‘only hope now is in a divided North.’  Fort Pillow went a long way toward mitigating any such division. In all, as a commander Forrest gained temporary possession of a meaningless fort while making things worse for the Confederate military effort everywhere.” Dr. Nelson regards removing the bust from the capitol the right thing to do.

This article tells us Virginia is going to allow local communities to decide whom and what they feel is worthy of being honored with a monument. “The Democratic-led House and Senate passed measures that would undo an existing state law that protects the monuments and instead let local governments decide their fate. The bill’s passage marks the latest turn in Virginia’s long-running debate over how its history should be told in public spaces. The legislation now heads to Gov. Ralph Northam, who has said he supports giving localities — several of which have already declared their intent to remove statues — control over the issue. After white supremacists descended on Charlottesville in 2017, in part to protest the city’s attempt to move a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, many places across the country quickly started taking Confederate monuments down. But Virginia localities that wanted to remove monuments were hamstrung by the existing law. In the two legislative sessions that followed the rally, Republican lawmakers defeated bills like the one that passed Sunday. But Democrats recently took full control of the state house for the first time in a generation. One of the bill’s sponsors, Del. Delores McQuinn of Richmond, said she feels great about letting local leaders decide what’s right for their community. But she said she thought many places would opt to keep the monuments.” The bill doesn’t apply to cemeteries or to the Stonewall Jackson statue at VMI.

Company E, of the 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, is pictured at Fort Lincoln in Washington, D.C. The regiment fought at the Battle of New Market Heights outside of Richmond. (Library of Congress)

Also out of Virginia is this article about a movement to honor USCT soldiers on Monument Avenue in Richmond. In that article, we find, “[Michael] Knight [ a specialist in 19th century African American military history and archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration] is part of a group that’s set out to change the enduring Lost Cause narrative in Richmond by building the first statue of black Civil War veterans on Monument Avenue. The road is a National Historic Landmark lined with five Confederate memorials built in the Jim Crow era. Joining Knight on the board of the Honor the 14 Foundation is Richmond City Councilwoman Kim Gray, whose district includes part of Monument Avenue. In December 2019, Gray proposed a resolution to enlist support for the initiative from Mayor Levar Stoney’s administration. ‘Those troops won Medals of Honor for their valor and it was a very significant battle in the Civil War. … It’s appropriate to honor our troops, and Union soldiers, I think, are an interesting twist to Monument Avenue,’ said Gray, who also announced last month that she would challenge Stoney in the mayoral election this fall. Her colleagues in City Council unanimously approved the measure in January. The resolution also asks Stoney to allocate $5,000 for start-up costs, a number that Gray said would reflect a symbolic blessing from the city. The project is expected to cost approximately $5 to 10 million. Commemorating formerly enslaved people and black veterans was among the recommendations made by the Monument Avenue Commission in 2018. The group was formed at the behest of Stoney in June 2017, two years after a white supremacist who embraced symbols of the Confederacy massacred nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C.” Also, according to the article, “Another proposal comes from Virginia Beach, where the Historic Preservation Commission recommended contextualizing a Confederate memorial with a public park and counterbalancing it with a statue, sculpture or artwork that commemorates African American heritage. Some say paying tribute to black history isn’t enough to bring justice to those who feel pain and offense when faced with the likeness of slaveholders. Joseph Rogers is a Civil War educator and activist with Monumental Justice. He is also a descendant of James A. Fields, who was born into slavery and went on to become commonwealth’s attorney and a member of the Virginia House of Delegates after the war. Rogers commends the proposed monument to black Union soldiers, but said it’s wrong to juxtapose oppressors with the oppressed. ‘It does run the risk of creating a dangerous moral equivalency’ between the causes for which the men fought, he explains. (Rogers is also the education program manager at the American Civil War Museum in Richmond but stressed he was speaking for himself, not the museum.) ‘We’re talking about the leaders of the Confederacy,’ he said. ‘The men who were directing the armies which, had they been successful, would have expanded the institution of slavery.’ There’s a long way to go before Richmond memorializes black Civil War veterans on Monument Avenue. The city has to sign off on the proposed location, currently slated for a median between Strawberry and Allison Streets, about two blocks west of the Robert E. Lee statue. If they get the green light, the Honor the 14 Foundation will conduct a search for an artist and design, which must also get approval from the city. Then there is the matter of raising millions of dollars.  The process could take years, but the effort to commemorate a battle that some describe as ‘forgotten’ is a worthwhile cause, Knight said.”

The lies of the confederate heritage scam continue to retreat.