There are 772 statues or monuments dedicated to soldiers or leaders of the Confederate States Army identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center that activists now want removed from taxpayer-funded public places. That’s a lot of granite and marble and bronze, but it amounts to about two regiments in the Confederate army (350-400 soldiers ) and a little less than a single regiment in the Union army (800 soldiers).
The law center omitted my favorite piece of granite however. It’s a small stone marker labeled “Arm of Stonewall Jackson May 3, 1863.”
Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, one of the most famous of the Confederacy’s generals, was wounded in the left arm by his own troops during the Battle of Chancellorsville in Virginia. Rather than throw the amputated limb on a heap of other amputated limbs outside the field hospital, a military chaplain wrapped it in a blanket and the arm was buried the next day in a private cemetery not far from the battlefield.
When Jackson died eight days later, his body was sent to his family and buried in Lexington, Va., giving him the dubious distinction of being simultaneously buried in two graves.
In 1998, as a high school English teacher, I studied at the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, having earned a fellowship there that was usually reserved for history teachers and students of history. I argued in my application essay that the eligible applicants ought to be broadened to include teachers of American literature. After all, the Civil War was a four-year tragedy that intersected the lives of great American authors including Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass. The Civil War Institute agreed with my logic, and since then has enlarged its applicant pool.
Chalk one up for English teachers, especially in a world where the study of the humanities is shrinking.
Each year, the Civil War Institute chooses a topic and invites scholars to deliver papers on that topic for a week, ending with the July 1-3 anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Presenters address both Union and Confederate battles, soldiers and issues and participate in tours: “John Brown and Harper’s Ferry” and “The Escape Route of John Wilkes Booth” were two of my favorites. In 1998, my fellowship year, the topic was “Longstreet.” I had no idea who or what Longstreet was, but was happy to learn.
It turns out that James Longstreet was an important lieutenant general in the Confederate army who served under the top Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, in many battles, including at Gettysburg.
He disagreed with Lee’s strategy at Gettysburg but, like a good soldier, carried it out (some say reluctantly), sending troops across an open field in what is today called Pickett’s Charge. They were defeated, nay slaughtered, by Union soldiers, including Vermonters posted behind a stone wall on the Brian (or Bryan) farm.
As part of our fellowship week we walked the actual field where Pickett’s Charge took place, and we learned what it must have felt like to be a Confederate sitting duck (or marching duck) ourselves.
The Union victory at Gettysburg prompted Abraham Lincoln to deliver what has become arguably the most famous speech in American history (and literature, this former English teacher would point out). Its opening words — “Four score and seven years ago” — echo in the ears of high school students even in the digital classrooms of today.
Some devotees of the Confederacy still resent the fact that, years after the war was over, Longstreet soldiered for the victorious Union under Ulysses S. Grant, by then president of the re-United States. Notably, Longstreet even commanded an African-American militia in the 1874 Battle of Liberty Place in New Orleans, a revolt against the Reconstruction-era Louisiana state government.
The year I attended the institute, a statue to Longstreet was dedicated at the Gettysburg National Military Park, which is filled with monuments and statues to both sides, almost like a giant chessboard. I have a photograph of myself standing under another monument, the 20-foot-tall statue of Lee mounted on his favorite horse, Traveller, at the battlefield.
So what’s the big deal with the statues and monuments activists want removed from public places?
The argument is that most were not dedicated immediately after the end of the Civil War in 1865 as tender memorials to loved ones, but rather in the early 1900s as coded symbols of the “Lost Cause,” and therefore an endorsement of the Jim Crow segregation of the South. The “Arm of Stonewall Jackson” marker, for instance, was erected not in 1863, when the arm was buried, but in 1903 by Confederate devotees.
Today, activists don’t want a single taxpayer dollar spent to maintain these symbols of white supremacy in public places. Remove them or tear them down, they cry. Indeed, the violence last year in Charlottesville, Va., was the result of opposing groups tangling over the city’s attempt to remove a statue of Lee.
I would like to make a modest proposal that could solve this problem: Gather all the disputed statues and monuments and have them donated to the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. The institute could use them as visual aids for its annual scholarly presentations. In other words, they would be seen through the prism of scholarship (the mission of every American institution of higher learning), not through the prism of racial animus or political correctness. Heck, they might even bring the donor a tax credit.
Then, a thousand years from now, when archaeologists dig up Gettysburg, Pa., they may discover two regiments of bronze and granite Confederate soldiers, much like the Terracotta Army in China, the thousands of life-sized pottery soldiers discovered a few decades ago after being buried for 2,000 years near the first Chinese emperor’s tomb.
These archeologists from the future may find something else of military significance at their Gettysburg excavation: the home and farm of the greatest wartime general since Julius Caesar, Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander who orchestrated the D-Day invasion that was the beginning of the end of World War II in Europe and later became president of the United States.
Eisenhower and his wife, Mamie, maintained a summer White House at Gettysburg from 1952-1960, the years Ike was president. If you take the tour of that farm, as I did, the guide will tell you that one day, while digging in her garden, the first lady uncovered the bones of what turned out to be a Confederate soldier. She ordered that the remains be buried with full military honors — by the very country that soldier had fought to defeat.
During that same time, President Eisenhower quelled a potentially violent confrontation in Little Rock, Ark. In 1957, three years after the Supreme Court handed down its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, the governor of Arkansas ordered the Arkansas National Guard to prevent African-American students from enrolling in the all-white Central High School. Eisenhower responded by placing the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and sent 1,000 paratroopers from the Army’s 101st Airborne Division to help restore order.
Two acts of peaceful leadership to heal a nation’s wounds — one by a president, the other by a first lady, each inching us all toward justice.
Paul Keane lives in Hartford.