Really, I’ve never heard of any motive expressed for the dedication of a Confederate memorial that would distinguish it from any other war memorial–except that Confederate memorials are a little more explicitly dedicated to defenders, right here in their native land, as opposed to expeditonary forces.
Also, what’s this stuff about the last fifty years? Has there been a run on new monuments? As far as I can recall, the ubiquitous Confederate-soldier statues in Southern town squares and cemeteries were mostly all dedicated in the 1880s through 1920s (when some veterans were still around).
Except that they weren’t American soldiers at the time. They were either soldiers of another country or traitors, depending on how you view such things.
I disagree with this. What particular crimes against humanity that were not also committed by Northern states? As someone pointed out, Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland were all slave states that stayed in the Union. Ulysses S Grant had owned a slave; his wife’s family owned many.
Yes, they could have been tried for treason. But if that had happened (as many radical Republicans wanted) then a Confederate Memorial Day would be the least of our problems: how about car bombs and a simmering guerilla war?
You have a point here. Southerners want to separate secession from slavery. They talk about “states rights” and the “War of Northern Aggression”. However, when it comes down to it, the “states right” that they demanded was the right to own slaves. Slavery cannot be separated from the Confederacy. I suggest to everyone the excellent books by Bruce Catton.
On one level, yes, people could simply remember Robert E Lee, Beauregard, Stonewall Jackson, Longstreet, and Jeff Davis as part of their history. OTOH, there are enough of those Southerners who want to do so as a means of asserting white supremacy and racism to sometimes taint the whole enterprise.
There are other areas where we have the same problem. For instance, there are lots of places named for Andrew Jackson: President, General, reformer, democrat. And also the person who tried very hard to commit genocide to the Cherokees, Choctaws, and other Indian tribes in the southeast. Trail of Tears.
You also need to remember that Memorial Day was first celebrated only in the North. It wasn’t a “national” holiday, but a holiday to celebrate the victory of the Union in the Civil War. No Confederate soldiers allowed. Confederate Memorial Day can be seen partly as a backlash to that.
I tend to look at individual events and the motivation of individuals. Is this a simple memorial of the other side of a war, or are people using it as a smokescreen for racism?
There is nothing objectively wrong with wanting to remember Confederate war dead. Hell, we were in the wrong in Vietnam and Iraq, but I don’t remember anyone saying we can’t honor soldiers who died in Vietnam and Iraq. The real problem is of course that racists have attached themselves like the human lampreys they are to the notion of honoring Confederate soldiers, and tainted it with their nasty beliefs. I’m not sure what can or should be done about it, but living in the south, it’s real obvious what’s happened.
I lived in Florida for five years and worked for the state part of that time. I never got off Confederate Memorial Day (or Robert E. Lee’s birthday, also a state holiday), nor did my daughter get a day off of public school. It was one of those days like Flag Day where unless you paid special attention to it, you never knew it was going on.
Or get drunk and shell Ft Sumter! Folks down there USED TO know how to celebrate.
Fifty years ago in Virginia the public schools got off for Jeff Davis’ birthday, but my Catholic school didn’t cotton to such foolishness. They got Jackson and Lee day off, too. We felt ripped off.
ETA: Even then I thought Davis, Jackson, and Lee were rotting in Hell, but I could use the days off.
No, Confederate memorials are by definition not dedicated to defenders. It was Grant’s army, not Lee’s, that were defending their country.
Another way of looking at this: Every single person who was alive during the Civil War is now dead. Likewise, so are a great many other Americans, from other times. Many of them, soldier and civilian, were honorable, in their way. Why, then, celebrate the soldiers over the civilians? The only difference between the soldiers and the civilians is that the soldiers made a terrible, terrible mistake, in choosing to fight for the side that everyone should by now recognize as wrong. If we establish memorials to the soldiers specifically, then what we are in effect doing is honoring that terrible mistake. If you want to honor our ancestors’ virtues, then establish a day for honoring all of our ancestors. But don’t specifically call out those ancestors distinguished by their vices.
You could strike “Southern” - the various confederacy groups sprinkled memorials all over the US, including northern states and states that didn’t exist in 1865.
Hairsplitting, I think. Unsuccessfully secessionist Americans are still Americans. I see no reason remembering our war dead should not include them, utterly aside of the cause they fought for.
As arguments go that’s arrant nonsense. They believed they were no longer citizens of the United States. They were fighting the United States. They deserve no remembrance except as either traitors against their country or enemy combatants. We have no memorials for the Nazi war dead, even though some American citizens fought for Germany. We should have no memorials for the Confederate dead, no matter whose great-grandpappy died. Great-grandpappy died dishonorably as a scoundrel and a traitor.
I honestly have no idea where people get such an idea. It’s pure sentimentalism laid over a fictionalized history. It has no basis in logic or good sense. Leave that for Confederate reenactors and faux Southern belles. It has no place on the SDMB.
Would it help to say that we’re calling them out despite their errors? A good person can do a good job…in the service of a wrong cause.
I share in this more charitable interpretation. At that time, many people held that a man’s “homeland” was his state, not his country. The sobriquet “War Between the States” is not wholly wrong. The table of organization at, say, Shiloh includes several “U.S. Regiments,” but also a number of “Ohio Regiments,” “Pennsylvania Regiments,” “Illinois Regiments,” and so on. (Um, quoting from memory here; it’s been a while since I transcribed a Shiloh OOB.) Anyway, both U.S. formations and state formations.
The university I attended has a monument to alumni who have died in war. It may seem somehow pretentious and provincial, but local consciousness is not morally invalid.
(It would, however, be amusing if someone erected a counterpart memorial, listing all the alumni in prison on felony convictions…)
I mean “defense” in the most basic, literal sense. Not a matter of any abstruse political argument, but a matter of protecting one’s own towns and farms from the fires and looting of an invader. For the most part, it was Northern armies that invaded Southern states–that treated the South as enemy territory.
No, it was treated as occupied territory. The Federals believed they were bringing the land and the citizens back into the bosom of the United States and freeing them from the vile usurpers.
Oh, and the Confederates looted and burned when they got the chance. Chambersburg, PA was a notable example. Unfortunately for them, they so seldom left the bounds of the Confederacy that they rarely got the chance. Then again, their first two occupations of Chambersburg were peaceful enough.
Yeah, whatever. The point is, towns and farms were looted and burned. Civilians were sometimes killed outright, and otherwise knew great privation. Most Americans have no cultural memory of such an experience, of invaders moving through one’s own familiar landscapes. I find it completely understandable that Southerners who do would feel a visceral attachment to the memory of the men who resisted that, utterly apart from any political argument or interpretation.
If you can’t see that soldiers who fight as ordered and die for what they believe to be right - be they our Sainted American Revolutionaries, Confederates, Wehrmacht or Sitting Bull’s warriors - are all the same in the grave, then I pity you.
I have absolutely NO respect for the worship, whitewashing and revisionism of the neoconfederate movement; I’ve gotten into fistfights insisting that the Civil War was first, last and always about slavery.
If you see the Confederate troops who were stacked like cordwood at Gettysburg and Antietam as despicable traitors, fine. Have another beer and go think about something important instead.