I know this is long, longer than I intended when I began, but I for those of you who really want an answer to the OP, I hope you will read it.
There’s an often-missed angle as to why there are so many monuments and why so many of them are to Robert E. Lee.
Does anybody ever wonder why these women who lived through the war and the Reconstruction aftermath dedicated themselves so wholly and completely to the memories of “Our Boys”? Why would they be raising money for monuments when often times didn’t even have enough money for food?
It is very likely because many, many Southern women were survivors of sexual violence at the hands of Union soldiers, and their coping mechanism was to build up the idea that a Southern Gentleman would never have behaved in such vulgar way. In the social decorum of the time, the notion of Gentlemen and Ladies was very real, and aristocratic Southern Belles admired nothing more in a man than his manners. So when you are set upon by bands of marauding and pillaging enemy soldiers, it has a way of causing moderate to severe psychological stress.
If you study Sherman’s March to the Sea, we do know that elite white women we specific targets for violence, humiliation and sexual assault. Lisa Tendrich Frank’s book called The Civilian War describes this. We also know that the real numbers of sexual assault are hugely underreported, for many reasons. I have read so many books on the subject, and I used to have a copy of a book called “I Had Rather Die” by Kim Murphy, and in it she describes these kinds of scenarios and the psychological reaction to rape by an enemy soldier in Southern society. I recall a passage where a woman actually was trying to report during Reconstruction being essentially gang-raped (although they did not use those terms then) by 5 Union soldiers, and she was dismissed (by a Union Officer of course) and told that if the really was a Lady, she wouldn’t be talking about such things. Most of the women just turned to each other for comfort and/or suffered in silence.
And yes, yes, I get it that Sherman’s aim was to break the back of the Confederacy, blah, blah, blah, I know that, and I know that he felt the women needed to be targeted because he believed they were a big source of the strength of the men who were fighting, but what he didn’t bargain for, and what so many people don’t get today, is that the backlash of all that was a generation of very damaged women who had no outlet for their grief and pain.
And I certainly hope I don’t need to make the argument that a woman does not necessarily have to be actually raped to be traumatized. Maybe just having your petticoat and skirts ripped off you and all your clothes stolen is enough. Or what about jewelry and other personal belongings stolen and sent away to Northern wives and sweethearts? Or your treasured letters burned and every household item of any usefulness destroyed? And what if they came again and again, taking all you need to produce more food, leaving you essentially naked and hungry with no way to replace what was taken? I would say that would jack you in the head a little bit. Women were left to whisper about it among themselves.
So they decided to erect monuments as a coping mechanism, and they built up the notion that their men had a special nobility, and would never, ever have allowed this to happen if only they had been there! Robert E. Lee became the archetype of this. It is a status even he, himself, would not have wanted.
One only has to read the diaries of a few Southern war widows to understand this. Dolly Sumner Lunt is a good one. Most of my particular interest has been in Georgia. There wasn’t a woman anywhere around that hadn’t lost a husband, son or brother, or possibly all 3. And then to suffer sexual violence on top of that? And then to have to report it to the very people that did it to you?
I think it is kind of understandable that they would take solace in building up legends.
Has anyone ever considered Mrs. DuBose in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird? For those of you who can’t recall, she is the bitter old lady who sits on the porch and yells at the children, all the while with a Confederate revolver in her lap for protection. Why is she like that? What has she been through that she is so threatened, even by small children? There is so much going on that novel that non-Southerners never pick up on. Harper Lee was writing from experience and she knew that in the 1930s these kinds of old ladies were everywhere. They had been traumatized in The War, and they were best left alone. She is the typical type of woman who would have been very involved in the late 1800s and early 1900s in organizations such as The Society of the Beautification of the Graves of Our Glorious Dead, probably a chapter of the UDC.
There was a huge need on the part of these women to legitimize their pain. Pain of grief, loss, violation. And putting their energy into the only acceptable avenue available to them at the time is a good explanation. Putting up obelisks, plaques, and headstones was a way of saying that “My fallen (Husband, Brother, Son) is JUST as legitimate as yours!”.
The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830-1930 by Anne Firor Scott is an excellent book to shed light on this.
The backstory of the Confederate monument in Savannah is perfect example. It was originally designed in 1875 with shrouded female figures on it, signifying grief and mourning, clearly a female statement. About a dozen or so years later, the female figures were removed and placed in Laurel Grove cemetery and the top figure was replaced with a typical soldier. I have argued we should restore it back to the Ladies’ original conception so people would understand better that the beginnings of the Monuments Movement came out of female grief and trauma. The glorified “generals on horses” statue types of monuments didn’t come until a little later once the politicians got involved and pretty much hijacked what the women had already started. This is where the whole “our women need protection” line came from so often spouted by the Dixiecrats that would come later.
Never underestimate the far-reaching power of a damaged War Widow.