Rewiring history..

[tsubaki]

It becomes the seperation between official history and 'known' history. The root of this issue, certainly regarding the statue issue is projection and perception. The 'glorification' of known slave traders as opposed to the villification of slave traders.

"Projection and perception" are very dangerous things in history though; they invariably tend to obscure the truth because we do not want to see it. Have a street named after a slave trader (for example) and it doesn't lessen what he did, it does nothing for his victims, it doesn't even tackle the wealth that his descendants may still enjoy, but renaming it makes us feel better whilst making the generations to come much less likely to remember what it is he did in the first place.

A good example of this is the Victorian translation of the Tiberius section of Suetonius' Twelve Caesars. They left one part of it completely untranslated because they couldn't allow uneducated minds to read about the complete deviance that Tiberius got up to on Capri; had you not been able to read Latin one would assume that his retirement was spent in gentle pursuits like dining and having caves collapse.

 

[orly]

"Projection and perception" are very dangerous things in history though; they invariably tend to obscure the truth because we do not want to see it. Have a street named after a slave trader (for example) and it doesn't lessen what he did, it does nothing for his victims, it doesn't even tackle the wealth that his descendants may still enjoy, but renaming it makes us feel better whilst making the generations to come much less likely to remember what it is he did in the first place.

A good example of this is the Victorian translation of the Tiberius section of Suetonius' Twelve Caesars. They left one part of it completely untranslated because they couldn't allow uneducated minds to read about the complete deviance that Tiberius got up to on Capri; had you not been able to read Latin one would assume that his retirement was spent in gentle pursuits like dining and having caves collapse.

A lot of modern interpretation put this st the level of tabloid gutter press equivalent, titillation without too much basis in fact.

Didn't know about the translation though. Interesting

 

[tsubaki]

A lot of modern interpretation put this st the level of tabloid gutter press equivalent, titillation without too much basis in fact.

Didn't know about the translation though. Interesting

It could be - though the specific allegations are so lurid and so unique to him it does make you wonder how true they might be, and Suetonius was in a position to know.

 

[Old Blue 2]

I think the problem with the Confederate statues is that there appears to be no 'wider achievement'. I may be wrong, but from what I understand (I'm not American btw) the sole aim of Lee's rebels was to preserve slavery, so what is being celebrated? I'd be interested to hear what the arguments for keeping said statues actually are, as I've not come accross much more than 'It's part of our history', a history which started with the noble aims of shrugging off oppression and unpalatable ideas, yet is now impervious to the same ideals which shaped the nation.

Be happy to be educated.

The American Civil War is not a simple war. The origins go back many years, and are rooted in the perception of Southern States that the Northern States, having the industrial might, dictated many policies that were not acceptable to the South. Secession, in the round, was the desire of Southern States to detach from the Northern States and determine their own future course. I believe Ulysses S. Grant was quoted as saying, in so many words, that if the only reason for the war was to free the slaves, he would not have gone to war. The slavery issue was one of many issues current at the time.

Robert E Lee was a graduate of West Point and a fairly high-ranking officer in the US Army when the American Civil War broke out. He was offered a post in the US Army for the war, but stated he would not take up arms against his own state, and resigned his commission, returning to Virginia. He accepted comand of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

One thing to be borne in mind is that the vast majority (and I'm talking the high 90s %age) of soldiers in the Confederate Army were ordinary men who fought because the publicity of their state at the time told them that their state was being invaded by the US Army, and not through any moral belief in slavery, as none had slaves - it was the rich southerners who had them. And so it was that the Northern Army invaded the south. Lee's minor foray into the North culminating in the defeat at Gettysberg, was a blip in the otherwise main course of the war: Northern invasion of the south.

In the post civil war years, it was probably de rigeur for both sides to 1) put up statues to their military commanders, and 2) honour their war dead. The statues issue is now in a blaze of publicity; what is not generally known is that certain institutions in the south in recent years have sought to have the graves of ordinary Confederate soldiers not marked in any way, even by flowers...

I offer the above in a neutral stance in response to your last sentence.

 

[Raindog]

The American Civil War is not a simple war. The origins go back many years, and are rooted in the perception of Southern States that the Northern States, having the industrial might, dictated many policies that were not acceptable to the South. Secession, in the round, was the desire of Southern States to detach from the Northern States and determine their own future course. I believe Ulysses S. Grant was quoted as saying, in so many words, that if the only reason for the war was to free the slaves, he would not have gone to war. The slavery issue was one of many issues current at the time.

Robert E Lee was a graduate of West Point and a fairly high-ranking officer in the US Army when the American Civil War broke out. He was offered a post in the US Army for the war, but stated he would not take up arms against his own state, and resigned his commission, returning to Virginia. He accepted comand of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

One thing to be borne in mind is that the vast majority (and I'm talking the high 90s %age) of soldiers in the Confederate Army were ordinary men who fought because the publicity of their state at the time told them that their state was being invaded by the US Army, and not through any moral belief in slavery, as none had slaves - it was the rich southerners who had them. And so it was that the Northern Army invaded the south. Lee's minor foray into the North culminating in the defeat at Gettysberg, was a blip in the otherwise main course of the war: Northern invasion of the south.

In th epost civil war years, it was probably de rigeur for both sides to 1) put up statues to their military commanders, and 2) honour their war dead. The statues issue is now in a blaze of publicity; what is not generally known is that certain institutions in the south in recent years have sought to have the graves of ordinary Confederate soldiers not marked in any way, even by flowers...

I offer the above in a neutral stance in response to your last sentence.

Thanks for taking the time to write that, it certainly helps understand things better.

 

[mezzrow]

There seems to be an overt trend at the moment to wipe out elements of history just because it doesn't fit in with current morality and political views.
This isn't a new phenomenon, it was always done by conquering hoardes to eradicate cultures, the library at Alexandria is the biggest known occassion, but more recently too with the Taliban destroying buddhist monuments, the destruction of ancient sites across Iraq and Afghanistan, by both sides, and now with the pulling down of confederate 'monuments'.
Do we allow the past to stand and instruct and to learn from? Or do we eradicate, sanitise, to be forgotten, only to see the mistakes repeated further down the line?
This has been mooted closer to home with suggestions on renaming streets in Liverpool that were named after slave traders. It wouldn't stop the historical fact that our city grew and benefitted from slavery.
Why the need to 'rewire' history?

To make it more fungible. I keep asking, "why do you want to destroy evidence?" The contents of the Memory Hole are not easily reformed into the new narrative.

I think it is displacement for their inability to pull down Trump. If not the Donald, the statue.

 

[Old Blue 2]

The problem is that "to tell the truth with no bias" is rewriting history - there is no way we can ever get to the truth of what happened and why because so much of it is lost forever to us. The only sensible way you can do it is to search for and properly examine what sources remain to us

The above is spot on.

The way one gets to the truth is by way of facts. Facts that can be proved beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Unfortunately, quite a bit of what is written, even with modern history, is based on personal speculation or mis-interpretation. Adolf Galland's 'Give me a squadron of Spitfires' to Hermann Göring during the Battle of Britain is probably one of the greatest mis-interpretations of all time, even up to present...

 

[mezzrow]

The American Civil War is not a simple war. The origins go back many years, and are rooted in the perception of Southern States that the Northern States, having the industrial might, dictated many policies that were not acceptable to the South. Secession, in the round, was the desire of Southern States to detach from the Northern States and determine their own future course. I believe Ulysses S. Grant was quoted as saying, in so many words, that if the only reason for the war was to free the slaves, he would not have gone to war. The slavery issue was one of many issues current at the time.

Robert E Lee was a graduate of West Point and a fairly high-ranking officer in the US Army when the American Civil War broke out. He was offered a post in the US Army for the war, but stated he would not take up arms against his own state, and resigned his commission, returning to Virginia. He accepted comand of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.

One thing to be borne in mind is that the vast majority (and I'm talking the high 90s %age) of soldiers in the Confederate Army were ordinary men who fought because the publicity of their state at the time told them that their state was being invaded by the US Army, and not through any moral belief in slavery, as none had slaves - it was the rich southerners who had them. And so it was that the Northern Army invaded the south. Lee's minor foray into the North culminating in the defeat at Gettysberg, was a blip in the otherwise main course of the war: Northern invasion of the south.

In the post civil war years, it was probably de rigeur for both sides to 1) put up statues to their military commanders, and 2) honour their war dead. The statues issue is now in a blaze of publicity; what is not generally known is that certain institutions in the south in recent years have sought to have the graves of ordinary Confederate soldiers not marked in any way, even by flowers...

I offer the above in a neutral stance in response to your last sentence.

An outstanding and accurate post. Thank you.

It was not an honorable cause, but it was fought by many honorable men. Many of these statues went up in a spirit of reconciliation when the participants were about as far from the event of war as we are from the sixties, while their sons and grandsons prepared themselves to cross an ocean and fight yet another war beside many of the great grandfathers of those reading this.

Old men want to forgive and reconcile before they die. Reconciliation comes and goes as an element of the zeitgeist. Current times find it at something of a nadir.

 

[abelard]

An outstanding and accurate post. Thank you.

It was not an honorable cause, but it was fought by many honorable men. Many of these statues went up in a spirit of reconciliation when the participants were about as far from the event of war as we are from the sixties, while their sons and grandsons prepared themselves to cross an ocean and fight yet another war beside many of the great grandfathers of those reading this.

Old men want to forgive and reconcile before they die. Reconciliation comes and goes as an element of the zeitgeist. Current times find it at something of a nadir.

what makes you think the statues went up in a spirit of reconciliation? reconciliation with whom?

 

[abelard]

One thing to be borne in mind is that the vast majority (and I'm talking the high 90s %age) of soldiers in the Confederate Army were ordinary men who fought because the publicity of their state at the time told them that their state was being invaded by the US Army, and not through any moral belief in slavery, as none had slaves - it was the rich southerners who had them. And so it was that the Northern Army invaded the south. Lee's minor foray into the North culminating in the defeat at Gettysberg, was a blip in the otherwise main course of the war: Northern invasion of the south.

Yes, though the South fired the first shots.

For what it's worth (and everyone interested should look into this themselves, and not just take anyone's word for it), the overwhelming majority of historians, people who devote their entire lives to conducting research on this question using the available documents, concur that slavery was by far the most important cause of the conflict. And there has been a consensus about this for decades.
@Old Blue 2 may be correct about everyday soldiers -a more difficult question to answer - but the rhetoric and private letters that we have from the people in the South who decided to launch the war affirm over and over again that preserving slavery was the driving factor behind their decision.

 

[mezzrow]

what makes you think the statues went up in a spirit of reconciliation? reconciliation with whom?

http://althouse.blogspot.com/…/might-it-be-that-non-souther…

Like my father before me, I will work the land/And like my brother above me, who took a rebel stand/He was just eighteen, proud and brave/But a Yankee laid him in his grave....

"It made me think of the 140 Confederate soldiers whose nearby graves I visited the other day, after Madison's mayor, Paul Soglin, got a memorial removed. I took photographs...

... but only later did I learn that the headstones do not mark individual graves. What's under the ground is, in fact, a mass grave. The individual stones are a later effort at imposing dignity — an effort that corresponds to the effort we are experiencing today, the withdrawal of dignity."

Many (not all) of the statues went up in the first twenty years of the 20th century. This was the era of reconciliation I refer to above. The statues were built, some fine words were said, and we kept trying to become one nation again. It could have been ever so much more brutal and long lasting than it was. There are those on both sides of this current thing eagerly trying to blow life into the dead embers of something that was long thought over. For what purpose?

also - I would listen to that Gladwell podcast if you have any appreciation of country music whatsoever. It is a beautiful thing. I met Bobby Braddock once a long long time ago.
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/16-the-king-of-tears

 

[magicjuan]

"Projection and perception" are very dangerous things in history though; they invariably tend to obscure the truth because we do not want to see it. Have a street named after a slave trader (for example) and it doesn't lessen what he did, it does nothing for his victims, it doesn't even tackle the wealth that his descendants may still enjoy, but renaming it makes us feel better whilst making the generations to come much less likely to remember what it is he did in the first place.

A good example of this is the Victorian translation of the Tiberius section of Suetonius' Twelve Caesars. They left one part of it completely untranslated because they couldn't allow uneducated minds to read about the complete deviance that Tiberius got up to on Capri; had you not been able to read Latin one would assume that his retirement was spent in gentle pursuits like dining and having caves collapse.

Is again the point I'm driving, but bigger than Twelve Caesars, try the Bible instead. That is why I used projection and perception, add manipulation. The truth was always the truth, but in certain overriding cases it has been replaced or sanitised by 'some people' for their benefit. Control.

 

[abelard]

http://althouse.blogspot.com/…/might-it-be-that-non-souther…

Like my father before me, I will work the land/And like my brother above me, who took a rebel stand/He was just eighteen, proud and brave/But a Yankee laid him in his grave....

"It made me think of the 140 Confederate soldiers whose nearby graves I visited the other day, after Madison's mayor, Paul Soglin, got a memorial removed. I took photographs...

... but only later did I learn that the headstones do not mark individual graves. What's under the ground is, in fact, a mass grave. The individual stones are a later effort at imposing dignity — an effort that corresponds to the effort we are experiencing today, the withdrawal of dignity."

Many (not all) of the statues went up in the first twenty years of the 20th century. This was the era of reconciliation I refer to above. The statues were built, some fine words were said, and we kept trying to become one nation again. It could have been ever so much more brutal and long lasting than it was. There are those on both sides of this current thing eagerly trying to blow life into the dead embers of something that was long thought over. For what purpose?

also - I would listen to that Gladwell podcast if you have any appreciation of country music whatsoever. It is a beautiful thing. I met Bobby Braddock once a long long time ago.
http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/16-the-king-of-tears

This is one blog post, about one set of monuments, in one northern city. Regardless of the context in Madison, that is prima facie very flimsy evidence on which to base the bold claim that some sort of era of national racial reconciliation took place in the early 20th century. This time period is in fact well-established as one of the high points of American lynchings and pogroms.

And in Madison, it isn't the headstones that are being removed, but monuments that stood next to them. The biggest monument, according to the link the author provides, was funded and installed in 1930 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group entirely devoted to building monuments nationwide which glorify the Confederacy.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, is, or at least certainly was, according to most historians, a white supremacist group. From James McPherson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War historian who lobbies for Civil War battlefield preservation: "They are dedicated to celebrating the Confederacy and rather thinly veiled support for white supremacy." The author of the blog mentions none of this, and it completely contradicts the notion of Confederate monuments and statues serving to reconcile the nation. Reconciling whites together against blacks, I'll grant you - but then, this is precisely why so many people now think they should come down,

As @LinekersLegs has posted elsewhere, most Confederate monuments were installed during the 1920s and 1930s, the height of white race riots and lynchings, or during the 1960s. And they were, by all accounts (unless you can show otherwise) installed as an assertion of white supremacy, or in defiance of the Civil Rights movement. Essentially the exact opposite of a spirit of reconciliation.

As another historian puts it (David Blight): "For those who needed it, the Lost Cause became a tonic against a fear of social change, a preventative ideological medicine for the sick souls of the Gilded Age. It also armed those determined to control, if not destroy, the rise of black people in the social order." (Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory).

I'm sorry, but I don't find Ann Althouse's sentimalism about headstones (not the removed monuments) in Madison at all convincing as evidence of an era of national reconciliation.

I'm a little agnostic about tearing down all the statues, by the way - doing this systematically would be a bit heavy-handed, and bad politics just now.

But the idea that they preserve a history which would be lost by their removal is totally absurd. They were built specifically to distort history. If they must remain, they should at least be supplemented by proper context about what the war was about, why they were built, and who built them. This, by the way, was the Madison mayor's preferred option, something Ann also doesn't see fit to include. But on the other hand, I don't know what it's like to live surrounded by monuments intended to glorify my reduction to someone else's property, or my extermination. And I also think that if a given community overwhelmingly wishes to remove its Confederate statues, they should be permitted to do so without their efforts being distorted by racist demagogues seeking to score cheap political points. This appears to be what happened in Madison, where the Mayor and the council were responding to concerted campaigning by a number of different citizens' groups.

 

[abelard]

By the way, since much of this discussion has veered toward questioning what the Civil War was about, there is a helpful recent article from James McPherson which summarizes the way in which thinking about this question has evolved. It is valuable reading, as background to the current statue debate.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2001/04/12/southern-comfort/

McPherson, like most historians, going back several decades, sees slavery as fundamental to the southern decision to go to war.

He cites the Confederate hierarchy, and rank and file, in its own words:

"At the war’s outset in 1861 Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, had justified secession as an act of self-defense against the incoming Lincoln administration, whose policy of excluding slavery from the territories would make “property in slaves so insecure as to be comparatively worthless,…thereby annihilating in effect property worth thousands of millions of dollars.”

The Confederate vice-president, Alexander H. Stephens, had said in a speech at Savannah on March 21, 1861, that slavery was “the immediate cause of the late rupture and the present revolution” of Southern independence. The United States, said Stephens, had been founded in 1776 on the false idea that all men are created equal. The Confederacy, by contrast: "is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition. This, our new Government, is the first, in the history of the world, based on this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."

...

"The states’-rights thesis has found its way into some odd corners of American culture. One of the questions in an exam administered to prospective citizens by the US Immigration and Naturalization service is: “The Civil War was fought over what important issue?” The right answer is either slavery or states’ rights. For Charles Dew growing up in the South of the 1940s and 1950s, there was no either/or. His ancestors on both sides fought for the Confederacy. His much-loved grandmother was a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. In his dorm room at prep school in Virginia he proudly hung a Confederate flag. And he knew “that the South had seceded for one reason and one reason only: states’ rights…. Anyone who thought differently was either deranged or a Yankee.”

Later, however, as a distinguished historian of the antebellum South and the Confederacy, Dew was “stunned” to discover that protection of slavery from the perceived threat to its long-term survival posed by Lincoln’s election in 1860 was, in fact, the dominant theme in secessionist rhetoric. In Apostles of Disunion, which quotes and analyzes this rhetoric, Dew has produced an eye-opening study of the men appointed by seceding states as commissioners to visit other slave states—for example, Virginia and Kentucky—in order to persuade them also to leave the Union and join together to form the Confederacy. “I found this in many ways a difficult and painful book to write,” Dew acknowledges, but he nevertheless unflinchingly concludes that “to put it quite simply, slavery and race were absolutely critical elements in the coming of the war…. Defenders of the Lost Cause need only read the speeches and letters of the secession commissioners to learn what was really driving the Deep South to the brink of war in 1860–61.”

Those who do read the excerpts from speeches and letters quoted by Dew will find plenty of confirmation for this conclusion. “The conflict between slavery and non-slavery is a conflict for life and death,” a South Carolina commissioner told Virginians in February 1861. “The South cannot exist without African slavery.” The Mississippi convention’s “Declaration of Immediate Causes” of that state’s secession formed the basis for their commissioners’ message to other Southern states: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.” With Lincoln’s election, "there was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the union…. We must either submit to degradation and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede…."

Mississippi’s commissioner to Maryland insisted that “slavery was ordained by God and sanctioned by humanity.” If slave states remained in a Union ruled by Lincoln and his Republican cohorts, “the safety of the rights of the South will be entirely gone.”

A Mississippi commissioner told Georgians that Republicans intended not only to abolish slavery but also to “substitute in its stead their new theory of the universal equality of the black and white races.” Unless white Southerners wanted “submission to negro equality…secession is inevitable.”

Georgia’s commissioner to Virginia dutifully assured his listeners that if Southern states stayed in the Union, “we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything.” An Alabamian born in Kentucky tried to persuade his native state to secede by portraying Lincoln’s election as “nothing less than an open declaration of war” by Yankee fanatics who intended to force the “sons and daughters” of the South to associate “with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality,” thus “consigning her [the South’s] citizens to assassinations and her wives and daughters to pollution and violation to gratify the lust of half-civilized Africans.”

With Lincoln’s election, wrote Charles Francis Adams Jr., the son and grandson of the only truly “Northern” presidents the country had known, “the great revolution has actually taken place…. The country has once and for all thrown off the domination of the Slaveholders.”1 Precisely. Slaveholders came to the same conclusion. So did other Southern whites. “If you are tame enough to submit,” the Baptist clergyman James Furman told South Carolinians, “Abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.”

They did not submit; they seceded. As another South Carolinian explained, “We are contending for all that we hold dear—our Property—our Institutions—our Honor…. A stand must be made for African slavery or it is forever lost.”

In 1863 a cavalry lieutenant from Mississippi reaffirmed his belief that “this country without slave labor would be wholly worthless…. We can only live & exist by that species of labor: and hence I am willing to continue the fight to the last.”

The unrepentant Edward Pollard, wartime editor of the Richmond Examiner, wrote the first history of the Confederacy, with the appropriate title The Lost Cause. The war had ended slavery, Pollard acknowledged, but it “did not decide negro equality…. This new cause—or rather the true question of the war revived—is the supremacy of the white race.” In a speech to Confederate veterans in 1890, a former captain in the 7th Georgia Volunteer Infantry echoed Pollard: “We fought for the supremacy of the white race in America.”

 

[LinekersLegs]

Personally think it a decision for each local community regarding statues in public parks and town courthouses.

Their tax dollars go to the maintenance and upkeep of them, including policing of protesters from both sides who come to demonstrate, and they are the ones who walk past them each day. If they want to move them to a museum where their proper context can be taught and understood (like the statues at Gettysburg) then that should be their choice.

But as several other posters have pointed out a lot of these statues are neither historical nor put up with a spirit of reconciliation. This is a 1998 statue of KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest.