Of Monuments

The Monument of James Oglethorpe in Chippewa Square, Savannah, Georgia

I have watched as across the United States, and even the world, there have been not only calls for the removal of a great number of historical monuments and statues, but even mobs proceeding to do so on their own initiative.  What of all of this?  Should we have public monuments to men whose positions are, at least in part, no longer societally acceptable?  Here are this blogger’s own thoughts on the question, for the fair minded.

To start with, I must grant that I obviously cannot speak to how an individual feels about a particular monument or statue.  I have no doubt that a great number of monuments are the cause of distress and anger in individuals.  There are certainly monuments in our world to individuals whose legacy I do not approve and whose example I would not seek to imitate.  At the same time, I am concerned that it would be short-sighted to remove a monument simply because it elicits a negative reaction in some folks.  Maintaining such historical monuments should be a matter of reasoned consideration, not of the passion of the moment.  In such considerations, I am convinced that making distinctions is key to arriving at the most prudent course.

I would also note, at the outset, that the mob-destruction of monuments and statues is, to me, a clear sign of anarchy and barbarism.  If a monument must go, it must depart according to the rule of law.  What we are witnessing today is outrageous and disturbing.

That said, now let us consider what should be portrayed and what should stay.

I will take for granted that we should not honor a truly wicked character, like Adolf Hitler, and that it is obviously right and good to honor those supremely good as Our Divine Lord and the Blessed Virgin Mary.  Disagreement at this level betrays such a radically different worldview that we’d be better served discussing the nature of that reality than the places of monuments within it.

For the purposes of these reflections, I wish to wade into the question of monuments celebrating a complex character.

What do I mean by a complex character?  Here I am looking at someone whose life was a mixture of the good and bad, and while he or she may have had traits or accomplishments worthy of honor, they also had failings or problematic characteristics.  It is important for us to recognize and respect the virtues in men revered by past generations and for us to be able to recognize these virtues in regional or local figures.  I think it is possible that a character be honored for their virtue or accomplishments, without implying an endorsement of their failings or of all that they did or believed; or, at the very least, we can appreciate that virtue for which they were honored, even if it seems less relevant for our own time.  While it might not make sense to put up a new monument to such a complex character whose relevance is no longer so significant to our own time, we should certainly maintain what past generations erected to honor them.  That is an important part of our public history.

I will take as an example four historical figures that I can see being “complex” in some respect, that admittedly not equally so: James Oglethorpe, George Washington, and two notable Southern figures associated with the late Confederacy: the famous Robert E. Lee, and the Georgian John B. Gordon.  Along with them, I want to consider monuments to all of the men that served that cause.

James Oglethorpe was the founder of the Colony of Georgia, a member of Parliament, and an English general.  He was a famous philanthropist, whose idea for Georgia was as both a buffer to Spanish expansion, but also as a haven for debtors, where he forbid the institution of slavery.  At the same time, the Charter for the new Province of Georgia included this line: “there shall be a liberty of conscience allowed in the worship of God, to all persons inhabiting, or which shall inhabit or be resident within our said provinces and that all such persons, except papists, shall have a free exercise of their religion, so they be contented with the quiet and peaceable enjoyment of the same, not giving offence or scandal to the government.”  Oglethorpe, like so many others in the English-speaking world, was anti-Catholic and denied religious liberty to Catholics, like myself.  Hence, whatever his other accomplishments, he is a character of some complexity.  Nevertheless, the monuments to Oglethorpe are not fundamentally meant as monuments to anti-Catholicism and bigotry; the represent a man of great talent and ideals who motivated by a desire to help the disadvantaged, founded a new colony.

George Washington is honored as the great military leader of the American Revolution and first President of the United States.  His fortitude during that conflict and his combination of prudence and humility as President surely merit praise and honor.  Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Longinqua wrote that, “at the very time when the popular suffrage placed the great Washington at the helm of the Republic, the first bishop was set by apostolic authority over the American Church. The well-known friendship and familiar intercourse which subsisted between these two men seems to be an evidence that the United States ought to be conjoined in concord and amity with the Catholic Church. And not without cause; for without morality the State cannot endure-a truth which that illustrious citizen of yours, whom We have just mentioned, with a keenness of insight worthy of his genius and statesmanship perceived and proclaimed.”

He is, of course, a complex character, as he was a slaveowner.  There is no defending his participation with that immoral institution; but that association is not why he has been honored for generations – and is not why the same Pope who wrote an encyclical condemning slavery would call him “the great Washington.”  Surely we can separate the symbolism of Washington and reason he is honored from his personal faults and failings.

Let us consider the Confederates.  I do not think we need approve or endorse the Confederate cause to appreciate the place of a monument to a complex character associated with the conflict. 

Before proceeding any further in discussing these Confederate figures, though, I would encourage you to read my earlier post on the causes and complexities that led to the Civil War: Why Civil War?

To dismiss out of hand anyone associated with the Confederacy as nothing more than a traitor and promoter of slavery is a gross historical oversimplification.  For instance, it was a real contested question as to where loyalties should rest: Home State or Federal Union.  Further, the respective attitudes and actions of the Cotton States (seceding before Lincoln was inaugurated) and the Tobacco States (seceding only after Lincoln demanded they contribute troops to invade the Deep South - Virginia having earlier voted against secession) certainly present two different paths to an attempted separation from the United States.  All of these states sought, in part, to defend legal slavery as it had been protected under the United States Constitution, and all of these states sought to depart the Union through elected conventions and in an orderly and legal fashion, based on the political ideals of the American founding.  Not only slavery, but whether a free Union should be maintained by coercion, was very much a matter in question.

Robert E. Lee was honored by a resolution of Congress to name the Arlington House in Arlington, Virginia as the Robert E. Lee Memorial in 1955, wherein was proclaimed:

“Whereas Robert E. Lee had graduated from West Point, dedicated himself to an Army career, and became a colonel in the United States Army, then the commander of the Confederate forces, attained world renown as a military genius, and after Appomattox fervently devoted himself to peace, to the reuniting of the Nation, and to the advancement of youth education and the welfare and progress of mankind, becoming president of the Washington and Lee University at Lexington, Virginia; and Whereas the desire and hope of Robert E. Lee for peace and unity within our Nation has come to pass in the years since his death, and the United States of America now stands united and firm, indivisible, and unshakable.”

While some may choose to view Lee simply as a traitor leading troops for a pro-slavery secessionist movement, the reality is that he was a man of deep honor or decided to remain loyal to his home state, and who worked for reunion and reconciliation after the conflict.  He could have chosen to urge his men to wage on-going guerilla war or refuse to accept their place in the United States once more.

John B. Gordon, a Georgia native, served in the Confederate army, rising through the ranks to end up one of Robert E. Lee’s chief lieutenants by the end of the war, having a prominent role in the formal surrender at Appomattox.  After the war, he would write, that, "The South maintained with the depth of religious conviction that the Union formed under the Constitution was a Union of consent and not of force; that the original States were not the creatures but the creators of the Union; that these States had gained their independence, their freedom, and their sovereignty from the mother country, and had not surrendered these on entering the Union; that by the express terms of the Constitution all rights and powers not delegated were reserved to the States; and the South challenged the North to find one trace of authority in that Constitution for invading and coercing a sovereign State." Cf., General Gordon's Reminiscences

It is true that he was an opponent of Reconstruction – and some even allege a connection with the KKK, though he denied any such connection and the evidence of his participation is rather circumstantial.  It is without question that he would serve in the U.S. Senate from 1873-1880 and 1891-1897 and Governor of Georgia from 1886-1890.  When a monument was erected of him at the Georgia State Capitol, he represented not only military heroism but the resumption of Georgia in the life of the United States. 

Gordon was not the only prominent Georgian to have a leadership post in the Confederacy and then take a leading role in the post-war United States government – I might observe that Alexander Stephens, who voted against the secession of Georgia but was Vice President of the Confederacy, was later both U.S. Congressman (1873-1882) and Georgia Governor (1882-1883) after the war.  Like so many of his time, he was certainly a racist in his views (his Cornerstone Speech makes that clear), but he also represents a reconciliation of the defeated South to the American Republic.

Not only were men like Gordon and Stephens willing to reenter the halls of Congress, but they were allowed to do so, in a show of clemency that made reconciliation possible.  They certainly had views on race that were simply wrong; as wrong as Oglethorpe was about Catholics.  Like Oglethorpe, however, they represent a key historical role and contribution, as well.  When monuments were erected to Lee and Gordon, these men represented not only the pride and honor of their region, but also reconciliation and reunion after the terrible conflict of the Civil War.  It is peculiar to see less tolerance for the memory of such former Confederate leaders from our contemporaries than from those who had personally fought against them. 

Let us move to my last category: monuments commemorating common soldiers, but of such a cause as the Confederacy.

In considering whether it is appropriate to maintain monuments to the common soldier that fought for a Southern state during the Civil War, I think of my great-great grandfather.

In the summer of 1864, my great-great grandfather, Thomas J. Cole, a lad of 16 years of age from Butts County, Georgia, joined the 3^rd Georgia Reserve regiment.  He had never been far from his family’s farm in Middle Georgia – a family farm that did not include any slaves.  That same summer the State of Georgia was being invaded by the armies of US General William T. Sherman which would go on to burn Atlanta and devastate Middle Georgia on his way to Savannah.  My great-great grandfather responded to the call of the State of Georgia in that moment of crisis.  The historian William Marvel, who wrote about him and his service at the terrible prison of Andersonville, describes his ordeal:

"Nor were the prisoners the only victims. Sixteen-year-old Thomas J. Cole joined the 3rd Georgia Reserves during Rousseau's cavalry raid, in July [1864]. He had never wandered far from his father's farm in Butts County, midway between Macon and Atlanta, and shoes had never served as part of his daily wardrobe. He arrived at Andersonville with a pair of brogans on, however, and they irritated an insignificant scratch on his left foot, just below the ankle. The nearest he ever came to the stockade was the sentry box, and he did not approach the prisoners' hospital at all, but, just before the evacuation of prisoners began, his foot turned so sore that he had to be relieved from duty. A week later his comrades carried him from his tent over to Sumter Hospital -- the parallel pair of two-story barracks buildings alongside the railroad. In seven weeks the wound had grown to look like a carbuncle, but ten days in the hospital transformed it into a gaping, putrid lesion four inches in diameter. The flesh dropped away to reveal his ankle joint, his lower leg started to swell and ulcerate, and he wailed piteously whenever the doctors tried to touch it.

Cole would survive, however. He would live into the twentieth century and raise five children, but he would have to sacrifice the leg in order to save the rest of his hide."  [William Marvel, Andersonville: The Last Depot, pgs. 209-210]

He was not a slave-owner, and neither was his father.  He responded to a call for help from this state, served with honor, and lost a leg in service to his state.  He, while just a boy, responded to Georgia in her moment of need; surely the State of Georgia must continue to honor him, and others like him, who gave life and limb for their home.

We must reject the legacy of slavery and racism that has surely tainted the history of our country.  At the same time, we cannot ignore honor and sacrifice on behalf of their homes, even if the cause is not all that it might have been or all that we would wish it to be today.

In all these cases, I think fair-minded folks can reasonably debate and discuss the merits of these figures whose life and legacy are complex.  In the end, however, I would think a deference to the public goods celebrated by past generations is a healthy tendency, and that we can distinguish between the good honored and the failings tolerated.  Even a monument to a figure whose ideals were problematic can serve to teach us a lesson about our own past and need to improve as a society.

Live well!