Paul Harvey made thousands of radio recordings in which he would tell a story and then add, “the rest of the story.” For those of us in the history field, we know there is no such thing as “the rest of the story,” because there is always “more of the story.” With that in mind, this article gives “more of the story” of the Confederate monuments in Richmond and elsewhere.
In today’s public narrative on Confederate monuments, we commonly are told that the great majority of the monuments were erected between 1885 and 1925. Many say that this time period corresponds with the “Jim Crow Era” or the “Lost Cause Era,” either of which identify them as products of the white supremacy and black suppression of that time. As a result, the monuments have become testaments to racism and their subject matter is racist and is to be rejected by a modern, enlightened, and appropriately sensitive population. While those causes cannot be dismissed or discounted, they are not the whole story.
Historians of the era would also call it the “Memorial Period” because of all the statues, monuments, and memorials that were being erected all across the country—North and South, East and West, urban and rural. As Dr. Caroline Janney points out in her book, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation, the great tidal wave of monuments began shortly after the war with Union veterans going to the various battlefields and erecting markers—many small and some monumental in size—to their participation and valor in battle. And America’s Civil War battlefields are covered with these markers. Gettysburg alone now has 1,328 of them. By the 1880s, the effort to remember the valor and sacrifice of the soldiers had spread to the hometowns from which those soldiers came. Again, this phenomenon began in the North; but it quickly spread to the South, with southerners often noting their jealousy of the North or a sense of competition with the North.
