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Tera W. Hunter is a professor of history and African American studies at Princeton. Her latest book is Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).

In December 1865, the College of New Jersey, as Princeton was known, created an honor roll of students and alumni who died during the Civil War, which had ended several months before. Understandably, only those who served in the Union Army were identified. At a memorial service sponsored by College trustees at the First Presbyterian Church six months later, the Rev. Joseph Duryea, the officiating pastor, took pains to valorize only the soldiers who fought for the United States. Yes, he noted, there were those who served with "disloyal States" in the "insurgent army," but the two sides would not and should not be treated as morally equivalent. One army fought to restore the United States; the other sought to destroy it.

Fast forward to the 1920s, when a longer list of deceased students and alumni who served in the Civil War was carved into the marble wall in the atrium of Nassau Hall. At the insistence of President John Grier Hibben 1882, the son of a Civil War soldier who died serving the Union, the names were listed alphabetically without identifying which army each soldier fought for. The gesture to neutralize the enmity among brothers literally hid the fact that more Princetonians actually fought on the side of the breakaway Confederate States of America, not for the United States. Of the 86 who died as a result of the conflict, 48 fought with the rebels and 38 with the Union. These alliances reflected the College's longstanding ties to the South and its sympathies for the institution of slavery, which the Princeton & Slavery Project has documented.

It was startling to learn that in 1924, the National Alumni Association of Princeton University donated $1,000 to the Confederate Monument Association to support the completion of what is now Stone Mountain. The larger-than-life granite carvings of leading secessionists Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee are most infamously known as the site of the founding of the second Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in 1915, near Atlanta. Members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) led the campaign to raise funds to enshrine the site as a symbol of white supremacy, which was part of their larger effort to vindicate their ancestors.

Both the creation of the memorial wall and the alumni donation marked significant departures in tone and substance from Princeton's initial memorialization of the Civil War, honoring only the dead soldiers of the United States. What transpired in the intervening years? A national political, economic, and cultural reckoning helps to explain the revived controversy about Civil War monuments today.

White Southerners began honoring the rebel military just after the war ended, and there have been unrelenting efforts to do so ever since. But there were two crucial periods in which the majority of the Confederate monuments were built, a fact that's essential to understanding their contentious historical roles and what should be done about them.

The first period was between 1895 and the 1920s, as Southern states enacted Jim Crow (segregationist) laws and disenfranchised black citizens, the KKK revived its violent white-supremacist campaign, and most lynchings of black people occurred. The second period coincided with the start of the modern civil-rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, as an overt backlash to the extension of American democracy to African American citizens.

A 2016 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that there are more than 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy in public places, although the number is slowly shrinking in response to recent outbreaks of violence by white supremacists. They include the names of Confederates on parks, trails, and public schools (many of which have large African American student populations), the flying of the Confederate flag, the identification of official state holidays and observances in honor of insurgents, and the building of monuments and statues in the likeness of famed leaders (overwhelmingly on courthouse grounds). The message of the monuments has been crystal clear. Confederate figures lording over the institutions charged with enforcing universal law meant that African Americans should enter into them knowing they would be subjected to white rule.

Confederate symbols have appeared in odd places on private property, such as stained-glass windows installed in the Washington National Cathedral (of the Episcopal Church) in 1953, lionizing the likes of Lee and Jackson. The separation of church and state could not have been more blurred, until events in August in Charlottesville, Va., in which a neo-Nazi and KKK rally led to the death of Heather Heyer, inspired their removal.

Oddest of all, Confederate symbols adorn federal property. There are 10 major U.S. military bases named after disloyal men who waged war against the nation and slaughtered loyal citizens. There are monuments to rebel leaders in the National Statuary Hall of Congress mounted between 1909 and 1929. There are images of the battle flag contained in state flags that fly in the House complex. The Gettysburg National Military Park in Pennsylvania has marble and granite monuments valorizing insurgent combatants all over its grounds.

Perhaps most egregious, there is a Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery, commemorating not only the soldiers who died fighting against the Union, but also featuring an enslaved man following his master into battle and an enslaved woman described as "mammy" cuddling a white child. [The monument was dedicated in 1914 on Jefferson Davis' birthday.] That emblems of white nationalism have been widely abided by the federal government indicates just how normalized they have been.

The majority of these symbols are located in the South. But a striking number are located all over the country, from New York to California, and in several states that did not exist at the time of the Civil War, such as Arizona, Idaho, and Montana. Their proliferation can be attributed partly to the "Great Migration" of white Southerners to other states. But credit as the leading purveyor of Confederate statuary goes largely to the UDC for its unmitigated early- to mid-20th-century campaign. It masterfully perpetuated the mythology of the "Lost Cause" by educating generations to see the Civil War in retrospect as a noble fight for "states' rights," to diminish the role that slavery played in the conflict, to reinvent slavery as a benevolent institution, and to literally whitewash unfavorable historical facts. White Northerners were complicit in donating funds and lending moral support to these efforts, or they remained silent while Confederate markers cluttered public landscapes nearly everywhere.

Defenders of Confederate monuments have been fond of asserting that they represent "heritage, not hate." Local chapters of the KKK donated money to build some of them. The messages delivered in speeches at the times they were dedicated and the inscriptions on many of the monuments themselves are unmistakable in their bigotry and embrace of the "Lost Cause." A monument in Charlotte, N.C., erected in 1929, praises Confederate soldiers because "they preserved the Anglo Saxon civilization of the South." It was defaced in 2015 and subsequently put in a clear protective case to prevent future vandalism.

Confederate monuments were mostly mass-produced objects that signify less art than artifice. As historian Fitzhugh Brundage has stated, they are "the result of private groups colonizing public space." They were allowed to flourish to foster reconciliation between white Southerners and Northerners after Reconstruction was toppled, to heal the nation's wounds sundered by the bloodiest war in our history. They did so at particular times when white supremacy was ascendant and African Americans fought back for civil rights.

The monuments do not memorialize a truthful history of the Civil War, even from the perspective of the South. Nowhere are the Southerners who fought for the United States - mostly black and enslaved - represented. Nowhere are the minority of white Southerners who dissented and allied with the Union ever honored in marble or stone. Nowhere are the war's emancipatory achievements represented. All that remains are artifacts of intolerance that inspired their erection in the first place.

"We must never forget that victory to the rebellion meant death to the republic," Frederick Douglass reminded the crowd on Decoration Day at Arlington National Cemetery in 1871. "We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation's destroyers." As Princetonians in 1865 insisted, treason and disloyalty to the United States should not be rewarded in idol worship and public displays.

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Essay: Confederate Memorialization and the Problems of Moral Equivalency

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Tera W. Hunter is a professor of history and African American studies at Princeton. Her latest book is Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017).

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Graffiti covers a monument to Confederate soldiers in Nashville's Centennial Park on Monday. (Mark Humphrey/AP)

Park officials in Nashville were greeted with a jarring sight Monday morning when they discovered that a century-old Confederate monument had been vandalized.

Blood-red liquid spattered the bronze figure of a Southern private, while letters scrawled across a list of hundreds of Civil War fighters declared, "They were racists."

The vandalism was discovered Monday in Centennial Park, not far from Vanderbilt University. Police spokesman Don Aaron told The Washington Post that the incident was still under investigation and that authorities were reviewing surveillance video to identify a perpetrator.

BREAKING @FOXNashville: Confederate statue vandalized in Centennial Park. "They were racists" written across the front. pic.twitter.com/nWwW3j4AtO
- Sara Small FOX17 (@SaraSmallTV) June 17, 2019

Designed by Hungarian American sculptor George Julian Zolnay, who created other Confederate statues, including a monument to Jefferson Davis, the monument in Centennial Park was dedicated in 1909 in an extravagant ceremony. "Tears came into the eyes of Confederate veterans and Daughters of the Confederacy" as the "magnificent bronze monument to the Confederate private soldier" was unveiled, the Nashville American newspaper reported.

From its plinth, the bronze Confederate soldier watched the coming and going of the Jim Crow era, during which African Americans were barred from using the pool in Centennial Park.

The Centennial Park statue is not the first to be doused with red substances in the past week. Charleston, S.C., police announced Sunday that they had arrested two people accused of throwing paint on the Confederate Defenders of Charleston monument.

Suspects Arrested After Vandalizing Confederate Monument in White Point Gardens#chsnews pic.twitter.com/BhQdXKllka
- Charleston P.D. (@CharlestonPD) June 16, 2019

Other Confederate monuments have been vandalized with red paint and other graffiti as a cultural and political battle continues over whether to let such monuments stand or take them down. Last August, a Richmond monument was covered in a "red paint-like" substance. In April 2018, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill doused a statue in red ink and blood; months later, it was toppled by protesters.

The monuments' defacement comes as calls to remove Confederate symbols from public spaces have grown more urgent in recent years, particularly in the wake of a 2015 mass shooting at a black church in Charleston and the 2017 Charlottesville clash between white supremacists and counterprotesters left one woman dead. Critics of the statues argue that such monuments glorify the country's history of slavery and racism. In 2017, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu (D) decided to remove four such monuments from the city.

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'They were racists': Confederate monument in Nashville sprayed with blood-red graffiti

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Park officials in Nashville were greeted with a jarring sight Monday morning when they discovered that a century-old Confederate monument had been vandalized. Blood-red liquid spattered the bronze figure of a Southern private, while letters scrawled across a list of hundreds of Civil War fighters declared, "They were racists."

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Erected in 1911, Atlanta's Peace Monument depicts a winged goddess calling to a Confederate soldier, "Cease firing - peace is at hand."

Is that a representation of reconciliation - or oppression? Vandals defaced the monument in 2017 after a violent white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, sparked nationwide protests.

Why We Wrote This

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner wrote. "It's not even past." Many communities are wrestling with that lesson today, as they debate what to do with Confederate monuments - underscoring how their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.

This month, Atlanta added an explanatory plaque at the Peace Monument site, saying the monument "should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood," its original intention.

Two years after Charlottesville, many locales continue to struggle with how to properly present Confederate statuary.

In Georgia and other former Confederate states, state laws prohibit monuments from being removed. That's led cities to look for ways to better explain the stone monuments and their role in history.

Atlanta is beginning with a quick approach: plaques. Besides the Peace Monument, it has added signs at the "Lion of the Confederacy," a stone statue in a city cemetery.

Even writing a plaque can be a fraught process. But officials say the important thing is that just addressing the issue can bring history to life.

"These statues are no longer static. They are now evolving," says Sheffield Hale, president of the Atlanta History Center.

Put up in 1911, the Peace Monument in Atlanta's Piedmont Park features a winged goddess calling to a Confederate soldier: "Cease firing - peace is proclaimed."

At the time, the monument was meant not to glorify the Confederate cause, but to urge reconciliation, a rekindling of a national bond stretching from Atlanta to Boston. It was built to commemorate peacekeeping trips to the North made by members of the Gate City Guard, Georgia's first militia, in previous years.

But 2019 is different historical country than 1911. What seemed progressive then can today strike some as an oppressive symbol. Vandals defaced the monument following the August 2017 violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a "Unite the Right" rally clashed with counterprotesters.

Why We Wrote This

"The past is never dead," William Faulkner wrote. "It's not even past." Many communities are wrestling with that lesson today, as they debate what to do with Confederate monuments - underscoring how their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.

Atlantans suddenly faced some thorny questions, says Sheffield Hale, president and CEO of the Atlanta History Center: "Why is a peace monument a problem? What's wrong with peace?"

This month, the city of Atlanta installed a sign that presents one answer: the memorial's idea of reconciliation excluded African Americans. "This monument should no longer stand as a memorial to white brotherhood; rather, it should be seen as an artifact representing a shared history in which millions of Americans were denied civil and human rights," the sign states.

Two years after the Charlottesville march and its aftermath, states, cities, and citizens all across America continue to struggle with how to handle and interpret the artifacts of the past in the present day.

In that struggle, different narratives clash with modern distributions of power. Conservative Southern state legislatures have passed laws protecting historical monuments, including Confederate statuary. More liberal local jurisdictions are trying to rethink and reframe the meaning of these relics by surrounding them with context, including explanatory material such as signs and plaques.

The result, as in Atlanta, is a riveting and consequential debate that is about where the nation is going as much as where it has been.

"We are in the process toward a dream," says William Ferris, associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "These statues are markers along the way of how we address both the past and the future as a people. It is an ongoing conversation that in the 21st century is taking an interesting turn as the country is becoming predominantly nonwhite."

Monumental contested meanings

Richard Straut is one of the Atlanta Peace Monument's sworn protectors. He has a different view of its meaning than that expressed by its new accompanying sign.

The former Atlanta detective spent a career in both the police and military working for and with African Americans. He is a former commandant of the Old Guard of the City Guard, entrusted with the monument's care. The Old Guard's patch - a boar's head with an oak leaf in its mouth - now decorates the state National Guard uniform.

"I'm a soldier in the Old Guard, the precursor to our National Guard," says Mr. Straut in a phone interview. "It is integrated. We are not some white supremacist nonsense."

In 1911 the Old Guard wasn't trying to undermine the government in the United States with a peace monument that referenced a Confederate soldier, according to Mr. Straut.

"It was trying to bring the brotherhood back together again, and we succeeded. We are equal. And all races are involved," he says.

The Peace Monument is far from the only memorial whose meaning is contested today, of course. From small town squares to battlefields, the South is strewn with stone memories.

They range from innocuous cemetery markers to obvious paeans to the Confederate Lost Cause, including 75 "Johnny Reb" statues - most crafted after Reconstruction in Northern forges - that stand in public places, by intent, as sentinels of white power.

As of February 2019, 114 Confederate monuments have been taken down since the 2015 attack on a Charleston, South Carolina, church by white supremacist Dylann Roof, including General Robert E. Lee from Lee Circle in New Orleans and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest from a park in Memphis. Some 1,747 still stand, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Many of these monuments are shielded from removal or extensive alteration by state laws passed in the former Confederate states, including Georgia, according to the SPLC. Some cities in these states are challenging the legality of these restrictions. Norfolk, for instance, has sued Virginia to lift the state's removal ban.

Other localities are focusing on adding context. But that process itself is difficult. What to say? How to say it? What is the context here, after all?

"It doesn't surprise me that communities are struggling to some extent with conceptualization, because the writing of new inscriptions is always extremely contentious," says Kirk Savage, author of "Monument Wars."

For its part, Atlanta has tried to move quickly, adding low-cost, fact-based panels that contextualize memorial presence, and bottom-line their intent.

"It is a process to turn them from public statues to outdoor museum exhibits, from statement to artifact," says Mr. Hale of the Atlanta History Center. "And it is recognition that these are not Civil War monuments. They are Jim Crow monuments."

Similar discussions - sometimes heated, often thoughtful - are taking place across the South as more and more Americans realize the monuments "are connected to what is happening to me in the present day," says Mr. Savage, a University of Pittsburgh art historian.

The process of contextualization can be fraught. But inaction can have consequences. The failure of the University of North Carolina to heed calls to contextualize its Confederate "Silent Sam" statue on campus may have helped lead to a mob toppling the statue in 2018.

"We started from a premise of some are going to come down, some are going to stay up, but ... what is next is the really important question: How do we start something that is actually more democratic and more representative and more empowering for people than the old monument system, which is an elite-driven system that almost always tends to reflect the power relations on the ground?" says Mr. Savage. "Our political climate has made it a much more urgent issue."

"The statues are no longer static"

Americans seem at a wary impasse over the Confederate monument issue, polls say.

In the South, a majority of white Americans want the monuments to stay, and a majority of black Americans want them removed, according to a Winthrop University poll. Overall, a plurality thinks they should remain. There is little agreement about how, or whether, to contextualize them.

Meanwhile, majorities of both black and white Americans agree that race relations in the U.S. are worsening, according to the Winthrop survey.

That raises the stakes for questions about monuments being pondered in places like Decatur, Georgia; Savannah, Georgia; Norfolk, Virginia; and Richmond, Virginia. Richmond's Monument Avenue features famous statues of Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The city's Valentine Museum is currently exhibiting dozens of conceptual drawings of what could be done with the statues, including one idea to bury them to their heads.

"The question for us has become, what does contextualization really mean?" says Bill Martin, the museum's director. "And that becomes a jumping-off point for a conversation that needs to happen."

Two years ago, in Charlottesville, a blue ribbon committee's decision to remove a Robert E. Lee statue sparked the "Unite the Right" rally. It devolved into a riot and street fight that left dozens injured and one dead.

The national tragedy at Charlottesville made clear to many Americans that the nation's legacy of white supremacy had burst into the present, and that white supremacists looked at Confederate statues as symbols of their ideology.

As newspaper reporters flocked to the city, religion professor Jalane Schmidt began holding informal tours of the statuary. The tour continues on a monthly basis, drawing upwards of 100 people at a time.

Ms. Schmidt says she didn't realize until after she began researching that over half of the residents of Albemarle County, where Charlottesville is located, were African Americans the year the Lee statue went up. And her research showed that its installation had little to do with commemoration of soldiers, and much to do with a "lost cause mythology" that advocated a national white brotherhood to thwart the political power of black Americans.

"These statues of metal look like mute monuments, but as we found out they are distilled hatred," says Ms. Schmidt. "They are sending a message of complete disregard for the humanity of black people."

Just a few miles from the Peace Monument in Atlanta is "the Lion of the Confederacy," a stone representation of a lion in repose, clutching a Confederate battle flag. The sleeping royal feline guards hundreds of slain Confederates, including an ancestor of Martin O'Toole's.

Mr. O'Toole is a former newspaper editor, an amateur historian, and a spokesman for the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Last week, he made his first visit to the "Lion" monument after a contextual plaque was added.

Armed with a camera to document the changes, he immediately spots what he thinks is a mistake. A title says "Lion of Atlanta." The statue is actually called the "Lion of the Confederacy," Mr. O'Toole says.

He notes that Georgia nearly undermined the Confederacy as its key leaders backed national unity in the 1850s. So what happened? News in the South that church bells had pealed in New England in support of abolitionist John Brown's 1859 raid at Harpers Ferry meant that sectional disputes had morphed into "a dangerous moment for Southerners," says Mr. O'Toole. "They were suddenly afraid for their lives. They had to fight."

But even as he quibbles with the Lion's new explainer, he notes, "I'm OK with the panels. They are mostly fact-based and within the law. I just say thanks to the legislature for passing a law to make sure the Lion is still here. Or else it most assuredly would be gone."

Atlanta's confederate statues will stay, at least for now. But all around them, the conversation has shifted, and history, for many, suddenly seems alive - evoking both danger and hope.

"What is important is that these new panels are not permanent," says Mr. Hale, as park-goers gather to read the new panels. "We can change the words. We can add more panels. But that's the point. These statues are no longer static. They are now evolving."

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The future of America's past: Should we 'explain' Confederate statues?

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States are debating how to put Confederate statues in historical context - a reminder their meaning is shaped by the 21st century as much as the 19th.The future of America's past: Should we 'explain' Confederate statues?Confederate statues in context: The future of America's past?

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In the wake of Charlottesville, a chorus of media outlets, political activists, and random people on the Internet have called for the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country. They say we shouldn't honor a bunch of racists who fought to preserve slavery, and that it's long past time for these painful reminders of our past to come down-stow them away in a museum or smash them to pieces, just get them off the streets.

This iconoclastic impulse is a mistake, even after the harrowing events in Charlottesville last weekend. It's a mistake not because there was anything noble about the Confederacy or its raison d'être, which was slavery, but because there is something noble-and, for a free people, necessary-about preserving our history so we can understand who we are and how we should live.

For all the tough talk this week about the problems with these historical monuments, there hasn't been nearly enough discussion of their history. Most of them were built a half-century after the war, as the Civil War generation was beginning to die off. Before the turn of the century, Confederate graves had for the most part not been cared for in federal cemeteries, and erecting a Confederate monument was considered treasonous.

But as the veterans of the war began to die, there was a renewed push for reconciliation between North and South, and with it an outpouring of filial piety. Of course, the monument boom across the South during the first two decades of the twentieth century came at a time of terrible race relations, mass immigration, and the pernicious influence of the Lost Cause mythos, which poisoned the South.

So the monuments reflect more than one current of early twentieth-century America. They served to venerate Confederate heroes like Robert E. Lee, thereby cementing the narrative of the Lost Cause and all its misty-eyed nostalgia about the South. But they were also an outpouring of grief and remembrance for the hundreds of thousands who had died in the war. Nearly a quarter of Southern white men in their twenties were killed or died from disease. Is it any wonder that decades later, as families began to bury Confederate veterans in greater numbers, there would be a push to erect memorials to that generation?

And for as much as Lost Cause mythology adorns so many of these monuments, their purpose was also to convey to future generations why so many people kept fighting, for years and in the face of staggering casualties. For the ordinary soldiers who fought and died, devotion to the Confederate army did not arise primarily from a devotion to the institution of slavery (just as most Union soldiers were not fighting primarily to end slavery) but from a devotion to their home states and a sense of honor and duty to defend them from what they considered to be an invading army.

That they were wrong about slavery does not excuse us today from the burden of trying to understand what motivated them to fight-and what motivated them and their families to undertake a flurry of monument-building decades later as the surviving veterans began to die off.

Speaking on Memorial Day in 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a Union veteran who saw a great deal of action, talked about the importance of transmitting the emotional weight of the war from one generation to the next, and he specifically mentions the role of monuments: "I believe from the bottom of my heart that our memorial halls and statues and tablets, the tattered flags of our regiments gathered in the Statehouses, are worth more to our young men by way of chastening and inspiration than the monuments of another hundred years of peaceful life could be."

For Holmes, it was also the duty of Civil War veterans themselves to convey the significance of the war to posterity. He said, "the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire... we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after."

This Isn't Really About Confederate Monuments

Nevertheless, a common objection to these statues today is that because they occupy public spaces, they serve to venerate their subjects, who were of course racists and fought to preserve slavery. But if we know the history, why can't we see them in a different light? Why shouldn't we view them as we should, as a haunting and cautionary tale?

Certainly, the statues were not originally meant to educate future generations about the evils of slavery and secession, but that doesn't mean that we can't take them as such today. Indeed, the fact that these statues were erected in prominent public places is itself a powerful lesson in American history-a testament to our turbulent past that would be diminished if they were removed to a sanitized display in a museum. Not every statue or piece of public art has to comfort and console us. Sometimes, they should oblige us to grapple with our nation's history and the vagaries of human nature.

Even so, some conservatives are willing to let the things go. Kevin Williamson at NRO urges conservatives to do nothing. "The Left's vandalism is intended mainly to get a rise out of the Right, in the hopes of getting some Republican to wrong-foot himself over a racial question," he writes. Even if some conservatives sympathize with those who want to remove Confederate memorials-and plenty of prominent right-of-center writers clearly do-there's no need to join them because the iconoclasm sweeping the country, says Williamson, "mainly consists of local authorities making democratic decisions about the disposition of public property," and thus "there is a case for political quietism in this matter."

That would be fine advice if it were true that this is really just about local authorities making democratic decisions about statues. It would even be fine if it were just about the moral preening of Democratic politicians and activists, seizing on an opportunity to shame and embarrass Southerners for gradually abandoning their party in favor of the GOP.

But the iconoclasm on display now is about more than anathematizing the Confederacy or scoring cheap political points against hapless Republicans. It's part of the Left's overarching critique of American constitutionalism, the goal of which is to overthrow that order.

The Real Reason The Left Wants To Forget The Past

President Trump was mocked for suggesting that if we tear down statues of Lee then activists would demand the removal of George Washington or Thomas Jefferson next. But sure enough, later in the week the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC was vandalized with spray paint. A Lincoln statue in Chicago was burned. Al Sharpton said the Jefferson Memorial should be abandoned. A pastor in Chicago asked the mayor to remove the names of Washington and Andrew Jackson from city parks because they owned slaves. A writer at Vice News called for Mount Rushmore to be blown up. One columnist in Philly even argued for tearing down a statue of Frank Rizzo, who served as police commissioner and mayor in the late 1960s and '70s. In some cases, any monument would do.

All this sounds crazy, but jumping from Confederate statues to Lincoln to Rizzo follows a certain logic. For the Left, the Confederacy is just a small part of a much larger problem, which is the past. Iconoclasm of the kind we've seen this week is native to the Left, because the entire point is to liberate society from the strictures of tradition and history in order to secure a glorious new future. That's why Mao's Cultural Revolution in China torched temples and dug up ancient graves, why the Soviets sacked Orthodox churches and confiscated church property, and why various governments of France went about de-Christianizing the country during the French Revolution.

The modern-day American Left isn't as bad as all that, but its ideology about the past is more or less the same. Hence the statement issued Thursday by Seattle Mayor Ed Murray calling for the removal of all "symbols of hate, racism and violence that exist in our city." Murray is at least consistent, as he includes not just Confederate symbols but also a well-known statue of Vladimir Lenin. These symbols, Murray says, represent "historic injustices," and "their existence causes pain among those who themselves or whose family members have been impacted by these atrocities."

He is not interested in the history of the statues themselves, the people or events they depict, or "what political affiliation may have been assigned to them in the decades since they were erected." Don't be fooled by the therapeutic language about causing pain. The statues must go because they remind us constantly of a past that needs only to be overcome and forgotten.

A more mature society would recognize that the past is always with you and must always be kept in mind. There's a reason Christians in Rome didn't topple all the pagan statues and buildings in the city, or raze the Colosseum. Edmund Burke had strong words for the French during their revolution, while they were doing their best to destroy a rich past and slaughter one another in the process:

You had all these advantages in your ancient states; but you chose to act as if you had never been molded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you... If the last generations of your country appeared without much luster in your eyes, you might have passed them by, and derived your claims from a more early race of ancestors. Under a pious predilection for those ancestors, your imaginations would have realized in them a standard of virtue and wisdom, beyond the vulgar practice of the hour: and you would have risen with the example to whose imitation you aspired. Respecting your forefathers, you would have been taught to respect yourself. You would not have chosen to consider the French as a people of yesterday, as a nation of low-born servile wretches until the emancipating year of 1789.

That is part of why these memorials and statues are important. Perhaps not all of them need be preserved, but giving into the iconoclasm of the Left, with temperatures running high, will mean we lose far more than we gain by hiding these physical reminders of our nation's troubled past.

Let them stand as a memorial of our ancestors who died, a challenge to understand their time and its troubles, and a warning for the present day.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.

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Why We Should Keep The Confederate Monuments Where They Are

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In the wake of Charlottesville, a chorus of media outlets, political activists, and random people on the Internet have called for the removal or destruction of Confederate statues in cities across the country.

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Van Turner has a secret: He knows the whereabouts of the controversial Confederate statues removed last year from two parks in Memphis, Tenn.

"They have to be kept in a secretive location," said Turner on a recent afternoon, standing in a park overlooking the Mississippi River where one of the statues - of Confederate President Jefferson Davis - once stood. "For fear of someone trying to go in and get them."

Turner, a Shelby County commissioner, has been hiding the Jefferson Davis statue since it came down in December, along with a statue of Confederate Gen. and slave trader Nathan Bedford Forrest and a bust of Confederate Capt. Harvey Mathes.

They're among the more than 45 Confederate monuments that have come down in at least 27 cities across the country since last summer, when white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Va., to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. In the aftermath, counterprotester Heather Heyer, a 32-year-old paralegal, was killed. The violence amplified calls for the removal of such monuments and spurred an ongoing debate over whether tributes to the Confederacy have a place in public spaces.

Amid that debate, cities like Memphis are now dealing with a different problem: what to do with the controversial statues once they're removed from public spaces. In many cases, they remain hidden in storage while municipalities decide their fate.

It's not just Memphis. New Orleans is still storing four Confederate monuments more than a year after they were taken down. Mayor LaToya Cantrell has yet to announce a plan for relocation.

The city of Baltimore is also keeping four monuments, which came down last August, in a secret location while a city task force decides what to do with them.

The situation is particularly complicated in Memphis, where the majority-black city had to resort to an intricate legal loophole to remove the statues in the first place.

In Tennessee, it's illegal for cities to remove historical monuments without approval from the state. Six other states - Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia - have similar laws. Memphis petitioned the state for a waiver but was denied. So Mayor Jim Strickland, a Democrat and Memphis' first white mayor in 24 years, found a workaround.

"It prohibits government from doing it, but it doesn't prohibit a private person from doing it, on private property," says Strickland, who took office in 2016. Protests against the statues had been growing throughout the summer of 2017, and he needed to act. "We needed to find a way to do it legally."

The city's attorney pitched an idea to Turner, the local county commissioner: Turner would create a nonprofit, the city would sell the two parks to the nonprofit - for $1,000 each - and the nonprofit would remove the statues.

It was a risky gambit.

"You would possibly get death threats," Turner says, recalling his thoughts at the time. "Are you willing to endure this, knowing that you are a husband and a father? And I said yes."

The plan worked. On Dec. 20, the Memphis City Council approved the sale to Turner's new nonprofit, Memphis Greenspace. That same night, he brought in cranes and the statues came down.

Turner wasn't planning to hold on to the statues indefinitely. He had imagined a museum would take them. Or maybe a Confederate cemetery or a historic battlefield.

Instead, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a nationwide organization that fights to preserve Confederate history, sued the nonprofit and the city, accusing them of violating state law.

A lower court ruled in favor of Memphis and the nonprofit. The suit is now with the Tennessee Court of Appeals, and Turner is forbidden from moving the statues until the proceedings are over.

But even without the legal morass, it's unclear who would be willing to take the three Confederate monuments. Museums, which might seem like the obvious choice, are often hesitant to take them on.

"Truth is, we absolutely could not take them," says Christy Coleman, CEO of the American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Va. Coleman often receives calls from cities hoping to find homes for their Confederate monuments.

"The biggest reason, I'd say, that museums aren't able to accept them is that they simply can't afford to take care of them," says Coleman.

Many of the statues were built for large public forums, creating logistical challenges for museums. A prominent statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, for example, is more than 60 feet tall, including its pedestal.

"[Most] museums are not equipped ... to not only take and place them, but to provide the kind of care and conservation required to ensure that they are around for perpetuity," says Coleman.

That's not the only challenge.

"Sometimes when you take on artifacts or things that will skew one's mission and/or collection direction and resources toward something that you know strays from its strategic work, that's problematic," Coleman says.

In 2016, a history museum in Gainesville, Fla., refused to take a Confederate statue from the county government, citing the high costs of creating an entirely new exhibit. The Smithsonian has also said that it does not accept monuments - Confederate or otherwise - into its collection.

Even if a museum could accommodate the costs and logistics, contextualizing Confederate statues for visitors is a challenge for curators, considering how racially and politically charged the objects still are.

"They say things about gender, they say things about race, they say things about militarism that would take more than a plaque to sanitize," says Ben Wright of the Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin.

Despite these challenges, Wright and his team believe they've figured out one approach to the curatorial dilemmas: focus specifically on the time period in which the Confederate statue was created.

Last year, the Briscoe Center designed an exhibit featuring a statue of Jefferson Davis that once stood on campus. Instead of highlighting Davis' role in the Civil War, it tells the story of the statue's creation, placement and the subsequent controversy on campus.

"It's a history of the statue, which touches on race relations, it touches on the way the monuments were contested at the time," says Wright, who curated the exhibit. In this case, it was the 1920s, at the height of Jim Crow laws. "What we did by concentrating on the statue and the rich archival sources around the statues, we were able to create a space where all those things get talked about."

For those who fought to remove the statues, the question of what to do with them is a simple one to answer.

"I believe that Confederate statues should be disposed of," says Tami Sawyer, the founder of #TakeEmDown901, the group that formed in Memphis to protest the city's Confederate monuments. "You don't need oppressive structures in museums."

One idea being floated as a possible solution is to return the statues to the Confederate organizations that, in many cases, paid for them in the first place. (Around the turn of the 20th century, as Confederate veterans began to die in larger numbers, these groups erected hundreds of monuments across the South.)

Last year, the United Daughters of the Confederacy accepted the return of one of its statues - the one the local museum in Gainesville, Fla., refused - and placed it in a private cemetery nearby. But it's unclear whether the group, which has thousands of members nationwide, has an organizational policy about accepting returned statues. (NPR reached out multiple times to the group for comment but did not receive a reply.)

In Memphis, the Sons of Confederate Veterans - which helped pay for the city's two prominent statues - wants more than just the return of the monuments.

"The statues go back up, of course," says Lee Millar, regional spokesman for the group, which is suing both Memphis and Turner for removing the statues.

"We'll fight as long as it takes, all the way to the end. Because the solution is to put the statues back up," Millar says.

Opponents of the Forrest statue point out that the Confederate general was a slave trader who, according to the Mississippi Civil Rights Project, was also an instrumental figure in the early years of the Ku Klux Klan.

But for Millar, who says he is a distant relative of Forrest, the statues deserve to be in the public sphere because they were meant to honor military service.

"The citizens back then were erecting these statues to those veterans," says Millar, who lives in Collierville, a suburb of Memphis. "It had nothing to do with race, nothing to do with slavery."

In mid-July, the Sons of Confederate Veterans threw its annual birthday celebration for Forrest, at Davies Manor Plantation in Bartlett, Tenn., just outside of Memphis.

Confederate soldier re-enactors marched in formation and fired off a musket salute to honor the general. At a folding table in a corner of the yard, Millar collected donations in a large water jug with the label "Save Our Parks" to help with the legal costs of the lawsuit.

Seven months after the Forrest statue came down, attendees were still angry.

"I think it's deplorable," said Paul Alford, an group member from Memphis. "The city council all needs to go to jail."

Others, like Gary Elam of nearby Potts Camp, Miss., are fighting with their wallets.

"Since they took the statues down on Dec. 20 of last year, I have not spent one red cent in Memphis," said Elam. "I'm not going to put any money in the coffers as long as they're acting the way they're acting."

Elam is not alone. In April, the Tennessee legislature stripped $250,000 earmarked for Memphis from the state budget, with Republican lawmakers citing the statue removals as the reason for the vote.

But Mayor Strickland isn't worried. "We'll be able to handle it," he says. "We knew that there would be some pushback."

And Strickland stands by the decision to take the city's Confederate monuments off public property.

"If you go to Germany, there is no statue of Adolf Hitler. But you certainly learn about Adolf Hitler. And people ought to have in their history textbooks and in museums a history of Nathan Bedford Forrest," Strickland says. "But statues are for honoring people. And Memphis of the 21st century does not want to honor that individual."

The saga is far from over. The lawsuit against Memphis and the nonprofit that removed the statues is expected to stretch on for the rest of the year.

In the meantime, the tedious responsibilities of owning recreational parks - mowing the grass, cleaning the sidewalks, keeping the lights on, paying for insurance - are beginning to add up for Van Turner, the statues' reluctant owner. He estimates it will cost him at least $30,000 this year. And, as he feared, his family has received death threats.

Still, Turner believes that once the litigation is over, he'll be able to find the statues a new home.

"I think there will be more than one group interested," he says. "This is still American history."
Jolie Myers edited and Noah Caldwell and Melissa Gray produced the audio stories. Maureen Pao edited the Web version of the story.

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Where Do Confederate Monuments Go After They Come Down?

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Van Turner has a secret: He knows the whereabouts of the controversial Confederate statues removed last year from two parks in Memphis, Tenn. "They have to be kept in a secretive location," said Turner on a recent afternoon, standing in a park overlooking the Mississippi River where one of the statues - of Confederate President Jefferson Davis - once stood.

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https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/state/north-carolina/article231680543.html

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At least a dozen Confederate statues have been defaced around the South so far in 2019.

The vandalism and heated protests last year around the University of North Carolina's Silent Sam statue in Chapel Hill attracted international attention, but smaller acts of vandalism and protest are more frequent.

In the years since deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia over the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee in August 2017, scores of Confederate memorials have been taken down around the country, The New York Times reports. Many more have been vandalized over the past two years.

Here are some of the cases so far this year:

This week, police accused two people of splattering "a red paint-like substance" on the Confederate Defenders of Charleston monument in South Carolina, The State reports.

On Monday, someone painted "They Were Racists" and splashed red paint on a Confederate monument in Nashville, Tennessee, according to Nashville Public Radio.

Earlier in June someone spray painted the word "racists" on a Confederate memorial at the Texas Capitol grounds in Austin, KWKT reports.

A monument to Confederate soldiers in a cemetery in Bardstown, Kentucky, was vandalized in May, WLKY reports. Someone poured red paint on the statue, similar to what happened to another Confederate monument that was defaced in Louisville, Kentucky, according to the station.

Paint thrown on the Louisville monument in May marks the fifth time the Confederate soldier statue has been defaced in two years, according to The Louisville Courier Journal. A city commission had just voted to remove that statue, the newspaper reports.

In April, someone smeared what appeared to be cement on the plaque for a Confederate monument in a Durham, North Carolina, cemetery, The News and Observer reports. This was the second time the monument had been defaced, the newspaper reports.

In March, police said two people poured yellow paint on a Confederate statue in Salisbury, North Carolina, The Charlotte Observer reports.

Also in March, this time in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, someone spray painted the words "murderer" and "coward" in pink on a monument outside the Historic Rutherford County Courthouse, WZTV reports.

Statues were also vandalized in Tyler, Texas, Dallas, Wilkesboro, North Carolina, and other cities.

In one case of suspected mistaken identity, someone defaced a statue of World War II Gen. William C. Lee, not Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, in Dunn, North Carolina, CBS17 reports.

Charles Duncan covers what's happening right now across North and South Carolina, from breaking news to fun or interesting stories from across the region. He holds degrees from N.C. State University and Duke and lives two blocks from the ocean in Myrtle Beach.

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More than a dozen Confederate statues vandalized around the country so far in 2019

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At least a dozen Confederate statues have been defaced around the South so far in 2019. The vandalism and heated protests last year around the University of North Carolina's Silent Sam statue in Chapel Hill attracted international attention, but smaller acts of vandalism and protest are more frequent.

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White nationalists march on University of Virginia to protest statue removal

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Several people were injured and at least one person was arrested during a demonstration by white nationalists at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville Friday night. Hundreds of marchers carried torches and chanted to protest of the planned removal of a Confederate monument.