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A 2015 New Orleans Times-Picayune article tells how New Orléans' Vieux Carré Commission recommended that four monuments be removed. Three of them honour
[...] Confederate generals P.G.T. Beauregard and Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy [...]
The other monument
[...] was erected in 1891 to honor the 16 members of the White League who died during an insurrection against the integrated Reconstructionist government in Louisiana, which was based in New Orleans at the time.
Various news outlets are reporting that the latter monument, an obelisk, has been dismantled at the behest of the city government, and that the others are also set to be dismantled.
coverage:
- Washington Post
- The New Orleans Advocate
- WWL-TV (has statement from city government)
- ABC
- New York Magazine
- Newsweek
- The New Orleans Advocate
- Chicago Tribune
- Los Angeles Times
- Times-Picayune
- Reuters
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New Orléans Dismantles Monuments to Failed Coup and Civil War Figures
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 5, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:48AM (4 children)
Yeah, this is an oversimplification of history. The secession of Virginia is not like the deep South. It's often forgotten today, but there were two waves of secessions. The first began with South Carolina soon after Lincoln's election. And there were a bunch of states that followed. But then Virginia voted AGAINST secession. Repeatedly. Other border states followed Virginia's lead and chose to stay with the Union. A few months went by before the other states seceded.
Why did Virginia secede? Only after Lincoln decided to invade the South, and because he was forcing the border states to produce soldiers (the so-called "75,000 volunteers") to fight those states. Another thing that's often forgotten today is that the legality of secession was not definitely resolved until AFTER the Civil War. There were folks on both sides (North and South) that had argued that secession was legal before the war, and there were plenty in the North who were happy to just let the Southern states go.
So, actually, there is more of an argument over "states rights" for the secession of the border states in the second wave of secessions. If you look into their articles of secession, Virginia mentions slavery only once, in a statement that the North was "perverting" its powers to "oppress" the South. Arkansas specifically mentioned the demand for marshalled troops to invade its neighboring states as a primary cause for secession.
These states only made their choice to secede after the North had clearly decided on aggressive war. And before the Civil War, loyalty to one's state really was a big thing -- the federal government was much smaller and less significant than today. Robert Lee knew what the war would mean for his home state -- even if they stayed in the Union, Virginia as a border state would end up as a major battleground. No matter which side he chose, Lincoln had already made a choice where the citizens of Virginia were going to lose terribly.
So he chose loyalty to his home state. I'm not saying that deserves a statute, though many people at the time thought it did. Heck, I'll stop talking here and hand the argument over the Charles Adams, grandson of John Quincy, and great-grandson of John Adams, a man who fought for the Union in the Civil War, who actually led regiments of black troops in the Civil War, and whose interest in history afterward was so strong that he became the president of the American Historical Association. And you know what topic he chose to speak on during his tenure as AHA president? He gave an oration on why Robert E. Lee deserved a statue in Washington, D.C. [archive.org].
Again, I'm not necessarily saying Lee deserves a statue or that we should keep up the ones existing today. But Adams explains very thoroughly why he's a different case from the Deep South very pro-slavery secessionists.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Thursday May 04 2017, @04:53AM (2 children)
I did not know that. Thank you for the link. It was rather long, but in the end I found his speech. It was compelling.
I'm willing to agree he was fucked from the start, and didn't have any good choices. He is made out to be the liberal Southerner which I found interesting.
The link included images of the actual pages from 1902 which was pretty neat. Thank you.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:11PM (1 child)
You're welcome. I came upon that speech a couple years ago when these debates started happening over confederate monuments. I think it's a fascinating first-hand account.
The unfortunate thing, of course, is that stuff like Charles Adams' arguments were then taken too far by Southern apologists in the next generations, leading to the myth of the "Lost Cause" and the denial that slavery played a primary role in the causes of the Civil War (which of course it did).
We've seen the pendulum swing back and forth. In the late 1800s, the North perceived themselves as "victors" and the other side as losers, and the few monuments erected then reflect that rhetoric, often celebrating. By around 1900, there was a lot more conciliatory rhetoric among veterans particularly, leading to joint memorials and meetings of veterans from both sides. But then the sons of the veterans came along and in the South wanted to remember their fathers as heroes -- so you get the inaccurate "Lost Cause" stuff: that's when a LOT of monuments went up around the 1920s and early 1930s. The pendulum had swung so far by 1958 that Congress voted to recognize Southern Civil War veterans officially as veterans under federal law, giving them and their survivors pension benefits. That was too late for any actual veterans, but many wives and children received federal veterans benefits (and apparently even last year, there's still at least one child [usnews.com] of a Southern Civil War veteran receiving benefits).
But with the Civil Rights Movement, the pendulum started to swing back -- and rightly so. And now we're tearing down the statues.
What I like about Adams' account is that it tries to explain the nuances and personal struggles many people undoubtedly had about the coming war. To me, that's a lot more interesting than the extremist positions people tend to have: either you brand the South summarily as evil pro-slavery traitors or you're a Southern apologist who denies that slavery was even a major factor in the war. Both sides in that discussion are severely flawed. History is more complex.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Thursday May 04 2017, @01:16PM
Oops -- sorry about that link. I misunderstood that the veteran in question there actually served in the Confederate army but then joined the Union army. Anyhow, I guess there aren't any more children of confederate veterans still receiving federal benefits, though there still were a few years back.
(Score: 2) by boxfetish on Thursday May 04 2017, @08:09AM
"...and there were plenty in the North who were happy to just let the Southern states go."
Count me among those. In fact, I'd be happy to even let them do it today, as long as these "taker" states in the South first paid back ever dollar they have taken from the Federal government, over and above what they paid in.