Monuments surround us. On the courthouse square. In our cemeteries. On battlefields. What are these monuments for? Or as the Nashville songwriter Kate Campbell puts it, “Who are these monuments for?”
Monuments help us remember. Monuments are, after all, for us. They help us remember from where we’ve come, and therefore, they help us know who we are. Monuments are also erected as what writer Catherine W. Bashir referred to in “Southern Cultures” journal as “landmarks of power.”
And this is exactly what General Robert E. Lee did not want to happen. For General Lee, monuments to commemorate the Lost Cause would only “keep open the sores of war.” On several occasions and in several letters after he had surrendered to Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865, about seventy miles from Charlottesville where white supremacists and neo-Nazis only recently proved his words prophetic, Lee stated his “conviction,” that “however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt in the present condition of the Country, would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its accomplishment; & of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labor.”
Lee stated directly that it would be “wiser . . . not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
Instead, during the era of Jim Crow, during a time when African Americans were systematically disenfranchised and whites institutionalized segregation, from 1890 to 1917 and beyond, white Southerners disregarded Lee’s advice and built monuments to enshrine the Confederate dead, thus re-opening the wounds of war, and at the same time enshrining the Lost Cause of white supremacy throughout the South.
Monuments should be built for a nobler cause. Where are the monuments, for example, to Kentucky’s 23,000 African Americans who fought for freedom by taking up arms for the Union? Where are the monuments to prominent women in Kentucky, such as Linda Neville, the founder of the Kentucky Society to Prevent Blindness who almost single-handedly eradicated the horrific eye disease of trachoma from the mountains of eastern Kentucky? Where is the monument to Mary Breckinridge, the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service, which provided mid-wifery services for thousands of families in the hollows of eastern Kentucky?
I am prone to hero worship. Historians and other scholars, writers, athletes, preachers, teachers, artists, architects of buildings and of landscapes, musicians, family members, friends, and many, many ordinary people have all been heroes to me. Perhaps they have accomplished feats as no one else has been able to accomplish; perhaps they have persevered through pain and suffering; or maybe they have committed their lives to sacrificial service, putting others before themselves. Maybe they have sensed a particular calling or vision from God and then lived a life with the intense purpose of fulfilling that calling, of being guided by that vision.
Where are the monuments to these men and women? Monuments do not exactly preserve the past. We read books for that purpose. Our public libraries and archives preserve our past. For me, monuments should inspire. Monuments should inspire us to live lives of meaning and purpose, to accomplish things that we did not know we might accomplish.
Duane Bolin is a history professor at Murray State and presents his commentary series "Home and Away" on WKMS and the Murray Ledger and Times. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily represent the views of WKMS or its staff.
