Monuments and Myths

By Hank Silverberg

          There it is again. My trip to work up and down I-95 takes me past a great big flagpole displaying the Stars and Bars--what most people call the Confederate Flag. It towers above the highway and with some irony is easier to see going southbound. The location of that oversized flag has been the subject of controversy for a few years now, but it’s not going anywhere. It’s displayed on private property and several attempts to have it removed have failed despite its offensive message for many people. The First Amendment protects the property owner's right to display it. If you visit Virginia’s state capital and travel down Monument Avenue you will find more tributes to the insurrection that led to four years of Civil War. There’s Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B. Stuart and Jefferson Davis. Visit any courthouse in Virginia and throughout the south and you will see monuments to Confederate soldiers, privates or generals all.                                                 

(The Stars & Bars flies high over

I-95 in Stafford, VA) 

     Those who put them there and those who fly the Stars and Bars will tell you it’s all part of our history and a tribute to southern heritage. But what is it really? The man who swore allegiance to the U.S. Constitution before he betrayed his country to join an insurrection to destroy the United States, didn’t think the monuments should be there when the carnage ended. And at first, they weren’t.

       “I think it wiser, moreover, 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.”—Robert E Lee, 1866

(A Confederate soldier greets all 

who enter the courthouse in Leesburg,VA)

 The monuments were not really put up to honor the men who gave their lives for "The Lost Cause" as the Daughters of the Confederacy and others still claim.  Instead they were erected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to preserve the discriminating laws which had grown out of the ashes of the old south. The monuments and the Stars and Bars became symbols of white supremacy to keep people of color in segregated schools and neighborhoods and away from the ballot box. When they stand in front of almost every courthouse in Virginia they can intimidate some minorities who already don't think they are getting a fair shake in our criminal justice system. That argument has been made in a number of lawsuits to eliminate the statues including the one in Leesburg pictured here. The Confederate battle flag no longer stands for the long lost army of men who were misled to slaughter defending the immorality of human bondage and the wrong side of history.  Now that flag and those monuments stand for the KKK, white supremacists and Jim Crow. Hate groups can often be found demonstrating near Confederate monuments waving the Stars and Bars and the Nazi flag together.  

 Anyone who has stood at the Sunken Road at Antietam or the top of Marye’s heights at Fredericksburg can envision what it must have been like to fight that war, and we owe it to the 650,000 men who died on both sides to finally bind up the nation’s wounds.                                                                   

(The Sunken Road at  Antietam) 

    Take down the battle flag. Put it in a museum where it can stand as a grave marker for slavery and a new birth of freedom for  millions of Americans. Move the monuments away from courthouses and public roadways, and put them on battlefields where they can be interpreted and used to educate people about the price of the war that almost killed The United States. You can see General Jackson at the Manassas Battlefield still astride his horse near the stone wall where he got his nickname. That is the proper place for history.

 In his second inaugural address just months before he was murdered, Abraham Lincoln called on his fellow citizens:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds…. to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
--President Lincoln, 1865

  That was 153 years ago, but the recent events in Charlottesville and elsewhere indicate that the nation has not healed. Charity has been forgotten. The malice is still there. The nation has taken much to long to heal. It is time to rip off the dirty, worn out bandages and cauterize the wound forever.   

(All Photos taken by Hank Silverberg)

                  (Your comments and suggestions for this blog are welcome below)

(Order my new book "The Campaign"at Amazon.com, BN.com or hanksilverbergbooks.com)