News From Around the South 11/23 to 11/30

VIRGINIA: Professor Donates Civil War Artifacts to Manassas Museum

In 1861, Union Army Capt. Edward Todd of the 2nd Vermont Infantry was wounded at the Battle of First Manassas. He went home to Vermont for two years to recover before returning to fight in several more Civil War battles in Virginia.

More than 150 years later, Todd’s wartime haversack — a large, purselike bag he used to carry personal belongings — has returned to Manassas. The haversack is part of a collection of Civil War artifacts donated to the Manassas Museum in the summer by Northern Virginia Community College and retired history professor Charles Poland Jr.

Museum curator Mary Helen Dellinger said the 56-piece collection is significant because it encompasses a broad spectrum of artifacts. It includes cannonballs, a rifle, a surgeon’s medical kit, saddlebags, currency, photographs, buttons, buckles and other personal items carried by soldiers.

Poland, 81, of Chantilly amassed the collection during a 58-year career as an educator in Northern Virginia. The Loudoun County native taught at high schools in Leesburg and Herndon for several years before joining the faculty at NVCC, where he taught history for 48 years until he retired in June.

Early in his career at NVCC, Poland attended Civil War shows in Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania, where he bought a variety of items with funding from the college.

“I was looking for anything,” he said. Because he was particularly interested in personal items carried by the soldiers, the collection includes combs, a toothbrush carved out of bone, candle holders, oil lamps and a sewing kit known as a “housewife.” The small, cylindrical kit held needles and a pincushion and had sections to store thread and buttons.

“Soldiers carried these because the uniform you had was the uniform you carried for the whole war,” Dellinger said. “And so you had to learn how to mend it in the field.”

The medical kit includes a surgeon’s saw, which would have been used to amputate the arms and legs of wounded soldiers, Dellinger said.

Dellinger speculated that Todd’s haversack — embroidered with a floral pattern, with a braided rope handle — was made by his wife or possibly a sister. It was easy for Dellinger to trace the haversack to Todd because “CAPT. E.A. TODD 2 VT INT” is clearly stenciled inside the flap.

Dellinger learned that Todd fought in battles at Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, Fisher’s Hill and Cedar Creek before being wounded again at Winchester. He left the service three days after the assassination of President Lincoln and lived almost 50 more years before dying in 1914, Dellinger said.

Poland used the collection as a teaching lab for more than 40 years — first in a mobile van that he took to schools, nursing homes and fairs, and then in a display in the library at NVCC’s Annandale campus.

“I thought it was going to be my legacy to NOVA, that it would always be there,” Poland said. But administrators decided they needed the space at the library for other purposes. “So they got rid of it — over my protests,” he said, laughing.

Dellinger was happy to accept the collection on behalf of the Manassas Museum, where she showed it off at a “Chat with the Curator” event in August. A school group is scheduled to see the collection this week, she said.

Dellinger does not plan to create a permanent display for the collection at the museum, which has limited exhibition space, but will incorporate it into programming, she said.

Poland is pleased with the way things worked out.

“I thought it was significant that somehow the majority of the collection be kept together,” he said. “Where it’s going now, it will be available to the public, so I’m very happy about that.”

–washingtonpost.com

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MISSISSIPPI: Mayor’s Decision to Ban Confederate Flag Alienates SCV 

Natchitoches Mayor Lee Posey seems to hold authority to bar the Confederate battle flag from the city’s Christmas Parade, a decision that has compelled the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which has marched in the parade for a quarter-century, to withdraw from this year’s parade. Posted rules for the parade appear to be loose, but the city itself is in charge.

That won’t make Posey’s decision less controversial or soothe hurt feelings associated with it.

Posey’s decision reverberates around Louisiana for two reasons:

What changed for Natchitoches leaders this year, it seems, was the June murders of nine black worshipers at the ancient Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, an event that caused shock waves around the South because of the cruelty of the crimes, the forgiveness expressed by victims’ families and the assailant’s embrace of the Confederate battle flag.

It’s not the first time culprits have misused the battle flag for ill purposes, but this time, it effected change in states and communities across the South. Caught in the crossfire between murderous racism and demands for change was the SVC, a group impassioned by Confederate history with no ostensible racist sentiments.

“For many, the Confederate flag is a symbol of hate, bigotry, violence and division,” Posey said in announcing the battle flag ban for parade participants. For others, it is sparks devotion to ancestors who fought.

The Confederate cause is not universally embraced in Louisiana now nor was it in 1860. Most state voters cast ballots for either an anti-secessionist or a cooperationist who wanted to wait before secession. Some 5,000 to 7,000 Louisianians eventually fought for the Union. Almost half of the state’s people were enslaved.

Nonetheless, the decision has inflamed conflicting passions 150 years after the war’s end. Still, the city’s intentions in hosting the parade are clear: “The purpose of the parade is to enhance the warm feelings that the Christmas season brings and to provide quality entertainment for all members of the family, particularly the children.”

One Natchitoches businessman is printing and selling shirts emblazoned with an image of a tattered battle flag bearing the words, “Never Surrender. 2015 Christmas Collection.” It hardly seems appropriate for a season celebrating the birth of Christ, who told followers to turn the other cheek.

The SVC’s parade participation will be missed by many; the flag, maybe less so.

Let’s hope for peace on earth, especially in Natchitoches.

–theadvertiser.com

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NORTH CAROLINA: Silent Sam and the Messages in our Monuments

Soon after arriving in Chapel Hill in 1962, about to begin a career in the English department at the University of North Carolina, I began my acquaintance with “Silent Sam.” Ohio-born, I had lived most of my youth in Michigan and had received my degrees from the University of Michigan. There had been no Civil War battles in Michigan, and I had had little familiarity with Confederate monuments save for those I encountered during a graduate school visit to Atlanta.

Now at the front of the campus, I discovered the monument commemorating the bravery of the young men of the university who in 1861 put down their books and marched off to the bloodiest war in the nation’s history. On the east side of the base, a citation praises the volunteers for heeding the call to “Duty, the sublimest word in the English language.” The citation announces that the monument was a gift from the North Carolina Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy aided by the generosity of university alumni. On the west side of the base, a woman, sword in hand, touches the shoulder of a young scholar about to take up arms.

The statue’s moniker was born because the soldier wears no cartridge box for ammunition. It did not take long, of course, before I heard the risqué explanation popular with students.

Lessons about Chapel Hill and the state, destinations I soon learned to love, came fast. North Carolina was the last state to vote for secession, and that decision came reluctantly. There were tears in Raleigh when the final vote was taken. Once committed, North Carolina would pay dearly, its casualty list the lengthiest of the states, its economy shattered.

In Chapel Hill, following the surrender at Bennett Place, Union troops kept the peace. Occupational forces inevitably distress the occupied. At the commencement exercises in June 1865, there were four students present to receive their degrees; 35 Federal soldiers stood guard. Chapel Hill citizenry seethed when the daughter of the university’s president fell in love with the presiding Union officer, and they did not hide their displeasure when the couple married.

Closed four years

But greater gloom than any caused by the wedding was ahead. Its student population base decimated by the huge mortality toll among North Carolina troops and by the necessity of survivors to return to the farms to assist their impoverished families, the university had to close its doors. It would be four long years before the bells in South Building could be tolled and the university reopened. Recovery would not be easy. Any memorial marker for the young men of the university who had marched off to defend the Confederacy would have to wait.

On Commencement Day, June 2, 1913, the North Carolina Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy presented to the university president a monument designed to give those students full honor. In accepting the gift, President Francis Venable surely believed that the UNC students who marched to war felt a call to duty, that they represented a laudable bravery. The graduating seniors and their families likely did, too, as did the alumni who had donated to the campaign. Venable would also know that the women who had worked to get the monument were honoring sons, brothers, cousins. As was Gov. Locke Craig, who delivered the commencement address.

The UNC monument came as part of a wave of public statuary commemorating the Lost Cause, a mythology that downplayed the evil of slavery, promoted states’ rights as the cause of the war, glorifying a Southern gentility. Before the 1880s, there had not been much public sculpture in the South, excepting Richmond. The Confederate capital set a high standard for commemorative statuary, in number and in grandeur. The commemorative frenzy lasted into the late 1920s. Images of the Confederate soldier and Confederate leaders became focal points in Southern towns and cities. Art critic Randolph Delehanty has judged the UNC monument and the monument to the Women of the Confederacy on the Capitol grounds in Raleigh as “fine pieces of Beaux Art bronze statuary.”

That statuary and other commemorative statuary in the South must be viewed as valued art, but also in the context of the post-Reconstruction era. The dedication ceremony during the UNC commencement in 1913 would not have found African-Americans on stage or in the audience. The ceremony that day was deeply marred by hateful racial abuse spoken by Julian Carr, industrialist and generous philanthropist. (Carrboro is named for him, as is UNC’s Carr Building.)

Probably most in attendance on that day would now be called “racist” and were not shocked or deeply disturbed. But they loved the university; they honored the memories of the soldiers who had fought for the Confederacy. They could not know, though we do, that in just a few years the UNC campus would again find young men training for war, many eager to fight for the USA. Perhaps some of those students looked at Sam and found new meaning. Julian Carr’s words on that 1913 commencement day do not define the meaning of the monument.

John Wilson, the artist who sculpted the UNC soldier, was a Canadian. His vision had nothing to do with Jim Crow realities. He aimed to portray the young soldier on the way to battle. The figure is appropriately muscular, the face expressing purpose and innocence. A few weeks ago, walking across McCorkle Place, I saw that well-meaning students had visited Silent Sam during the night. There was a mask covering his eyes. I could appreciate the gesture. Sam was fighting to preserve an evil system. Soldiers often go to war with little understanding of the issues. Soldiers often fight for a cause not in their own best interests or the interests of their families.

The west side of the base of the monument beautifully reminds us of this reality: Societies put pressures on young men to enlist. The Civil War was fought to preserve slavery, a system chiefly beneficial for the planter class. Some soldiers who fought for the Confederacy did not approve of slavery but decided that their duty was with their state. So we think again of the words that the UNC monument accented. When teaching a Faulkner text or Donald Davidson’s poem “Lee in the Mountains,” I sometimes suggested that the students revisit Silent Sam and read the inscriptions, and I quoted British author George Eliot: “Duty is peremptory and absolute.”

For more than a century now, the monument has been reminding students and townspeople of a catastrophic moment in the university’s history: the closing of books foretelling the losses ahead for those students and for the university. About one-third of the UNC soldiers died in the war. It is also appropriate that we recall Jim Crow’s power during the era when the monument came into being. That story also belongs to Silent Sam.

Reading hearts of others

But we should be cautious of too easily reading the hearts of the Daughters of the Confederacy or of the alumni who contributed funds for their efforts. Toppling Silent Sam or the Confederate monuments throughout the South would not be a step forward. Those monuments, all of similar birthing, are part of Southern history and should be read in all their complexity.

Our monument tells a more complex story than do most Confederate monuments. It captures a key moment in the university’s history. It tells us where we have been, how far we have come and how far we have yet to go. Sam has seen great change in the university’s demographics. Antebellum, it had served mainly the plantation class. Following each of the world wars, the base broadened, dramatically so after World War II. The GI Bill opened many doors for Tar Heel veterans, William C. Friday among them. In the 1950s, women students numbered few among the student body. That percentage would change dramatically, beginning in the 1960s. In March 1966, Silent Sam provided a striking backdrop for UNC students, men and women, assembled in large numbers to hear banned speakers Herbert Apethaker and Franklin Wilson speak from the other side of the Franklin Street wall.

On the wall today, words from student body president Paul Dickson III highlight the students’ vision and effort to help secure a freer, more open society. Sam carries some messages that the Daughters of the Confederacy did not intend. He needs to remain right where he is.

But he is in need of company – another impressive statue or monument, this one to tell the story of the first entry of African-Americans into the student body. Not until the 1960s was the university truly able to become the place “as it was meant to be – the University of the people.” I have been witness to great courage and vision from students, white and black, during the integration struggle. The path of those first African-Americans who enrolled at UNC was not easy and was often lonely. Their valor also merits commemoration. They could see what Silent Sam could not, and they made UNC and Chapel Hill a better place. Yes, Silent Sam needs company!

GEORGIA: Protesters Want Confederate Flag in Museum

STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. — A group of protesters want to remove the confederate flags from public display at Stone Mountain.

The African American Equality Committee planned the Saturday noon protest.

In a statement, they argued:

“With the events that took place in Charleston, South Carolina and the police brutality cases that are going on in America we feel that these events begin with the allowance of the confederate symbols to be open to the public. America is still supporting these hate symbols and we want to pressure the government to move these hate symbols to private locations.”

The group marched up Stone Mountain with signs and American flags. At the top of the mountain, they waves the flag “to show respect to America”.

They want four American flags flown in place of the four Confederate flags currently on display.

–11alive.com

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