Member Review Recalling Deeds Immortal: Florida Monuments to the Civil War by William Lees and Frederick Gaske

Pat Young

Brev. Brig. Gen'l
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Recalling Deeds Immortal: Florida Monuments to the Civil War by William Lees and Frederick Gaske published by Florida University Press (2014). Hardcover $29.95 Kindle $19.99

Recalling Deeds Immortal: Florida Monuments to the Civil War is one of a dozen or so scholarly guides to Civil War monuments in one state that were published in conjunction with the Sesquicentennial. These guides usually give brief histories and location information about many of a state’s monuments, and typically offer background on the monumentation movements of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Most include a discussion of the Lost Cause impact on Southern memorials as well as Reconciliationist themes in monuments in both the North and South.

Recalling Deeds Immortal: Florida Monuments to the Civil follows the lead of similar works published during the Sesquicentennial. It is not groundbreaking, but it provides a good guide to what is behind behind the granite and bronze. Where it shows strength is in the many photographs of the monuments examined.

The book is arranged chronologically, by the periods in which the monuments were erected. This has advantages, you can discern trends in commemoration, but also disadvantages that I will deal with later. In keeping with the structure of the book, I want to begin with the earliest commemorative pieces.

During the Civil War, only graveyard monuments and a few makeshift memorials were erected. Even during the 1865-1876 period, only four monuments, two Union and two Confederate, were installed. The oldest extant monument is the Union obelisk at Key West. Put up in 1866, it is one of the oldest Civil War monuments in the country. For a while it was the southernmost, until Confederate heritage groups pushed for a monument even further south. Like many war memorials, it was funded with both private and public funds.

The first Confederate monument in Florida was unveiled in 1871 on the grounds of a Presbyterian church in the Florida Panhandle. A rival Confederate heritage faction then moved the monument to the Walton County Courthouse in Eucheeanna. The rationale was that a skirmish had occurred there in 1864 making it an historical marker as well.

The angry Presbyterian faction then moved the monument back to the church and threatened “violence to anyone that should interfere” with the move. The matter then went to court, with the Florida State First Judicial Circuit ruling in favor of the church location. When the case reached the state’s high court, the ruling in 1874 moved the object of so much contention back to the Eucheeana location, only to see the courthouse moved to DeFuniak Springs in 1886 leaving the monument behind. Not to fear, in 1927 the Florida Legislature appropriated a $1,000 to pay to move the Confederate memorial to the DeFuniak Springs courthouse, apparently forgetting the reason it had been next to the courthouse to begin with was the forgotten skirmish at Eucheeanna.

In the 1870s, a Confederate monument was erected on land owned by the Catholic Church in St. Augustine after Unionist Reconstruction authorities denied permission to place it on public property. When Reconstruction ended, the monument was moved to the public plaza in 1879 and installed there with additions at public and private expense.

Note: Because this is a long review, I will post it in several parts.
 
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Part II:

After the end of Reconstruction, former Confederates were free to not only commemorate their dead, but to celebrate the Confederacy in monumentation. The United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and its predecessor women’s groups, took the leading role in monumentation. The Leon County monument was erected on the grounds of the state capitol. The biggest critics of the memorial shaft, years after it was put up, were members of the UDC’s state leadership. They believed that the capitol should have been the location of a memorial to all of the dead of the state and not just those of one county.

As with the Walton County monument, the Leon County shaft was also fated to be moved, in this case when the State Capitol was expanded. The state paid for the move. There was a whole lot of movin' going on. Even the statewide monument planned by the women’s groups for the capitol was moved to Pensacola before it was even built.

As more and more monuments went up beginning in the 1890s, different meanings were assigned to what seemed like very similar statues of Confederate soldiers. The Pensacola statue, originally intended for Tallahassee, was dedicated at what could only be called a festival of Confederate memory. The soldier was unveiled in the newly-named Lee Square on the birthday of Jefferson Davis. The 1891 procession on the great day was led by militia companies and included fifteen maidens representing the states of the Confederacy. (Can you name them all?)

A privately donated bronze Confederate soldier on a shaft was dedicated in Jacksonville in 1898 during the height of the Spanish-American War. The dedication took a reconciliationist tone, with the parade being led by a U.S. Army band. War unity and the fact that the United States troops in the city were commanded by Major General Fitzhugh Lee may have contributed to approach taken by the ceremony’s organizers. In his speech, Major General Lee said that the United States was now united “under one flag, for a common cause, the only rivalry being as to which shall carry the flag further for freedom.”

The Jacksonville statue echoed the romantic heroicism of other memorials being put up at the time with these lines of dedication on its east facing plaque: “To the soldiers of Florida. this shaft is by a comrade raised in testimony of his love, recalling deeds immortal, heroism unsurpassed. With ranks unbroken, ragged, starved and decimated, the southern soldier, for duty’s sake, undaunted stood to the front of battle until no light remained to illuminate the field of carnage, save the lustre of his chivalry and courage.”

Three years later a great fire destroyed 2,638 buildings in Jacksonville, including most of the buildings near the bronze soldier. The Confederate statue was one of the few landmarks of 19th Century Jacksonville that survived.

On January 19, 1904, a monument was dedicated by the UDC on the anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s birth. With a price tag of $1,000, it went up on the grounds of the 1886 Alachua County Courthouse in Gainesville. It was sculpted by a Swiss immigrant and, like many Confederate monuments, it contained a few lines from the “Poet Priest of the South,” Father Abram J. Ryan, an Irish immigrant Catholic priest.

The 1908 ceremony in Ocala unveiled a 24-foot-tall monument topped with a Confederate soldier made of Italian marble. By now, white Floridians were erecting statues in full accord with Lost Cause orthodoxy. Speakers hailed the sacrifice of Confederate soldiers, whose deaths were said to have bought the country its precious liberties. The inscription traced the Confederacy back to the founders of the United States: “The south reveres her Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Andrew Jackson, and others, who laid the foundations of our grand republic. she honors her Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Stuart, Johns[t]on, For[r]est, and every brave son who fought to preserve our liberties, guaranteed by the fathers, under the Constitution.”

The racial politics of the Jim Crow Era are reflected in the controversy over monumentation of Olustee. The 1864 battle there saw the triumph of a small Confederate force over Union troops that included many black soldiers. According to the book:

In 1899, at the urging of the UDC, the Florida Legislature passed a bill that authorized the governor to appoint a five-person commission to oversee the construction of a Battle of Olustee monument and appropriated $2,500 for its erection. However, the bill’s original language to honor only the Confederate soldiers of Olustee had been changed by the legislature so that the monument was to be dedicated to both “the Federal and Confederate officers and soldiers who participated in said battle.”

Inclusion of a dedication to the Union participants on the proposed monument in the 1899 legislation was controversial. Reflecting social attitudes present in the nation at the time, the UDC adopted a resolution calling for the repeal of the bill, as “they did not care to divide honors intended for the Confederate dead with negro dead of the Union army.” As one UDC representative stated, “If the union dead had been white men it is possible that we would have remembered them in the bill, but as they were negroes, and we ignored them in the bill, we consider the change made by the legislature as worthy of our highest indignation.”

A different context provided a more tolerant outcome. When the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated a memorial to Judah P. Benjamin’s escape from Florida after finding refuge at the Gamble Plantation, the unveiling ceremony offered a rebuke to Anti-Semitism. The ceremony took place during World War II and the speeches given were calls for tolerance and respect for the Jewish people. Benjamin's Jewish ancestry was invoked throughout the dedication.

The hottest era for the erection of monuments has been the post-Centennial period, beginning in 1966 and running up to the current day. While many of these modern markers seem designed primarily to display Confederate iconography and Confederate Battle Flags, a few have been more historical. For example, the Confederate Cow Cavalry marker resurrects a forgotten piece of Civil War history. Fort Meyers has a large, and relatively new, monument, including a life-sized statue, dedicated to the United States Colored Troops who served there.

Part III follows:
 
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Part III:

Overall, the book does a good job of describing the one hundred monuments included in its pages. There are excellent modern photos of most of the monuments taken by William Lees. For most of the larger monuments there are multiple archival photos that show the changes over time in how the landscapes around them have been constructed, reconstructed, and altered. There are also photos of the unveilings of some of the monuments.

Although I generally liked Recalling Deeds Immortal, I had several problems with it.

One deficiency of the book is in its treatment of government involvement in the creation of the monuments and the spaces they inhabit. About half of the monuments discussed contain some mention of state or local governments contributing considerable funds to erecting, preserving, and moving monuments, as well as noting that the monuments are on public land and that improvements around the monument were made at public expense. However, there is very little discussion of how or even why governments got involved in supporting Confederate monumentation.

Except for the discussion of Olustee, the authors just seem to assume that tax dollars would be used to put these monuments up. In some cases, especially where government entities appeared to pay most of the costs, it would have been nice to know why. The only real discussion of the politics of government funding concerns the decision by the Florida legislature to not fund a joint Union/Confederate monument at Olustee because it would honor black Union troops.

The book is also deficient in describing the public’s reaction to the monuments. Only a few unveiling ceremonies merited discussion, in the view of the authors. There is not a lot of information on whether there was opposition to the monuments going up in the first place, except for the three Unionist monuments that were blocked by the Confederate descendant organizations. Nor is there a lot about how the monuments are viewed today. The authors imply that they are valued in their communities, but more evidence pointing to that conclusion would have been welcome. Since some of the memorials are headstone-sized Stonewall Jackson Highway markers, I wonder if locals are even aware of many of them.

The authors write of a Union monument being defaced with graffiti in the 1950s saying RE Lee, but not whether Confederate monuments have faced similar problems.

In the final pages of the book, the authors write:

Given the original intent of many Confederate monuments to vindicate the South for actions that many segments of our modern society would say cannot be vindicated, it is likely that discontent with the presence of these symbols of the Confederacy will continue to increase and that the legitimacy of Confederate monuments as part of the modern public landscape will continue to be questioned.

While we believe this will be the case, we also believe it would be unfortunate to see monuments relocated, especially those that remain in their original settings. We believe it would be even worse to dismantle monuments for storage or disposal. These are part of the historic landscape of our communities, and while they may become controversial, that controversy can, if approached properly, be turned into the proverbial teachable moment.

It is nice that this is the opinion of white Civil War experts. My problem is that there is a near complete absence of black voices on the monuments in the book. Occasionally the authors will note that a black legislator or the “black community” objected to expending money on the monuments, but the blacks have no names in the book and their objections may be noted, but they are not described.

The authors also note, in passing that Florida is the most demographically changed of the former Confederate States. Anyone who has been there knows that in many cities and communities there are more people from the Midwest, Canada, New York, or Latin America than there are descendants of Confederate soldiers. Yet the book does not begin to address the fact that in a state devoid of major battles, most Civil War monuments there do not mark scenes of heroic struggle but merely commemorate “Our Confederate Ancestors.” The decision of Confederate heritage groups, even in the 21st Century, to commemorate Confederate heritage, rather than Civil War history, in monumentation, likely will redound against public support for the existing stone sentinels.

Ancestor worship is not sustainable at public expense when most citizens don’t claim Confederate descent.

Patrick Young, Esq. is Special Professor of Immigration Law at Hofstra University School of Law where he also co-directs the school's Immigration Law Clinic. He is the Program Director of the Central American Refugee Center and Executive Vice Chair of the New York Immigration Coalition. He is the author of the web series The Immigrants' Civil War.

This concludes the review.
 
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I am going to post a few historical photos of some of the monuments discussed. Here is the Union monument at Clinton Square in Key West. Key West was in Union hands during the war. This is the oldest extant Civil War monument in Florida:

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Here is the St. Augustine monument during the Reconstruction Era. It was still on Catholic Church property at the time. The shaft ends halfway up to symbolize the end of the Confederacy. The original version of the monument was designed to have a tragic sense about it:

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would be interesting to study if there is any correlation between building Confederate monuments and related ceremonies and the many lynchings and extensive racial violence in late 19th and 20th century Florida.
 
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