Restricted Confederate monuments are community memorials

Andersonh1 · Jun 26, 2020

This is the same conclusion I had reached as I've looked into the motivation for raising these monuments in the first place. The information about what the Union side was doing at the same time was probably the final piece in the puzzle for me. We should be looking at the nation-wide trend, not just monuments going up in the South. There are actually more Union monuments than Confederate, something I did not know until recently.

Simply, the concept of the monuments placed in the late 19th to early 20th century as supporting Jim Crow and showing **** is a fallacy. To understand the monuments, one needs to look at the broad picture of what was occurring at the time.

The period is better defined as the Monument Movement, and it was not a Southern movement. The Northern memorials recorded in the survey work to date lists 11 monuments erected before 1866, 10 in 1866 and 11 in 1867 — the year the first two monuments in the South, in West Virginia and South Carolina, were placed.

Union monuments are monuments honoring and in mourning to the community's contribution to the war effort. Some added themes. Out of the 422 Union monuments studied, common Union themes were Defenders of the Union (24), Died so the Nation Might Live (20), Preservation of the Union (16) and Preservation of the Constitution (4) sometimes in combination. Monuments appeared both in cemeteries and public squares.

The community erected these monuments though ladies' associations and monument associations, and veterans raised funds for the monuments. The Grand Army of the Republic was established in 1866, and by the early 1880s, the women and sons formed allied orders. It was not until 1899 that the United Confederate Veterans was founded with the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans in the mid-1890s. All raised funds for the memorials.

Read the full article here: https://dentonrc.com/opinion/column...nwIswLEIJv1lXyJU_bYd2aVG-ra5IrXologdIVi1VtIRg

Greywolf · Jun 26, 2020