- Joined
- Feb 5, 2017
https://emergingcivilwar.com/2019/04/04/emerging-scholar-sam-florer/#more-181463
The small town of Fort Mill, South Carolina stands on the ancestral land of the Catawba Indians. By the time of the Civil War, the Catawba’s population had been reduced to barely more than one hundred members. Nonetheless, when fighting broke out in 1861, a majority of their military-age males volunteered to fight in the Confederate army.
photo by Michael Sean Nix from www.hmdb.org.
Forty years later, in the summer of 1900, Fort Mill unveiled a limestone monument to Catawba Indians who served the Confederate cause. My work seeks to explore the impetus behind this monument’s creation. I discovered that it served two primary purposes: it was unique in that the design and message of the monument served a local purpose by using images of the white population’s version of Catawba history and culture to help alleviate the fear of social and economic change; and it was representative in that it bolstered the ideals of Lost Cause ideology that swept the country at the turn of the twentieth century.
The small town of Fort Mill, South Carolina stands on the ancestral land of the Catawba Indians. By the time of the Civil War, the Catawba’s population had been reduced to barely more than one hundred members. Nonetheless, when fighting broke out in 1861, a majority of their military-age males volunteered to fight in the Confederate army.
photo by Michael Sean Nix from www.hmdb.org.
Forty years later, in the summer of 1900, Fort Mill unveiled a limestone monument to Catawba Indians who served the Confederate cause. My work seeks to explore the impetus behind this monument’s creation. I discovered that it served two primary purposes: it was unique in that the design and message of the monument served a local purpose by using images of the white population’s version of Catawba history and culture to help alleviate the fear of social and economic change; and it was representative in that it bolstered the ideals of Lost Cause ideology that swept the country at the turn of the twentieth century.