Augusta, Georgia is one of many Southern cities where controversy has enveloped the local Confederate monument. Black Lives Matter rallies have targeted the memorial, calling for it to be removed from its prominent place near the Savannah River and relocated to private property or warehoused. With three Confederate statues having been toppled by protesters in recent weeks, there is serious consideration being given to moving it.
Augusta University sociology professor Todd Powell-Williams told a reporter for the Augusta Chronicle that “The statue is not a neutral representation of heritage, it’s symbol a symbol of white supremacy.” The article refers to the monument as a product of the “Reconstruction-era.”
Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.
The cornerstone of the monument was laid in 1875 by the women of the local Ladies Memorial Association (LMA). The LMAs were organized after the Civil War by the widows and mothers of Confederate soldiers to bring the remains of the Confederate dead to Southern cemeteries and care for the graves. These associations began their work almost immediately after the war ended and spread throughout the South.
Initially, the LMAs claimed to be apolitical. During Congressional Reconstruction, military occupation authorities frowned on open expressions of Confederate nationalism. The women of the memorial associations carried on their work under the mantle of women’s traditional role of care for the dead. They established “Confederate cemeteries” where those who had died far from their homes could be reunited with their comrades in death. By 1866 they organized Confederate Memorial Day during which the graves of the departed were decorated with flowers. All of this fit within 19th Century bounds of propriety.
After white supremacist governments were reestablished, however, the white gloves of the Ladies Memorial Associations came off. The groups became a driving force behind the erection of the first wave of public monuments celebrating the Confederate cause.
While the Augusta Chronicle article describes the monument as “Reconstruction-era,” it was actually conceived and erected after Reconstruction had ended in Georgia.
In school many of us learned that Reconstruction lasted from 1865 to 1877. As a high school student I had so many dates to remember in history class that this was likely all I could recall about the chronology of the period. Modern historians reject this convenient periodization and say that in some places Reconstruction ended much earlier when white supremacist rule was reestablished. In most of Georgia, white rule came in 1872 when what we now call the “Redeemers” took power. The Redeemers were conservatives and Democrats who opposed the 14th Amendment and voting rights for African Americans. The completeness of Redeemer control of state government was on full display in 1873 when Georgia sent Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader John B. Gordon to represent it in the United States Senate. The Augusta monument was a product of the little-discussed “Redemption” period, not Reconstruction.
When the Augusta memorial was dedicated in 1878, it was an impressive edifice. While many municipalities put up cheap cookie-cutter “Confederate soldier” statues, pretty much identical to one another, the Augusta monument is seventy feet tall and made of Italian marble, imported at great cost from Carrara. The monument includes sculptures of four Confederate leaders and is topped by a sculpture of local Confederate hero Berry Benson. The Confederate soldier had made a daring escape from Elmira Prison during the war and became a symbol of the indomitable spirit of the Confederate.
Unlike earlier efforts of the LMA in Augusta, this was no mere memorial to the Confederate dead, it was a monument to the Confederate cause. The inscription on the base asserted of the Confederacy “NO NATION ROSE SO WHITE/AND FAIR:/NONE FELL SO PURE OF CRIME.”
Among the four Confederate leaders on the memorial was Thomas Cobb. According to the Georgia Encyclopedia:
The ideological mission of the memorial was summed up in the words etched on it which said that the Confederates honored there “gave themselves in life/and Death for us:/For the Honor of Georgia./For the Rights of the States./For the Liberties of the People./For the Sentiments of the South.” This was not simply a remembrance of lost sons.
The same Augusta Chronicle that is now reporting on the efforts to move the monument was there a century and a half ago to report on the erection of the “shaft.” The city at the time had a population of 20,000 people, and more than that number attended the ceremony. Former Confederate Colonel C.C. Jones delivered the keynote address.
Jones began by saying that the shaft had been conceived as “a monument in honor of the Lost Cause.” The Confederate dead were merely incidental.
While we sometimes hear the defenders of the Confederate monuments call them attempts to reconcile the North and South, Jones’s speech gave Northerners no quarter. Referring to the United States Army as the “conquerors, he charged that under their rule the “Established institutions had been ruthlessly overturned,” a reference to Emancipation.
The building of the monument symbolized that the dark days of Reconstruction were in the past. One would think that the dedication of a memorial to the war dead would be a sad occassion, but Jones says that, “With rapturous joy do we hail the dedication of this goodly monument…We glory in the rectitude of the cause…For the past we have no apologies to offer, no excused to render, no regrets to utter, save that we failed.”
The Augusta monument was never intended to be an anodyne commemoration of dead soldiers. It was a proclamation of victory of over Reconstruction and a glorification of the Confederate cause.
Note: Quotes from the Augusta Chronicle were found in Augusta Chronicle Friday, Nov 01, 1878 Augusta, GA Page:1
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