In a 2017 newspaper article, scholar Brian Fennessy wrote that in researching Confederate monument dedication speeches in North Carolina “I searched for dedication speeches that were given at Confederate soldier monuments across North Carolina. Most orations were given by veterans and state officials. I successfully tracked down 30, and they support two conclusions: 1) white nationalism was a fixture of Confederate monumentation, and 2) Confederate soldier monuments honored veterans for their postwar success in eroding black equality as much as for their failed wartime sacrifices.”
All of the speeches referred to whites as “Southerners” while apparently excluding African Americans born in the South from being considered Southerners. Fourteen of the speeches made appeals explicitly directed at the “White race” or “Anglo-Saxon race.” For example, the dedication speech for the “Silent Sam” Confederate soldier monument at the University of North Carolina delivered by Julian Carr included this: “be reminded by this silent soldier … to protect from taint the Saxon blood that courses in your veins.” In other words, the speaker was urging the presumably pure-blooded Anglo-Saxons assembled not to engage in “race mixing” with Blacks.
In the early 1920s at the dedication of the Caswell County Confederate monument, Chief Executive of the North Carolina Daughters of the Confederacy Mary Kerr Spencer said in her speech, “We are proud of the fact that North Carolina has the finest and purest strain of Anglo-Saxon blood in the veins of her people on the American continent.”
The Confederate monuments were often depicted as victory monuments over the brief period of Black political empowerment of the Reconstruction Era. Fennessy writes:
Reconstruction was another recurrent theme. Thirteen of the speeches described the postwar period. Orators spun a narrative of Reconstruction as a tragic era of misrule stemming from black suffrage. Carr alluded to Reconstruction as the time “when ‘the bottom rail was on top,’ ” suggesting – incorrectly – that former slaves had become politically dominant. Confederate veteran John C. McLauchlin tapped into a deeper anxiety at the Wadesboro monument. He said that during Reconstruction “our homes were not inviolable, our women were not secure from the assaults of the brutish,” conjuring up the white nightmare of black rapists.
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