By Dylan Lightfoot
Almost 140 years after his parole at Appomattox and over a century after retiring in cast-bronze posterity atop his pedestal on Third Street, our resident secessionist everyman is once again under attack by high-minded interlopers who are trying to lay claim to his patch of dirt.
But this time his crimes are more insidious than mere treason. Aggravated anachronism, failure to reflect contemporary views of history, and gross celebration of the Old South are the charges now leveled at him. The revisionists are forming ranks and limbering up their guns.
He is poorly favored in the contest, deployed on the field with only his musket and bayonette. To his right, an artillerist bereft of cannon menacingly waves a ramrod. On his left, a horseless cavalry trooper stands poised to draw his saber. The scant force faces a brigade of activist infantry under the able command of Brevet General Reverend Louis Coleman.
Coleman recently assumed command when the original campaign against the holdouts, launched in December 2002 by Generals Ramsey, Hudson and Owsley, had so far failed to engage the enemy. All that had been accomplished was a combination of bloodless maneuvers on the enemy’s flanks; Confederate Place was renamed Unity Place, and the plot of city land the rebels occupy was designated Freedom Park.
Despite the campaign’s slow progress, the plan of battle stands: rather than risk a frontal assault, a siege will be invested. The confederates will be surrounded with a host of memorials and statuary that will give a more “balanced” view of American history. These interpretive treatments and contextual counterpoints will downplay the confederates until they succumb from sheer inclusiveness.
Of course, if Coleman had his druthers, the rebs would be blasted from the field with heavy ordnance.
Either way, the means and motives aren’t hard to justify: the war against incongruity must be prosecuted with renewed vigor. Once more into the breach, pious revisionists, caparisoned in your shining armor, your white horses trampling the foes of diversity. We simply can’t abide a memorial to slave-ownin’, cousin-lovin’, ignorant racist hillbillies ensconced on marble columns in plain sight of our bastion of enlightenment, the University of Louisville.
But were they slave owners? The rank-and-file soldier generally didn’t own other people. If he’d had a few slaves, he wouldn’t have been drafted in the first place. In fact, many disliked the idea of fighting for the slavery interests of the southern planter aristocracy. This resentment was exemplified by Civil War diarist Private Sam Watkins of the 1st Tennessee: “A soldier was simply a machine, a conscript. … We were sick of war and cursed the Southern Confederacy.”
Did they lust after their cousins? Perhaps, but even I’ve got a cousin to whom I’m partial.
Were they racists? Possibly, but wouldn’t it be better to deal with the ones we have to contend with right now, rather than effigies of those long deceased? I’d bet there are racists on the Metro Council and in Frankfort who the Rev. Coleman, et al. could gun for.
Were they ignorant? Certainly of postmodernism, queer theory and Noam Chomsky, but not of the concept of duty as they understood it.
Were they hillbillies? Sort of looks like it, but they might also be rednecks, hicks, yokels, hayseeds, rubes, yahoos, honyockers, peckerwoods or some other stripe of uncultured white pariah. Fact is we shouldn’t have a lot of lofty talk about diversity and inclusiveness if we’re keen on posthumous ethnic cleansing and historical white-washing; the dead are truly a defenseless minority.
However, none of this matters in the final analysis. The Confederate Monument — which predates Belknap Campus by almost half a century — offends the sensibilities of the contemporary Arts and Sciences student. Go ahead and melt it down for upholstery tacks. Chain it to the back of one of those big SUVs — the kind the basketball players all drive — and drag it down the street. I’ll be in class trying to finish my damned degree.
The monument does what it says: it pays homage to the 300,000 southerners who died fighting a war contrived, as all wars are, by politicos, ideologues and profiteers, in which they had no stake equal to their ultimate sacrifice. Whatever negative connotations the monument has for its detractors, this should be kept in mind.
Red Cross heroine Clara Barton wrote of her impressions during the war, “It has come that man has no longer an individual existence, but is counted in thousands, and measured in miles.” When fallible human beings, sucked into the vortex of war, are ground to hamburger between the millstones of political faction and social upheaval, is it so much to ask that succeeding generations leave their memory well enough alone?
Dylan Lightfoot is a junior double majoring in Psychology and Political Science, and is Opinion Editor and Web Editor for The Cardinal.
E-mail him at: dlightfoot@louisvillecardinal.com
