Tag: Civil War

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Four New Orleans’ Statues: Battle of Liberty Place Monument

Dorothea Lange, Farm Security Administration, LC-USF34- 009389-E [P&P] LOT 1680, July 1936, New Orleans

Getting ready for our quick trip to New Orleans, sometimes I read about Louisiana and wonder what the hell were those people thinking.  Sometimes I think they’re just like the rest of us only more so.  Unfortunately with the Battle of Liberty Place and its monument I’m pretty sure I know what they were thinking, and I’m pretty sure they’re like the rest of us at our worst.

Early in the Civil War New Orleans was a Union target, and Union forces captured the city in April 1862. It remained occupied by federal troops until April 1877, the end of Reconstruction. Before they were dismantled by the Supreme Court, Congress enacted a series of forward-looking civil rights laws to protect and enfranchise former slaves, but after Grant’s presidency, the country’s leadership was too tired or indifferent or hostile to be bothered, and violence to control race relations became a marker of the Post-Reconstruction South. Louisiana did its part.

The Battle of Liberty Place wasn’t the only Louisiana violence (and Louisiana wasn’t the only location where violence became commonplace). In 1866, at the Republican Party Convention in New Orleans, police fired into the crowd killing 34 blacks and 3 whites. In 1868 in Opelousas, St. Landry Parish, an unknown number of blacks were killed after a confrontation between black Republicans and members of the Knights of the White Camelia. In 1873, in Colfax in Grant Parish on an Easter Sunday approximately 150 black men were murdered by white Democrats in the worst instance of racial violence during Reconstruction. Racial violence didn’t end with Reconstruction. Louis Armstrong remembered hiding in his home as a child because white gangs roamed black neighborhoods after the black boxer Jack Johnson defeated the white boxer Jim Jeffries in 1910. In 1900, Robert Charles murdered a white policeman, and then shot an additional 27 whites, with seven deaths. The resulting white riots resulted in 28 deaths and more than 50 casualties, mostly among blacks.

The Liberty Square riot saw 8,400 members of the Democratic White League attacking approximately 4,000 mainly white Metropolitan Police and mainly black state militia (commanded by former Confederate General James Longstreet who was shot trying to stop the riot) over, more or less, a disputed gubernatorial election between Democrat John McEnery (supported by the White League) and Republican William Pitt Kellogg. Eleven police and militia and 21 members of the White League were killed. After three days federal troops arrived and quelled the riot, but it signaled the end of Reconstruction.

Wikimedia Commons, Battle of Liberty Place, Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, 1874

When it comes to Louisiana race violence, two numbers are particularly telling. Largely as a result of violations of racial . . . etiquette, whites lynched 335 blacks between the end of Reconstruction and 1968 (though most lynchings occurred before 1940). Texas had more by the way, 352, and neither state could hold a candle to Georgia, 492, or Mississippi, 539. Lynchings didn’t result in the prosecution of the instigators. At the same time, the number of African American voters declined from a bit more than half of the state’s registered voters in 1880, 88,024 voters out of 173,475, to 1,342 in 1904. The decline was caused largely through laws restricting the rights of African Americans to vote and out-and-out violence. How can anyone wonder why African Americans still see voter ID laws as racist, or that the apparently institutional police violence that spawned Black Lives Matters resonates still? The Civil War was our most violent moment, and we still carry around that violence.

Wikimedia Commons, Michael Begley, Battle of Liberty Place Monument

The Battle of Liberty Place Monument was erected in 1891 by the New Orleans city government. It was removed in 2017. In 1974, the New Orleans City government erected an adjacent marker that stated “Although the ‘battle of Liberty Place’ and this monument are important parts of the New Orleans history, the sentiments in favor of white supremacy expressed thereon are contrary to the philosophy and beliefs of present-day New Orleans.” I like that. I like that New Orleans realized that there was a problem with the Battle of Liberty Place Monument 40-odd years ago.

The world changes, and I think, other than the whole global warming thing and fake news, it’s mostly a better place. Last Saturday Kris and I drove down to Freeport and walked the jetty. We were the only folk carrying fly rods, but since it’s hard to cast off a jetty in high wind they were mostly useless. After 20 or 30 casts I didn’t lose a fly in the jetty granite, but I didn’t catch anything either.  On the other hand it’s a terrific walk through a diverse and lively America. And the Liberty Place monument is gone.

Meanwhile we found a great breakfast taco stand in Angleton, Taco Loco #2.

I don’t know where Taco Loco #1 is located.  We also found a good bakery in Angleton, the Paris Texas Bakery, on the way back to Houston, almost directly across the street from Taco Loco.  The staff was well prepared for Easter.

 

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Four New Orleans Statues: Jefferson Davis

There is no good reason for anything to be named after Jefferson Davis.  He was everything that was bad about the Confederacy: arrogant incompetence coupled with certainty in an indefensible cause. The only good excuse for a Davis statue in New Orleans is that he died there, but when he died P.G.T. Beauregard refused to lead his funerary parade. He was unpopular in the South after the Civil War, and only after his death was his reputation revived as a hero of the Lost Cause.

The Davis statue was removed May 11, 2017. Good riddance.

On the bright side, yesterday evening this lovely bass crashed my popper next to the grass. After the cast I let the popper sit until the ripples died.

 

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Four New Orleans’ Statues: P.G.T. Beauregard

With a name like Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard (1818-1893), Beauregard could only have come from Louisiana.  He could only have been Creole. Dashing, aristocratic, glamorous, and reminiscent of Napoleon, P.G.T. Beauregard was the Confederacy’s first hero. Raised on a French-speaking St. Bernard Parish plantation and educated at West Point,  he commanded the Confederate forces at Charleston who fired the shots on Fort Sumter. He commanded the Confederate forces at the first Bull Run, the first major battle of the Civil War. He was not more important as a Confederate general only because he argued with Jefferson Davis.

Library of Congress

He was responsible for the adoption of the still-troubling Confederate battle flag. Because the Confederate national flag, now largely forgotten, was too similar to the flag of the Union, troops couldn’t tell them  apart in battle.

Beauregard’s statue was removed May 17, 2017, a bit more than 100 years after its erection in 1915. It’s hard for me to work up much feeling about the statue’s removal.  It was a lovely piece, created by a relatively important American sculptor (who also sculpted the Lee monument), Alexander Doyle. Maybe the erection of the statue had something to do with white power, but by 1915 the segregation of the South was old news and unquestioned, and Beauregard probably deserves some leeway for being a native son.

What interests me most about P.G.T. Beauregard is not his statue, and not his military accomplishments and failings, but that he was, along with fellow-Confederate General Jubal Early, the post-bellum front-man for the Louisiana Lottery.  In our America a state lottery is a  mildly questionable means of raising funds for a public purpose, questionable largely because it regressively raises funds to fund stuff like education that should otherwise be funded without resort to film-flam.  The 19th Century Louisiana lottery got that first part right: it regressively raised funds from the poor. But the second part, the funding of a public purpose, the lottery didn’t quite manage. It was a private enterprise chartered by the state that paid the state $40,000 annually.  $40,000. Mostly it paid off millions to its organizers, and paid Generals Early and Beauregard a decent livelihood to sit on a New Orleans’ stage to lend credence to the lottery drawing. When reformers threatened the lottery, the lottery corporation bribed the Louisiana legislature into writing its continued existence into the Louisiana state constitution.

The lottery was a power in Louisiana politics until 1890 when Congress banned sending lottery solicitations through the U.S. Mail. Most of the participation in the lottery came through mail solicitation, not only in Louisiana but nationally, so the enforcement of the Congressional ban effectively ended the lottery (though it survived for a few more years from Honduras). What it could have done with the internet.

 

 

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Four New Orleans’ Statues: Robert E. Lee

From Wikipedia

Like most Southern white boys of a certain age, I grew up with the conviction that Robert E. Lee was the paragon of virtues admirable in a man. He was the cadet who finished second in his class at West Point with no demerits. He was personally valorous, wealthy, handsome, Christian, the husband of George Washington’s adopted grandson’s daughter, Mary Custis Lee.  He was the brilliant general of the Civil War who fought insurmountable odds to a standstill. He had a horse named Traveller, which is pretty cool. Personally opposed to slavery, he fought not for its preservation but for his homeland. The removal of Confederate statues throughout the South, and particularly in New Orleans, was a bit of a come to Jesus moment for me. As a boy I would have sought out that statue and admired it. As an adult I would have certainly paused for it, and brought reverence to the pause.

Library of Congress

Louisianans began raising money for the statue shortly after Lee’s death in 1870, the second year of Grant’s presidency and the heart of Radical Reconstruction.  It was erected in 1884, seven years after the end of Reconstruction.  It is a peculiar statue, with Lee not mounted but standing, arms crossed, atop a 60-foot column. It is a statue of a type, a victory column, not dissimilar from the statue of Lord Nelson in Trafalger Square. He is a commanding figure, overseeing  the battle raging below.

Lee’s father, Lighthorse Harry Lee, was one of the Heroes of the American Revolution and the ninth Governor of Virginia. He was also one of the scoundrels of his age.  He married wealthy, squandered the wealth, and served a year in debtor’s prison. He was a fraud who abandoned his family and absconded to the West Indies.  Young Robert seems to have reacted to the disgrace of Harry by being uncommonly virtuous.

Portrait of Lighthorse Harry Lee, 1785, Charles Willson Peale, Bayou Bend Collection, Museum of Fine Arts Houston

Was Lee the great general of the Civil War? No. He was certainly brilliant, but Grant conceived and executed the plan that defeated the South. Grant was the better general.

Was Lee opposed to slavery? Yes and no. Lee’s wife, my fifth half-cousin only five times removed, was an abolitionist, as was her father, George Washington Custis, but like most Southern abolitionists of the age they were back-to-Africa abolitionists who owned slaves. They could not imagine that whites and blacks could live together on equal terms. Lee was tasked with freeing the slaves owned by his father-in-law at Custis’s death in 1857, and did so before the war, but he delayed their manumission until the last moment. He famously oversaw the beating of two escaped slaves. He seems to have disliked slavery because he disliked the burden of the oversight of slaves. He thought the institution was harmful to whites, but he did not accept the slaves’ equality.

Lee probably prevented the deterioration of the South into guerrilla warfare after the surrender at Appomattox. He was tired, old, in ill-health, impoverished, and burdened with the dead. He himself would be dead five years later.  He faced possible execution for treason, and maybe that was the course that should have been followed.

Was Lee a virtuous man? In many ways I still think so. At the least he was the ideal soldier, but like many other things Grant got it right about Lee: “I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.” Whatever the virtues of Lee, there is no forgiving the cause.

NOLA.com / The Times-Picayune, Michael DeMocker

Should the Lee statue have been removed? In his speech about the removal, New Orleans’ Mayor Mitch Landrieu recognized that the argument for retaining the statues was a reverence for history, but concluded we could not re-write the reverence for the Lost Cause that erected the statues. That reverence is precisely the reason the statue should go, but for darker and more personal reasons I have my regrets about its removal. Once African slaves were brought into Jamestown in 1619, the Civil War was inevitable, and someone would be the South’s general.  Without Lee it could have been like Jefferson Davis a man of few admirable qualities.  Isolated as his moral failure is in a man otherwise so generally good, you can’t argue about what cause of the War was wrong, about states rights or other nonsense, and Lee becomes not a virtuous hero but a tragic hero. He becomes our Othello murdering Desdemona not out of misplaced jealousy, but misplaced loyalty. We should all face Lee and try to understand how any of us, even the best of us, can embrace the worst of causes.

Library of Congress