Tag: Civil War

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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