/ 联邦纪念碑的作用 订阅

1869年8月，罗伯特. 李 敦促反对 用“花岗岩纪念碑”来纪念葛底斯堡,，因为它们只会“让战争的疮疤继续敞开”.”而不是, he asked that the country “follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”

李’s sentiments seem especially prescient in light of the events of Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, when white supremacists and neo-Nazis descended upon a memorial of 李 himself—erected in 1924 and now slated for removal—to riot against the perceived attack on their “heritage.”

它是 估计 有将近1个,遍布美国的5000座邦联纪念碑, 大多数在南部各州. 皇冠体育邦联纪念碑的未来的争论正在激烈进行, perhaps the most compelling argument put forward for keeping them in place is that their removal would 净化我们的历史，从公共领域的记忆中洗白我们集体的民族遗产. 持这种观点的人, 然而, are probably unaware that Confederate monuments are the unfortunate result of a successful sanitization of history that has already occurred.

This earlier sanitization becomes evident when we learn that the overwhelming majority of these monuments were not erected in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to commemorate it. 相反，它们是在种族隔离期间由 注定要失败 Confederate apologists—whites nostalgic for the antebellum South with a vested interest in maintaining segregation. These monuments were part of a large-scale propaganda campaign to revise and distort the narrative of the Civil War. 注定要失败 advocates attempted to drastically deemphasize the role of slavery as the major factor precipitating the Civil War. 他们还鼓吹邦联领导人, 特别是李, 对奴隶制深感遗憾，因此仁慈地实行奴隶制.

这两种失败的叙述都是 神话 根据 历史记录，其中包括南方联盟领导人自己发表的大量演讲. 以1861年为例 基石的演讲 delivered just weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War by Confederate vice president Alexander H. 斯蒂芬斯，他在书中揭示了邦联宪法的原则:

新宪法已经安定下来, 永远, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. 这就是最近的决裂和现在的革命的直接原因. [….] The prevailing ideas entertained by [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, 对非洲人的奴役是违反自然规律的…….]. 然而，这些想法从根本上是错误的. 他们建立在种族平等的假设之上. [….] Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, 它的基石, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.

The centrality of slavery to the Civil War would later be downplayed by prominent 注定要失败 texts, 比如里昂加德纳泰勒 邦联教理问答 of 1929. He, 和其他许多人一样, 将这场战争描述为各州权利与越权的联邦政府之间的斗争. But Tyler also inadvertently confirms that slavery was the cause of the war even as he attempts to refute it:

奴隶制是分裂国家的原因还是战争的原因?  No. 奴隶制在宪法之前就存在了，尽管如此，联邦还是成立了. 无论从宪法的观点还是从健全的政治家风度来看，这都不是奴隶制, 但是报复心很强, 无节制的反奴隶制运动是所有问题的根源.

A 时间轴 of the construction of Confederate monuments published by the Southern Poverty Law Center aptly illuminates the context of their erection in the thick of 注定要失败 propaganda. 1866年三k党成立后，纪念碑数量出现了最初的高峰, but the largest wave began in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s 1896 ruling in Plessy v. 弗格森，它肯定了吉姆·克劳种族隔离的“隔离但平等”格言. The highest peak of Confederate monument-building coincided with the founding of the NAACP in 1909 and the two years following. 第二波浪潮随着民权运动而出现，始于布朗诉马丁·路德·金案. 以及废除学校种族隔离的努力. 不足为奇的是, more schools were named after Confederate icons or had Confederate memorials erected on their property during this period than any other.

Confederate memorials certainly commemorate a history, but it’s not the history of the Confederacy. 而, they commemorate a history of how Confederate symbols have been mobilized as white backlash against the attainment of black civil liberties throughout this country’s post-Civil War era. Those responsible for raising these statues to give their entrenched racism a veneer of bronze-cast respectability are the true culprits of historical sanitization. 如果我们真的想要纪念一段未经净化的邦联历史, we would need monuments to the millions of lives stolen by chattel slavery and to African Americans’ hard fight for equality in the face of systemic oppression. 有多少 of those exist in relation to the hundreds of Confederate monuments littering our country’s landscape?

那些构建邦联时刻的人, 就像那些在夏洛茨维尔团结在一起的人一样, sought and continue to seek the preservation of the institutionalized supremacy of their skin color in the face of its threatened loss. 在 单词 艺术史学家W.J.T. 米切尔，纪念碑想要“击败历史，因为它们不想成为历史。. 他们想活在当下，所以他们是记忆的生物. 纪念碑是一项不可能完成的工程，目的是保存过去…….活在当下.“这些纪念碑最初旨在定义 集体 公共记忆和遗产——在其内涵中具有包容性的东西——被严格地视为白人. 白人至上主义者今天仍然指望这些纪念碑做同样的工作.

我在南方腹地长大. It’s a place that many who otherwise pride themselves on their open-minded inclusiveness grossly mischaracterize and dismiss as being populated exclusively by regressive racists. 但这种错误的描述只会把种族主义放在别处, conveniently excusing all of us from doing the difficult work of examining how racism is equally perpetuated around and by us.

南, 像所有的美国人一样, 我们集体的过去还有很长的路要走吗, 围绕着它的故意的历史健忘症, 以及它与持续困扰这个国家的当代种族主义的联系. 我自己的中间名，李，带有南部联盟的标志. 代之前, 它成为了一个家族的名字作为致敬, 小时候别人就这么告诉我, 感谢“伟大的罗伯特·E. 李.” The myth of the 注定要失败 in perpetuating historical amnesia has been a particularly powerful and insidious one—even in my own naming.

“遗产,而不是 hate” is a common refrain among amnesia-ridden defenders of the Confederate flag—the same flag waved by white supremacists in Charlottesville amid a chorus of competing racial slurs. 意识到邦联象征的意义- 仇恨的传承 that has no place being valorized upon pedestals—is one small step in undoing this amnesia. 作为激进分子 启蒙哲学家 艺术评论家丹尼斯·狄德罗在1765年宣称:“我的朋友，如果我们热爱真理…….让我们为一些反圣像者祈祷.”

莉莎奥利弗 is assistant professor of art history and South Asia studies at Wellesley College. She researches and publishes on visual cultures of colonialism in the 18th and 19th centuries, 以及文化遗产的政治. 

图片来源:Bill Dowling，青铜铸成的美国内战士兵吹响军号的棕色铜像.来自Shutterstock, 2017年8月23日.