Further Reading
A 20th century postcard featuring the 1895 Confederate Monument on the Capitol grounds (Courtesy of Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill)
The Civil War and Reconstruction in North Carolina Browning, Judkin. Shifting Loyalties: The Union Occupation of Eastern North Carolina. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011. Inscoe, John C. and Gordon B. McKinney. The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. --. For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Meyers, Barton A. Rebels Against the Confederacy: North Carolina's Unionists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Reid, Richard M. Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina's Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Confederate Monuments and the Lost Cause Berent, Irwin M. The Monuments and Statues on the Capitol Square of North Carolina. Greenville, NC: East Carolina University Press, 1985. Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Cox, Karen L. Dixie's Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. Documenting the American South: Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina. "Confederate Monument, State Capitol, Raleigh." http://docsouth.unc.edu/commland/monument/106/. Hardy, Michael. Remembering North Carolina's Confederates. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2006. Janney, Caroline E. Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Loewen, James W. and Edward H. Sebesta. The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader: The "Great Truth" About the "Lost Cause." Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2010. North Carolina Department of Resources. "North Carolina Civil War Monuments." 2010. http://ncmonuments.ncdcr.gov. Savage, Kirk. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Vincent, Tom. "'Evidence of Woman's Loyalty, Perseverance, and Fidelity': Confederate Soldiers' Monuments in North Carolina, 1865-1914." The North Carolina Historical Review 83 (January 2006): 61-90.
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A Historian's GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING CONFEDERATE MONUMENTS
The Lost Cause refers to a mythological interpretation of the Civil War created by former Confederates to defend Southern honor in the face of defeat. The United Confederate Veterans, the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and other Confederate heritage groups popularized the Lost Cause in the late 19th century. Its core tenets include: Confederates fought the war for states' rights and not to protect slavery. Slavery was a peaceful institution in which kindly slaveholders and loyal slaves coexisted in harmony. Confederates only lost the war because Unionists had more soldiers and resources and used brutal tactics in battle. Southerners united in their devotion to the Confederate cause during the war. The emergence of the Lost Cause signified a collective need to erase slavery's role in the Civil War and instead place the Confederate cause on the high principle of states' rights. As a result, proponents of the Lost Cause celebrated Confederate soldiers as symbols of ultimate Southern masculinity, reflecting composure and strength. Former Confederates used the Lost Cause to justify the end of Reconstruction, a revolutionary movement that brought citizenship and political and civil rights to African Americans. Ultimately, the Lost Cause more deeply entrenched white supremacy in the American South.
North Carolina and the Civil War
Should They Stay or Go?
History of Confederate Monuments
Tensions surrounding the issue of slavery plagued the United States since its very beginning. They reached a boiling point when South Carolina seceded in December 1860, justified by “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery," as written in the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union. Protecting the institution of slavery formed the cornerstone of South Carolina's departure from the Union and, later, of the Confederacy's political identity. Most North Carolinians initially opposed secession. Many whites sympathized with South Carolinians' grievances but believed that slavery could be protected in the Union. Some North Carolinians opposed slavery as an institution of human bondage or as the source of political power for the slaveholding class. With the outbreak of war, however, most white North Carolinians sided with the newly formed Confederacy, which explicitly protected slavery, rather than the Union, then dominated by free states. North Carolina seceded by unanimous vote in the General Assembly in an effort to fall in line with its "southern brothers." Yet, North Carolina's ambivalence toward the Confederate cause persisted into the war. While it mustered more troops for the Confederacy than any other state except Virginia, North Carolinians also deserted more often than their fellow soldiers. From the western mountains to the Piedmont, North Carolinians took anti-Confederate action by resisting military conscription, fleeing to the Union or Union-occupied territory, and giving aid to Confederate enemies and army deserters. North Carolina's enslaved people also played an important part in the Civil War. African-American men and women supplied Union soldiers with food, provided information about Confederate troops' movements and strength, and assisted Confederate deserters. Following the Emancipation Proclamation, freed African American men enlisted in four Federal regiments of the Union Army and seized the opportunity for social and political mobility.
The Southern "Lost Cause"
Civic debate around Confederate monuments and iconography reappeared after the massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 and surged with urgency after the violent clash in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Popular proposals on what to do with Confederate monuments include: Leave them as they are to honor Confederate heroes. Leave them in their current locations but with updated interpretations and signs. Move them to museums or other educational settings. Completely destroy them as symbols of oppression. With the support of 24 professional historical organizations, the American Historical Association (AHA) released a statement to help guide community dialogue. The statement shows consensus over the necessity to consider monuments as artifacts of a specific era and to examine them with an appropriate understanding of their past and present contexts. The AHA does not endorse a specific course of action. Instead, the AHA emphasizes that monuments do not present exactly what happened in the past. Instead, monuments present their creators' and supporters' interpretation of the past. “To remove a monument, or to change the name of a school or street, is not to erase history, but rather to alter or call attention to a previous interpretation of history. A monument is not history itself; a monument commemorates an aspect of history, representing a moment in the past when a public or private decision defined who would be honored in a community’s public spaces.” -- American Historical Association Statement on Confederate Monuments, August 2017
"As the elite whites of the South constructed their monuments and reconstructed the causes and meanings of the Civil War, they ignored their former slaves and memorialized a society built upon a bedrock of white supremacy." -- Tom Vincent, "Confederate Soldiers' Monuments in North Carolina," 2006
In the aftermath of the Civil War, former Confederates built monuments dedicated to fallen Confederate soldiers in cemeteries across the South. Resembling grave markers and using little Confederate symbolism or iconography, these monuments evoked mourning and remembrance of the dead. White Southerners, particularly women’s groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, eventually moved away from building monuments inside cemeteries. Instead, they built them in public squares, city centers, and state capitol grounds. Their inscriptions and symbols and the speeches given at their dedication ceremonies glorified the Lost Cause. Confederate monuments in public spaces embedded the Lost Cause into Southern culture and across the Southern landscape. Most Confederate monuments were built during times of increased racial tension and served as a declaration of white political power: 1890s-1920s: As state legislatures passed Jim Crow Laws, monuments cemented white supremacy into the physical landscape. 1950s-1960s: The Civil Rights Movement gained greater traction in the South. White Southerners again reasserted white supremacy by building monuments.
The Monument to North Carolina Women of the Confederacy features bronze casts of a boy grasping a sheathed sword kneeling beside a seated woman holding an open book. This scene positions Southern white women as key players in the Lost Cause narrative who sacrificed loved ones to a noble cause, guarded homes during the Civil War, and preserved memories of the Confederacy in nurturing subsequent generations. Armed with a sword, the boy prepares to fight for the South in future battles . First-hand accounts of the monument's dedication demonstrate its connections to white supremacy. Daniel Harvey Hill's speech, quoted below, reinforced the idea of plantation mistresses as the backbone of both the Southern home front and the Confederate war effort. It ignored the 300,000 men and women enslaved in North Carolina during the Civil War, including those owned by Ashley Horne's family, By minimizing slavery's role in Southern society and placing white women at the center of plantation life, Hill's speech at the monument's dedication promoted white supremacist ideals and cemented symbols of racial superiority into the landscape of Union Square.
"In short, as some one truly phrased it, the mistress was the greatest slave on the plantation which moved at her command." -Daniel Harvey Hill, Address at the Unveiling of the Memorial, 1914
"Erected to the North Carolina Women of the Confederacy by Ashley Horne Capitol Square, Raleigh, N.C." (Courtesy of Durwood Barbour Collection of North Carolina Postcards North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives, Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill)
Women & the Lost Cause Bishir, Catherine. “'A Strong Force of Ladies': Women, Politics, and Confederate Memorial Associations in Nineteenth-Century Raleigh.” The North Carolina Historical Review 77 (October 2000): 455-491. Mills, Cynthia and Pamela H. Simpson, eds. Monuments to the Lost Cause: Women, Art and the Landscapes of Southern Memory. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003. Monument to North Carolina Women of the Confederacy Documenting the American South: Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina. "Monument to the North Carolina Women of the Confederacy, Raleigh."
monument to north Carolina women of the confederacy
Significance and Symbolism
Dedicated June 10, 1914 Located in Union Square, southwest of the Capitol building, facing Morgan Street Sponsored by Ashley Horne, former Confederate Colonel and representative in the North Carolina General Assembly Coincided with passage of Jim Crow laws in 1900
Monument Quick Facts
