President Trumps Thursday morning tweet lamenting that the removal of Confederate statues tears apart the history and culture of our great country? raises numerous questions, among them: Who
history question
After reading historian Eric Foner’s essay in the New York Times, please respond to the following question. What type of statues might represent our modern American nation? Explain a statue you might like to see and why it would be suitable in our current social climate.
The Opinion Pages | O P – E D C O N T R I B U T O R
Confederate Statues and ?Our History By ERIC FONER AUG. 20, 2017
President Trumps Thursday morning tweet lamenting that the removal of
Confederate statues tears apart the history and culture of our great country? raises
numerous questions, among them: Who is encompassed in that our??
Mr. Trump may not know it, but he has entered a debate that goes back to the
founding of the republic. Should American nationality be based on shared values,
regardless of race, ethnicity and national origin, or should it rest on blood and
soil,? to quote the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va., whom Trump has at least partly
embraced?
Neither Mr. Trump nor the Charlottesville marchers invented the idea that the
United States is essentially a country for white persons. The very first
naturalization law, enacted in 1790 to establish guidelines for how immigrants
could become American citizens, limited the process to white? persons.
What about nonwhites born in this country? Before the Civil War, citizenship
was largely defined by individual states. Some recognized blacks born within their
boundaries as citizens, but many did not. As far as national law was concerned, the
question was resolved by the Supreme Court in the infamous Dred Scott decision of
1857. Blacks, wrote Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (a statue of whom was removed
from public display in Baltimore this week), were and would always be aliens in
America.
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This was the law of the land when the Civil War broke out in 1861. This is the
tradition that the Southern Confederacy embodied and sought to preserve and that
Mr. Trump, inadvertently or not, identifies with by equating the Confederacy with
our history and culture.?
Many Americans, of course, rejected this racial definition of American
nationality. Foremost among them were abolitionists, male and female, black and
white, who put forward an alternative definition, known today as birthright
citizenship. Anybody born in the United States, they insisted, was a citizen, and all
citizens should enjoy equality before the law. Abolitionists advocated not only the
end of slavery, but also the incorporation of the freed people as equal members of
American society.
In the period of Reconstruction that followed the war, this egalitarian vision
was, for the first time, written into our laws and Constitution. But the advent of
multiracial democracy in the Southern states inspired a wave of terrorist
opposition by the Ku Klux Klan and kindred groups, antecedents of the Klansmen
and neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville. One by one the Reconstruction
governments were overthrown, and in the next generation white supremacy again
took hold in the South.
When Mr. Trump identifies statues commemorating Confederate leaders as
essential parts of our? history and culture, he is honoring that dark period. Like all
monuments, these statues say a lot more about the time they were erected than the
historical era they evoke. The great waves of Confederate monument building took
place in the 1890s, as the Confederacy was coming to be idealized as the so-called
Lost Cause and the Jim Crow system was being fastened upon the South, and in
the 1920s, the height of black disenfranchisement, segregation and lynching. The
statues were part of the legitimation of this racist regime and of an exclusionary
definition of America.
The historian Carl Becker wrote that history is what the present chooses to
remember about the past. Historical monuments are, among other things, an
expression of power ? an indication of who has the power to choose how history is
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remembered in public places.
If the issue were simply heritage, why are there no statues of Lt. Gen. James
Longstreet, one of Gen. Robert E. Lees key lieutenants? Not because of poor
generalship; indeed, Longstreet warned Lee against undertaking Picketts Charge,
which ended the battle of Gettysburg. Longstreets crime came after the Civil War:
He endorsed black male suffrage and commanded the Metropolitan Police of New
Orleans, which in 1874 engaged in armed combat with white supremacists seeking
to seize control of the state government. Longstreet is not a symbol of white
supremacy; therefore he was largely ineligible for commemoration by those who
long controlled public memory in the South.
As all historians know, forgetting is as essential to public understandings of
history as remembering. Confederate statues do not simply commemorate our?
history, as the president declared. They honor one part of our past. Where are the
statues in the former slave states honoring the very large part of the Southern
population (beginning with the four million slaves) that sided with the Union
rather than the Confederacy? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery
or to the hundreds of black lawmakers who during Reconstruction served in
positions ranging from United States senator to justice of the peace to school board
official? Excluding blacks from historical recognition has been the other side of the
coin of glorifying the Confederacy.
We have come a long way from the days of the Dred Scott decision. But our
public monuments have not kept up. The debate unleashed by Charlottesville is a
healthy re-examination of the question Who is an American?? And our? history
and culture is far more complex, diverse and inclusive than the president appears
to realize.
Eric Foner is a professor of history at Columbia and the author, most recently, of
Battles for Freedom: The Use and Abuse of American History.?
? 2017 The New York Times Company
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