Whose Heritage? 4th Edition: Report Resources

Speeches and letters from pro-secession state commissioners — who traveled around the South in 1860 and 1861 to convince state legislatures to join the Confederacy — unequivocally named the preservation of slavery and white supremacy as the goal of secession and of the new Confederate government.

In 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, Confederate journalist Edward Pollard published a book called The Lost Cause. In it, he wrote that what the South lost on the battlefield it would carry on in “a war of ideas.” “The war,” he asserted, “did not decide negro equality.”

Former Confederates answered Pollard’s call to battle for the nation’s memory in the decades following the war. They began an organized propaganda campaign to remake the memory of the Civil War. Historian David Blight calls this “one of the most highly orchestrated grassroots partisan histories ever conceived.”

Thousands of Confederate memorials littering the American landscape from California to Maryland signified the extent of the Lost Cause distortion of Civil War history.

In 2021, a University of Virginia study found that counties with higher instances of lynchings in the past also had higher numbers of Confederate memorials.

Nearly 20% of the country’s 2,300 original Confederate memorials were erected on courthouse lawns, the majority of these between the years 1900 and 1920 — the height of Jim Crow.

“When I grew up, we knew at nighttime not to go [on the courthouse lawn],” MarTeze Hammonds said in the film Ghosts of a Lost Cause. “We would walk longways around instead of going through the courthouse square,” he described, recalling how groups would gather in the square chanting racist slurs and slogans. Hammonds grew up long after the era of Jim Crow, but the memory remained, and so does the Robert E. Lee monument in front of the Calloway County Courthouse in Murray.

The Confederate anthem “Dixie” was played at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally on Oct. 27, 2024, an event filled with racist harangues and ridicule.

For context, the University of Mississippi banned the song from games and school events in 2016.

On several occasions, Trump has identified Confederate memorials with his movement’s values. In summer 2020, he proclaimed that “our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children.”

“Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials,” he said, identifying Confederate insurrectionists as “our founders.”

Far-right pundit Tucker Carlson has similarly tried to forge a deep connection between Confederates and his audience. Carlson attacked Americans who advocate removal of Confederate memorials in a speech at a Trump rally on Oct. 23, 2024.

“As long as we have a politics of race in America,” wrote U.S. historian David Blight, “we will have a politics of Civil War memory.

Herbert praised the UDC for erasing this reality with the Confederate memorial, writing that “one leading purpose of the U.D.C. is to correct history.”

Some communities, however, continue to play offense. In Montgomery, Alabama, a 17-year-old student named Jeremiah Treece introduced a petition to remove Confederate flag imagery from Montgomery’s official city flag, adopted in 1952.

The Florence City Council rejected the measure in May 2024. “The community was livid,” said Camille Bennett, director of Project Say Something, a grassroots organization that has led the effort. Bennett explained that the City Council’s vote only motivated more people to oppose the monument. 

Another setback came in May 2024. Four years after the school board in Shenandoah County, Virginia, voted to remove Confederate names from two public schools, board members elected in 2021 voted to restore them. 

The setbacks in Alabama and Virginia reflect the uphill battles that opponents of the Lost Cause have always faced, rather than any new trend. In a 2022 poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), 52% of Americans supported maintaining Confederate memorials, while 44% favored removal. 

When PRRI repeated this survey two years later in 2024, results were similar to the 2022 survey, showing that educational work must continue and improve.

The history and data presented in this report encourage readers to consider: Whose heritage do Confederate memorials represent? Certainly not that of millions of enslaved African Americans, nor the generations of Black people terrorized, murdered and oppressed in the Jim Crow South. Not that of the 300,000 white Southerners who courageously fought for the Union in the Civil War, nor the nearly 200,000 Black Union soldiers who fought for their freedom.

“Discrediting old myths without finding new ones to replace them erodes the basis for common action,” wrote historian William McNeill in a 1982 essay for Foreign Affairs titled “The Care and Repair of Public Myth.”

“Historians at our university [Murray State] and artists who paint murals all over our town,” Paine said, “could tell a story of resistance.” Paine suggested a mural on the wall of the building right across from the Confederate monument.

In 2023, on the 150th anniversary of the massacre, Colfax replaced the offensive plaque, erecting in its place a larger memorial with a depiction of racial violence and the names of 57 of the identified victims of the massacre.