The shifting history of Confederate monuments

EDWARD AYERS:

Well, as you say, they are all over the country.

There are — obviously, the Confederate statues are concentrated in the former states of the Confederacy. Some memorials to fallen Confederate soldiers began immediately after the Civil War, but what we think of as these Confederate statues are really much more a product of the 1890s to World War I period.

And so decades go by after the end of the Civil War before this widespread effort to memorialize the Confederacy appears. And you might say, well, why the lag? Well, it's, in part, because that's when Confederate veterans were dying.

And their daughters, United Daughters of the Confederacy, took main responsibility for making sure that they were not forgotten. And so they raised money in small towns and large cities all across the South to put up these memorials to the Confederate soldiers.

Sometimes, they were grand, such as the one that was put up in Richmond in 1890 that required 10,000 people to pull it by rope up on the James River as it arrived from Europe, all the way to the little solitary soldiers that stand in front of isolated courthouses all across the South.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7sa7SZ6arn1%2Bjsri%2Fx6isq2ejnby4e9KhoJ%2BsmaO0brTIrKuoqqlisLC6xZ6bnqqRqbJuuc6nrKadnqnA