Should-Read: Dave Drake: Statues of the Boys in Grey: "In Durham last month, a peaceful mob pulled down a Confederate monument on the grounds of the old courthouse. It wasn’t a statue of Lee or Jackson; it was dedicated To the Boys in Gray...
...This initially made me sad. Both Lee and Jackson were individually good men, but I figure generals can take care of themselves; goodness knows, the ones I’ve seen have certainly done so. But I was a grunt; my Civil War ancestor was a grunt; and the statue in Durham was dedicated to grunts.
Were the Boys in Gray fighting for a bad cause? I think so. But I was fighting for a bad cause also; I believed that at the time, and nothing I’ve learned since has caused me to change my mind.
I take citizenship seriously, and I entered the army as a citizen of a representative democracy. I’ve often disagreed with the choices my leaders made, but I believe in the system.
I loathe the mindset of a man like Henry Kissinger, who could dismiss as ‘a sideshow’ the Cambodian invasion (of which I was a part) and the millions of deaths it caused, but I prefer elective government to anarchy. If the folks we elect choose to depend on people like Mr Kissinger for advice, that’s really unfortunate. (At least Mrs Clinton made her intentions clear up front.)
That covers how I feel about the folks to whom the statues were dedicated, but that’s only half the story. The other half is the folks who raised the statues in the early part of the 20th century, and in large measure those were the same people who were imposing Jim Crow restrictions all over the South. They were using men like Lee and Jackson–and the Boys in Gray–to drum up enthusiasm for brutal racism.
Lee County, NC, was formed at that time from parts of adjacent counties. I’ve spent time in the courts there (on a friend’s behalf, not my own; thank goodness) and have been horrified by the contemptuous repression which I observed. (I also noted that every single person wearing a uniform was white. Spend a while in your district court, pretty much anywhere in the country, and you’ll see why that struck me.)
Lynchings rightly got headlines, but that was at the low end. At the respectable end, the Raleigh News and Observer (then and now NC’s premier newspaper) campaigned to get a Duke professor fired for saying that an exceptional Negro like George Washington Carver was fit to sit at dinner with Robert E Lee.
Buck Duke was no liberal, but his father had been a Confederate grunt. He backed his college president in ignoring the demands of a racist elite.
So. The statues were, for the most part, raised as instruments of repression. If folks who feel repressed want to complain about it, they’ve got a right. It doesn’t touch me personally: I’m a WASP (and proud of it), and my ancestor fought on the right side.
And as for the Boys in Gray–well, I’m still kinda sorry. They were, in their time, the best light infantry in the world. But they were also used to being shat upon, starting with their own political leaders, so it won’t be a new experience for them.
Heaven knows it’s a familiar one for Nam vets.
Hang in, people.
