Lost Cause

Here in Charlottesville, city government recently removed the first of our 3 main Confederate Participation Trophies.

Yay us.

The struggles and the arguments continue.

The New Yorker: (pay wall)

Frederick Douglass was a “from here.” Where I was raised, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a “from here” is the opposite of a “come here,” and much is made of whether you were born on this side of the Chesapeake Bay or arrived later in life. In weighty matters, the question of just how many generations of your family have called this place home can become relevant, too.

One such matter is the Confederate monument at the Talbot County Courthouse, in Easton, a town of about seventeen thousand people. The monument, which is the last in Maryland on public property outside of cemeteries and battlefields, has two parts: a granite base, which was erected in 1914 and bears the names of ninety-six Confederate soldiers with some connection to the county—most carved in stone, others on two brass plaques—and a six-foot-tall statue, added two years later, of a young man with “C.S.A.” carved into his belt buckle and a Confederate flag in his arms. The front of the base is inscribed “To the Talbot Boys / 1861 - 1865 / C.S.A.”

For most of the past decade, that monument has shared the courthouse lawn with another: of Douglass, who was born into slavery some twelve miles from where his statue stands. Probably no one would be more surprised by this arrangement than Douglass himself, whose home state never seceded from the United States and whose home county voted against secession, sending more than three hundred soldiers to the Union Army. And yet there is no monument for the Union dead at the courthouse, or anywhere else in Talbot County.

The absence of a Union monument and the prominence of a Confederate one are part of why many a “from here,” like me, grew up believing that Talbot County was a Confederate stronghold. I love where I am from, so much so that I moved back to the Eastern Shore as an adult and, for years now, I have been one of many residents advocating for the removal of the “Talbot Boys” from the courthouse lawn. Earlier this summer, I thought I might be able to tell the story of how the Confederate monument finally came down. Instead, I’m left to confront why it remains.

Talbot County’s monument was installed fifty years after the Civil War, in an era when the gains of Reconstruction were already being reversed, Jim Crow was under way, and revanchist public commemorations of the Confederacy were spreading across the country. Thousands of squares and streets were dedicated to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, and historical markers to Confederate sites and causes went up anywhere that the United Daughters of the Confederacy could inspire local action. So common were these memorials that there were companies devoted to their production. Though defenders of the “Talbot Boys” insist that the statue is a one-of-a-kind effort to honor the local dead, in reality it once had an identical twin, known as “The South’s Defenders,” on the lawn of the Calcasieu Parish courthouse, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Both statues came from the W. H. Mullins Company, in Salem, Ohio, which had so many Civil War wares on offer that it advertised them in a catalogue: “The Blue and the Gray: Statues in Stamped Copper and Bronze.”

Advocates for the “Talbot Boys” also like to say that the monument has nothing to do with slavery, and that the political beliefs of those who are honored on it and those who erected it are unknowable or distinct from the motivations of Confederate champions elsewhere. In fact, many of those involved left extensive archives of their lives, detailing their thoughts about the Civil War and everything else. The effort to erect Easton’s statue was started in 1912, by a lawyer named Joseph Seth. He was not a Confederate veteran, but he was a sympathizer. He was also active in local politics, eventually becoming mayor, and not long before his election he decided the time had come to honor the “Talbot Johnnies.” The statue was dedicated on June 5, 1916. Ten years later, Seth published a memoir with his second wife, Mary, which recorded his views on, among other things, race relations on the Eastern Shore. “Slaves were held here from the early days of the Colony until the Emancipation Act, but they lived under a paternal, kindly rule,” he claimed.

That does not comport with the narratives of slavery from the enslaved themselves, and certainly not with the most notable account from someone forced to live and work in bondage in Talbot County. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass wrote of his master:

"He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose."

At least fourteen of the men whose names appear on the Confederate monument in Easton owned slaves or belonged to slave-owning families, including the man whose name comes first: Admiral Franklin Buchanan, who married into the Lloyd family, which enslaved more than seven hundred people, Douglass among them, at their Wye House plantation. In the passage above, the man whom Douglass is describing worked for the Lloyds. The year before the Civil War began, nearly four thousand people were enslaved in Talbot County. Easton’s port had become a hub for the domestic slave trade, and the town’s slave market was located on the very grounds where the Confederate statue now stands.

The surnames on that statue also appear on local streets, towns, landmarks, and landings: a geography of place and power. Take “Tilghman,” the name of a nearby island, but also of Oswald Tilghman, who survived the war and helped Seth raise money for the monument. Around the same time that it was erected, Tilghman published a “History of Talbot County,” in which he described the death of another one of the statue’s honorees, his relative Lloyd Tilghman, at the Battle of Champion Hill, in Mississippi: “He was laid under the shade of a peach tree where his life’s blood ebbed slowly away, and another hero was added to that long list of martyrs who died for the cause, ‘the lost cause,’ though it be, still dear and will ever remain dear to the hearts of all true Southerners to the end of time.”

The piece goes on at some length, but you get the picture - there's a butt-load of conclusive evidence that those monuments are there to change history by controlling the narrative. They exist because white people were desperate to rationalize their atrocities and to further the agenda of White Supremacy.

By tearing down those monuments, we're not erasing history - we're acknowledging the reality of that history, and trying to accept responsibility for what our history has bequeathed to us.

There is much work to be done here.