Written by Wayne Ware

Montana was still a territory during the Civil War. The closest battle may have been Glorieta Pass, southeast of Santa Fe, New Mexico, some 1,200 miles from the city of Helena. So I was intrigued to learn that a monument to the Confederacy had been removed from Helena. 

It was an imposing 9-foot-tall granite fountain, situated on a rise in a small park overlooking the city. At the dedication in 1916, Georgia Young, president of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, offered idyllic and healing words, closing by saying, “On behalf of the daughters of the Confederacy, I present this fountain to the city of Helena as a token of our esteem toward our new home.” The fountain watched over the city peacefully until August 2017, when it was quickly and unceremoniously removed. 

But Montana had no Confederate soldiers. Or Union soldiers. Or any Civil War soldiers at all for that matter. The state of Montana wasn’t the state of Montana until 1889, 25 years after the war had ended. So why Montana? 

It turns out that Montana was a very pro-Confederacy territory, which later became a haven for defeated and dispossessed Confederates. Helena’s place names reflect this history: Davis Street, Jackson Street, Confederate Gulch. “When the racist film Birth of a Nation — the film that revitalized the Klu Klux Klan in 1916 — opened in Helena, it didn’t play in the small movie theaters, but in the auditorium, Helena’s largest venue,” City Commissioner Ed Noonan told me when I visited last year. 

Tickets were sold by reservation only, and the movie often sold out during its lengthy run. A review in the local newspaper revealed the audience’s frame of mind: “The necessity of educating the Negro made apparent throughout the play, although those who saw the picture could not see where Birth of a Nation might incite any prejudice against the colored race.” 

“It is hard then to look at the monument installed several months after this showing and see it only as a dedication to honoring the Civil War dead,” Noonan said. “It also honors the racial understanding the Confederacy represented.”

The Montana Territory’s first two petitions for statehood were rejected by Congress – likely because of its pro-Confederacy politics. It eventually succeeded in joining the Union, of course, but it clung tenaciously to some of the old ideology. The United Daughters of the Confederacy, sensing fertile ground, eventually opened a chapter in Helena. The organization’s mission included the commemoration of Confederate soldiers who gave their lives for a noble cause — a cause that existed only in the Daughters’ imaginative re-writing of history.

To many historians, the organization is nothing more than a white supremacist outfit obsessed with promoting a revisionist history of the Civil War’s “Lost Cause.” Sociologist and historian James Loewen, author of Lies Across America, and Lies My Teacher Told Me, put it this way: “For more than a hundred years, the United Daughters of the Confederacy has harmed Americans’ understanding of the past by putting up triumphant counterfactual monuments and influencing timid textbook editors.”

The UDC disputes this, but the group’s president, Nelma Crutcher, did not respond to numerous requests for comment. Still, the group’s history is revealing. In 1934 alone, 69 years after Appomattox, it put 865 Confederate flags in Southern public schools and began running a wildly popular essay contest on topics such as “The origin of the Klu Klux Klan” and “The right of states to secede.” It was particularly effective in perpetuating the myth that the war was fought to protect states’ rights, rather than to perpetuate the enslavement of humans. The organization labored tirelessly to ensure that Southern states used only history books edited by the United Daughters (and therefore loyal to the myth of the Confederacy). The group was successful at this from 1889 all the way up to 1969, and its influence is still felt today. In 1917, the UDC even managed to place a gigantic, 32-foot-tall monument at the National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. The monument was dedicated by President Woodrow Wilson, who also premiered Birth of a Nation in the White House. Wilson regularly screened the movie for visiting foreign dignitaries, because, he said, he wanted to show them “the problem the country has with Negroes.”

I arrived in Helena on a beautiful autumn day. Nestled in the foothills of the Elkhorn Mountains, Helena has clean, wide, tree-lined streets; cute, gentrified Victorian homes; and a very walkable downtown with more than one good brew pub. The box elders and green ash trees were beginning to change color, and the air was crisp and bright. The city has a welcoming feel, justifying its nickname, “The Queen of the Rockies.” I was lucky enough to be meeting with former mayor, Jim Smith, a big, out-going guy who shares my love of history, good beer and tromping around the hills. It was he who had first broached the topic of removing the fountain during his tenure as mayor from 2001 to 2018. 

After Dylann Roof murdered nine Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, Smith presented the monument’s removal as a safety issue. “I never liked the presence of that fountain. But after Charlottesville, I really feared that it was a safety issue Both anti-fascist activists and far-right groups like the Proud Boys frequent Seattle and Portland, Oregon, each within a day’s drive of Helena.” But I suspect Jim’s real reason involved matters of the heart. His advocacy created a bit of buzz around town. Four camps quickly emerged: The ever-present “leave it alone, you’re erasing history” coalition; the “symbol of unity and togetherness” bunch; the “let’s just put more accurate signage on existing monuments” people; and the “just get rid of the damn thing now” crowd. 

The city eventually decided to erect a new, more informative plaque, and Pam Attardo, a local attorney-turned-historian who is now the head of the Helena/Lewis and Clark Co. Heritage Tourism Council, was tapped to write it. Attardo told me she originally thought, as many Americans do, that such Civil War monuments were merely an inoffensive acknowledgment of an important period in history. A well-designed interpretive plaque seemed like the sensible, educational solution. But as Attardo deepened her research, she was surprised — and sometimes horrified — by what she learned. “Once I started researching, I was appalled to read that these women from the UDC had started a nationwide propaganda campaign in the early 20th century to put monuments all over the U.S.,” Attardo said. “What seemed to be monuments to the dead were in fact much more.” The organization’s founders, who supported the KKK, “basically rewrote the saga of the South’s role in the Civil War.” And their romantic view of the South’s “lost cause” made its way into Southern textbooks. “The UDC made sure that Southern children’s textbooks did not teach the true story behind the Civil War — the unsavory part about enslaving human beings because their skin was a different color, profiting off their unpaid labor, and treating them brutally,” Attardo said. “These books are still being used in some communities, and that blows my mind.”  

But the proposed educational plaque soon found itself stranded in bureaucratic purgatory, and there it stayed, from 2015 until the violent, deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, South Carolina, on Aug. 12, 2017. Smith brought up the Helena monument at a public meeting four days later, urging its removal. Though not everyone at the meeting was in favor, the city approved the resolution. Within a week of the Charlottesville rally, the monument was gone, placed in permanent storage.

Attardo’s journey is not uncommon. I have friends who say they understand the national turn against some Confederate imagery, especially the 13-starred flag, which has arguably become nothing more than a hate symbol for white supremacists. Still, they see the monuments as “a part of our history.” To that I say: “It’s complicated.” Before you can understand Confederate monuments, you need to understand all those issues that plagued Pam. What was secession about? What is the “lost cause” myth? When were the monuments built? Who erected the monuments, and what did they say when they dedicated them? Why did some generals get monuments, while others were completely ignored? And why did states like Montana and Arizona, which were never involved in the war, end up with their own monuments? 

The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that 48% of U.S. teachers currently hew to the argument that Southern secession was over “states’ rights.” This is a tragedy, as it supports what historians calls the “ABS” version of history: “Anything But Slavery.” Dwight Pitcaithley, a former chief historian for the National Park Service who now teaches at New Mexico State, estimates that “about 80%” of his incoming students “believe that the Confederate states seceded over the issue of states’ rights.” As we spoke, he reconsidered: “Actually, that may be conservative, and it may be closer to 90%.” The SPLC appears to agree; a recent report, “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery,” found that only 8% of graduating high school seniors identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War. A full 68% of students did not know that a constitutional amendment was required to formally end slavery, and only one in four could correctly identify the constitutional provisions that gave advantages to slaveholders.

I find this frightening. How can there be so much ignorance about such a seminal event in a nation’s history? In fact, this national blind spot is no accident. After the war and the South’s humiliation in defeat, regional leaders launched a concerted, well-coordinated and quite successful campaign to revise the narrative. Fake news is nothing new. A year after the war ended, an ex-Confederate named Edward Pollard published the first pro-Southern history, The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. Pollard’s revisionist book was followed by a torrent of similar propaganda. Instead of having fought, killed and died for white supremacy and slavery, the narrative held, the South had fought for a noble cause: the right of states to determine their own destinies, free from federal government control. 

It sounds good, but it isn’t true. In the years preceding the war, some 9,000 pages appeared in public accounts, newspapers and letters, clearly stating the reasons for the conflict. Southern leaders were forthright about their belief in white supremacy and Black inferiority. Southern states wanted the right to keep slaves. It is as simple as that. The states proposed some 90 constitutional amendments to federally protect slavery, states’ rights be damned, Pitcaithley told me. “The poster child for this effort was Sen. Jefferson Davis, who proposed that slavery be nationalized and protected universally as property under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment,” Pitcaithley said. “The future president of the Confederacy was clearly no states’ rights man.” One of the first things the Confederate leaders did when they wrote their own Constitution was “to remove protections for slavery from the states and move those protections to the federal government.”

Altogether, five states penned “declarations of causes” for succession. Texas was remarkably straightforward: “We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race ... that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race.” Mississippi’s delegation stated that its position was “thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.” Virginia, Georgia and South Carolina each made similar declarations.  Confederate state after state confirmed the true reason for secession and war. At Alabama’s Secession Convention in January 1861, the need to secede was explained in clear and simple terms: “The question of Slavery is the rock upon which the Old Government split: it is the cause of secession … to protect, not so much property, as white supremacy.” In his famous “Cornerstone Speech,” future Confederate Vice President Alexander Stevens proclaimed that the new government would stand by “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.” The Confederate government would be “based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

But even as Confederate states proudly justified slavery, they rarely mentioned its tremendous economic benefits. This is critical to understanding secession. “It informs virtually all the attitudes about race that we wrestle with today,” Loewen, the historian, told me. If we believe that the Civil War was fought for the sake of self-determination — an honorable notion — and that slavery itself was benign, then the monuments deserve a place in our landscape. But if we acknowledge that the war was fought to preserve white supremacy and the benefits of unpaid, exploited labor, then those monuments exist to promote a destructive ideology, and their survival threatens the well-being of Black Americans. Once the propaganda is wiped away, the monument question becomes fairly easy to tackle.

There’s a reason why in 2021 we still hear so much racially-tinged political speech couched in concerns about “States Rights…wink wink.” The false cause of states’ rights is still invoked against federal social programs and education initiatives that are often beneficial to people of color. Misunderstanding the war allows the continuation of division by racial code language. To quote Lee Atwater, senior political advisor to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush: “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘N…N…N.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘N…’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh…states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. (States’ Rights) is…a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘N…N…’.” 

Both North and South, eager to put the war behind them, allowed the “lost cause” lie to proliferate. Aided and abetted by groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, it was rooted in public school textbooks deep into the 20th century. It wasn’t until 1980 that Mississippi schools even had access to an alternative, when Loewen and co-author Charles Sallis filed a suit in Mississippi’s Northern District Court to force the state to use their historically accurate text. And the problem continues today: In 2010, Texas removed books from public curriculums that identified slavery as the principal cause of the Civil War, replacing them with books that adhered to the states’ rights narrative. Republican Texas school board member Patricia Hardy called slavery “an after issue.” In some Texas schools, slaves are now described as “immigrant laborers.” 

The United Daughters of the Confederacy proudly perpetuated the “lost cause” myth. The UDC erected the Helena fountain and hundreds more across the country, including “Silent Sam”, the controversial statue of a Confederate soldier which stood on the campus of the University of North Carolina until protesters toppled it in August 2018. It was this statue’s removal that drew white nationalists and their allies to that city. According to Mark Elliot, history professor at North Carolina State, Greensboro, “The UDC was probably the most important and influential group” when it came to funding and installing confederate statues.

The United Daughters bills itself as a group of genteel Southern women dedicated to maintaining the heritage of the South. Given that the actual legacy of the South is one of white supremacy, they do a good job. “For more than a hundred years,” Loewen writes, “the UDC has harmed Americans’ understanding of the past by putting up triumphant counterfactual monuments and influencing timid textbook editors.”

“The UDC, more than the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led the way in creating the alternate narrative that we now know as the Lost Cause,” Pitcaithley, the Civil War historian, told me. “They sponsored the erection of monuments and statues on courthouse and statehouse lawns, and the very monumental Confederate memorial in, of all places, Arlington Cemetery! They also worked hard to ensure that textbooks reflected the Southern perspective — the central point being that the South seceded in support of something called states' rights, and not slavery.”

In 1913, 48 years after the Civil War, 26 years after Reconstruction and in the midst of Jim Crow, the United Daughters of the Confederacy recruited Julian Carter, a prominent industrialist and ranking member of the KKK, to speak at the dedication of the Silent Sam statue. Carter’s remarks illuminate the true purpose of the Confederate statues. First, he credited Confederate soldiers with saving “the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South,” adding that “today, as a consequence the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States — Praise God.” He went on to tell a personal story. “One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these university buildings where was stationed a garrison of 100 federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison.”

The majority of so-called “Civil War monuments” were not erected until decades after Appomattox. “The vast majority were put up between 1920 and 1950, which matches up exactly with the Jim Crow era and the start of the modern civil rights era.” As former FBI Director James Comey has written, “The Confederate statues … weren’t erected to honor the service of brave warriors. Those soldiers had been dead for decades. The statues were put up by white people … to remind black people that despite all that nonsense of Lincoln and Grant and Reconstruction, we are back and you are down. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments aren’t going to help you black folks because the South has risen … Jim Crow is king!”

To understand the monuments, it’s helpful to know not only who placed them, but who got one – and importantly - who didn’t, and where they were placed. Throughout the South there are monuments to Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, for example. Prior to the war, Forrest made a fortune in Tennessee as a plantation owner and slave trader. Tall, handsome and broad-shouldered, Forrest, who quickly rose from private to general, has been called the most brilliant military tactician born in America. He was responsible for many key victories, including the battle of Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in March 1864. There, Forrest led perhaps as many as 2,500 Southern troops against a fort held by some 600 Union troops, approximately half of whom were Black. The Union forces quickly surrendered, but instead of taking prisoners, a military commission later found, Forrest summarily executed some 300 soldiers, most of them Black. After leaving the Army, Forrest went on to become the KKK’s first Grand Wizard. Eventually, he would have more markers in his honor in Tennessee than anyone else in any state — more than George Washington in Virginia, or Abraham Lincoln in Illinois. As recently as May 2019, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee proclaimed June 8 to be a day of remembrance for Forrest — a slave trader, unindicted war criminal and KKK leader. 

One such statue was erected in Selma, Alabama, in 2000 — just weeks after Selma elected its first Black mayor. A local tour guide remarked, “Every time I see that statue, it’s like I can see his lips move and hear him say, ‘You may have a Black mayor, but we’re still here.’ ”

In Cleveland, Mississippi, a United Daughters’ Confederate monument dominates the front lawn of the Bolivar County Courthouse, with an inscription proclaiming: “To the memory of our Confederate dead. No nation ever rose so free from crime, nor fell so free from stain.” However, Cleveland — like Montana — had no Confederate dead, and the city didn’t even exist until well after the Civil War had ended. The monument was erected some 43 years after the last battle, smack-dab in the middle of the Jim Crow reign of terror.

The UDC, ever in search of unlikely and non-historical sites for its monuments, erected one in Ellisville, Mississippi, in front of the Jones County Courthouse. But Jones County not only opposed the war, its citizens led an armed revolt to declare the county “The Free State of Jones.” Again, the monument was erected during the Jim Crow years — 46 years after Appomattox. 

Baltimore, which was never part of the Confederacy, honored Chief Justice Roger Taney, who is remembered mainly because he, in cahoots with Southern sympathizer President James Buchanan, authored the infamous Dred Scott decision, which stated that the U.S. Constitution held no provisions for the citizenship of Black people. Thus Scott, a slave who lived in a free state and had therefore sued for his freedom, had no standing with the court and therefore could not sue. After Taney died in 1864, The New York Times quoted his decision, in which he called Negroes “beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Taney contributed nothing else of note to history, yet Baltimore decided to honor him with a statue 22 years after the war ended, in the middle of the Jim Crow era. The statue was finally removed in 2017.

Arizona, another state that was not a state during the war, has its own history with Confederate memorials. The UDC, ever eager to promote the “lost cause,” began promoting a Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway as early as 1913, just one year after Arizona achieved statehood, to be part of a proposed cross-country highway to be built in response to the dedication of the Lincoln Highway. In 1961, the Arizona Highway Commission designated U.S. 80 through Arizona as the Jefferson Davis National Highway. U.S. 80 is no longer an “active highway”; it was decommissioned in 1989, though the name still appears on some maps. 

Eventually, the UDC placed a total of six memorials in Arizona. Perhaps anticipating another removal, the United Daughters recently convinced the governor to move one of them from the grounds of the state Capitol to a private location. 

“It’s a long time coming,” said Rev. Reginald Walton, pastor of Phillips Memorial CME church in Phoenix and an activist who has spent years advocating for the removal of all of Arizona’s racist monuments. “It means that Arizona is finally understanding the wounds that were inflicted by the Confederacy and the racist attitudes that the Confederacy represented.” Over 4,000 Black Americans were hung, shot, burned alive, dismembered, or castrated in the latter third of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. If you take a map of Confederate monuments and overlay it with a map showing the sites where those outrages occurred, you might be forgiven for questioning the legitimacy of the whole notion of “heritage not hate.” 

Black leaders throughout Arizona have urged Gov. Doug Ducey to remove all six memorials, arguing that they were “erected to intimidate, terrorize, and strike fear in the hearts of Arizonans, particularly African-Americans, while inspiring and emboldening white supremacists.” Ducey has yet to make a decision, preferring instead to advocate a vague “public process” for deliberation. 

Who didn’t get honored with statues?

One question regarding the monuments occasionally arises: Why have some Confederates been honored by statues, while others, equally significant, are completely ignored? If the monuments are about heritage rather than hate, and the benchmarks are valor and sacrifice, where are the monuments to James Longstreet or William Mahone, two of the Confederacy’s greatest generals

Longstreet, whom Lee called his “Old War Horse,” fought brilliantly at decisive battles like Bull Run and Gettysburg. After the death of Stonewall Jackson, Longstreet became Lee’s most trusted second-in-command. Confederate soldiers invariably lauded Longstreet as “The best fighter in the whole army!”

But Longstreet’s behavior after the war was another matter, and he soon fell into disfavor with white supremacists. Once Longstreet accepted that Lincoln’s anti-slavery Republicans had a firm grip on the country, he changed party affiliation, joined the Republican Party and supported Reconstruction. He likely did so more for his own personal advancement than for reasons of humanity. But still … he did it, and in the process became a pariah. Longstreet, who endorsed his old friend Ulysses Grant for president, was subsequently appointed surveyor of customs in New Orleans and later the commander of all militia and state police forces with the city. 

In that role, Longstreet led a mixed-race force at the Battle of Liberty Place, when an armed mob of some 5,000 White League vigilantes descended on the Statehouse to contest the Republican governor’s narrow victory. But Longstreet’s greatest sin was unforgivable: He openly criticized Lee’s leadership and skill. Lee is perhaps the closest thing to a saint in the South. 

Gettysburg has some 39 monuments to the Confederacy, but Longstreet did not receive one until 1998. It sits on dirt rather than on a grand pedestal, and is tucked away behind a grove of trees. 

William Mahone was another brilliant and courageous general whose luster strangely dulled after the war. He was at Appomattox with Lee, and he shared in the decision to surrender; Lee had even contemplated him as his successor. So how did this brilliant general, slaveholder and ardent secessionist end up sort of missing in action? His post-war career didn’t live up to the former Confederacy’s white supremacist ideals. 

According to Jane Dailey, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, Virginia Sen. Mahone has been called one of the most capable, yet most maligned, political leaders in post-war America. Mahone organized and then led the most successful interracial political alliance in the South. His “Readjuster” party — an independent coalition of Black and white Republicans and white Democrats, which was named for its policy of downwardly “readjusting” Virginia’s state debt — governed the state from 1879 to 1883. Under Mahone’s leadership, his party controlled the governorship, the state Legislature, and the courts. A Black-majority party, the Readjusters promoted Black political power by supporting suffrage, office-holding, education and jury service to a degree unmatched anywhere else in the country in the 19th century. 

According to Dailey, the Readjusters lost power in 1883 following a Democratic campaign of violence, electoral fraud, and appeals to white solidarity. Even as late as the 1940s, the worst charge that could be bought against any candidate was that he had been associated with Gen. Mahone. But African Americans remembered him differently. 

Does it all even matter?

So what of the controversy over Confederate monuments? Is it really all that important? Is it just a matter of hurt feelings, or political correctness? African Americans have been at the chokepoint of racial turmoil and injustice since long before the Civil War. As the conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks recently wrote, “I’ve been traveling around the country for the past few years studying America’s divides — urban/rural, red/blue, rich/poor. There’s been a haunting sensation the whole time that is hard to define. It is that the racial divide doesn’t feel like the other divides. There is a dimension of depth to it that the other divides don’t have. It is more central to the American experience. … We’re a nation coming apart at the seams, a nation in which each tribe has its own narrative and the narratives are generally resentment narratives. The African-American experience is somehow at the core of this fragmentation. …”

The ideology of racial supremacy did damage to this country long before it was a country. America was built on stolen land and stolen bodies, on genocide and the enslavement of millions of people. Abraham Lincoln himself initially believed that the white race was superior. During his famous debates with Sen. Stephen Douglas, Lincoln reassured the crowd: “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races … and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be a position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”  

In a famous speech in 1876, Frederick Douglass said that Lincoln “was pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men.” And yet he goes on to say, “The name of Abraham Lincoln was near and dear to our hearts in the darkest and most perilous hours of the Republic. … we were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position. … The man who could say, ‘Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war shall soon pass away, yet if God wills it continue till all the wealth piled by two hundred years of bondage shall have been wasted, and each drop of blood drawn by the lash shall have been paid for by one drawn by the sword, the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,’ gives all needed proof of his feeling on the subject of slavery.”

Lincoln doubted whether the Black race could ever fully assimilate in the United States. But he also fully understood that slavery and white supremacy limited our potential as a new democracy and as a beacon for the rest of the world. Douglass gave the speech just quoted at the dedication of a monument to the memory of Abraham Lincoln. Known as the Emancipation Memorial, it was commissioned and paid for by former slaves. And yet it, too, is currently facing its own share of controversy as its dated and arguably racist iconography is re-evaluated by new generations. Monuments, as I said at the beginning of this essay, are complicated. That’s because human beings, and human history, are complicated. But some things are not that hard to understand if a person is willing to look deeply enough.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “Be true to what you said on paper.” African Americans remain bewildered why it has taken so long for this country to recognize the harm of racism and to finally make it right. Understanding the Civil War – and the role of these monuments — would be a good place to start. In the words of historian and author Henry Louis Gates, ‘Whatever the terms of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Grant at Appomattox, the Confederacy didn’t die in April 1865; it simply morphed.’ ”

James Loewen again: “Concealing the role of white supremacy — on both sides of the conflict — makes it harder for students to see white supremacy today. After all, if Southerners were not championing slavery but states’ rights, then that minimizes southern racism as a cause of the war. And it gives implicit support to the Lost Cause argument that slavery was a benevolent institution. Espousing states’ rights as the reason for secession whitewashes the Confederate cause into a ‘David versus Goliath’ undertaking — the states against the mighty federal government.”

I recently reconnected with former Helena Mayor Jim Smith to ask about his thoughts, as more and more statues topple amid demonstrations for racial justice. He seemed a bit melancholy and was still clearly worried about the proximity of the Proud Boys and the anti-fascist groups. So he chose his words with care. “I didn’t do my mayoralty any good, but I’m still glad that we did what we did. Now it’s gone beyond statues, or race. Our whole concept of the Union — or dis-Union — is on the table, and I’m troubled by what’s going on. There are a lot of good, ordinary people trying to create a more perfect union, but I do fight sinking into despair.” 

Don’t we all, Jim. Don’t we all.