North Carolina Civil War Monuments

Monuments honoring leaders and victorious armies have been raised throughout history. Following the American Civil War, however, this tradition expanded, and by the early twentieth century, the Confederate dead and surviving veterans, although defeated in battle, ranked among the world's most commemorated troops. This memorialization, described in North Carolina Civil War Monuments, evolved through a challenging and contentious process accomplished over decades. Prompted by the need to rebury wartime dead, memorialization, led by women, first expressed regional grief and mourning then expanded into a vital aspect of Southern memory. In North Carolina, 109 Civil War monuments--101 honoring Confederate troops and eight commemorating Union forces--were raised prior to the Civil War centennial. Photographs showcase each memorial while committee records, legal documents, and contemporaneous accounts are used to detail the difficult process through which these monuments were erected. Their design, location, and funding reflect not only the period's sculptural and cultural milieu but also reveal one state's evolving grief and the forging of public memory.

"This ... assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans' wariness of standing armies limited construction of war memorials in the early republic, ... and continued to influence commemoration after the Civil War. ... distrust of standing armies gave way to broader enthusiasm for soldiers in the Gilded Age. Some important projects challenged the trend, but many Civil War monuments proposed new norms of discipline and vigor that lifted veterans to a favored political status and modeled racial and class hierarchies. A half century of Civil War commemoration reshaped remembrance of the American Revolution and guided American responses to World War I"--

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and "heritage" laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.

While battlefield parks and memorials erected in town squares and cemeteries have served to commemorate southern valor in the Civil War, Confederate soldiers' homes were actually 'living monuments' to the Lost Cause, housing the very men who made that cau

"This ... assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans' wariness of standing armies limited construction of war memorials in the early republic ... and continued to influence commemoration after the Civil War. ... distrust of standing armies gave way to broader enthusiasm for soldiers in the Gilded Age. Some important projects challenged the trend, but many Civil War monuments proposed new norms of discipline and vigor that lifted veterans to a favored political status and modeled racial and class hierarchies. A half century of Civil War commemoration reshaped remembrance of the American Revolution and guided American responses to World War I"--

The American Civil War was scarcely over when a group of ladies met in Raleigh and began to plan commemoration for the honored Confederate dead of North Carolina. In 1867, they held their first memorial service. Two years later in Fayetteville, the first monument to the state's fallen Confederate soldiers was erected. Over the next 14 decades, countless monuments were commissioned in cemeteries and courthouse squares across the state. Following Reconstruction, the veterans themselves began to gather in their local communities, and state and national reunions were held. For many of the Confederate veterans, honor for their previous service continued long after their deaths: accounts of their sacrifice were often chiseled on their grave markers. The images within this book--photographs of veterans and reunions, monuments, and tombstones--are but a sampling of the many ways that the old Confederate soldiers are commemorated across the Old North State.

Immediately after the Civil War, white women across the South organized to retrieve the remains of Confederate soldiers. In Virginia alone, these Ladies' Memorial Associations (LMAs) relocated and reinterred the remains of more than 72,000 soldiers. Challenging the notion that southern white women were peripheral to the Lost Cause movement until the 1890s, Caroline Janney restores these women as the earliest creators and purveyors of Confederate tradition. Long before national groups such as the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the United Daughters of the Confederacy were established, Janney shows, local LMAs were earning sympathy for defeated Confederates. Her exploration introduces new ways in which gender played a vital role in shaping the politics, culture, and society of the late nineteenth-century South.

From well-known battlefields, such as Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Appomattox, to lesser-known sites, such as Sinking Spring Cemetery and Rude’s Hill, Sedore leads readers on a vivid journey through Virginia’s Confederate history. Tablets, monoliths, courthouses, cemeteries, town squares, battlefields, and more are cataloged in detail and accompanied by photographs and meticulous commentary. Each entry contains descriptions, fascinating historical information, and location, providing a complete portrait of each site. Much more than a visual tapestry or a tourist’s handbook, An Illustrated Guide to Virginia’s Confederate Monuments draws on scholarly and field research to reveal these sites as public efforts to reconcile mourning with Southern postwar ideologies. Sedore analyzes in depth the nature of these attempts to publicly explain Virginia’s sense of grief after the war, delving deep into the psychology of a traumatized area. From commemorations of famous generals to memories of unknown soldiers, the dead speak from the pages of this sweeping companion to history.