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If racism was not the primary motivation for Confederate monument-building, what exactly was?…

In the wake of the current controversy over Confederate monuments, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has created a timeline that has made its way around the worldwide web like wildfire. It purports to show that two spikes in the building of the monuments coincide with occurrences of racially-charged historical eras, such as the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and the Civil Rights Era. The timeline has been published on websites such as Mother Jones and Daily Kos, and has been endlessly tweeted and re-tweeted on Twitter. The premise that it rests on—that racism and white supremacy were the driving motivation of the building of Confederate monuments—has been blindly accepted with, evidently, little or no critical thinking.


The implication that can be drawn from this timeline is that during our nation’s most racially hostile moments, white Southerners were inspired to construct Confederate monuments to help solidify white supremacy. This provides the rationale for the current drive to remove the monuments—that they were built by racists seeking to impose white domination on society.  But is this allegation true? An earlier timeline produced by SPLC tells a different story:

In this timeline, the rise in KKK membership didn’t peak until 1925, a full decade after the KKK peek on the first timeline. According to the second (earlier) timeline, membership in the KKK was meager at the time of the increase in the building of the Confederate monuments—only around 5,000 people. Such a small amount of KKK members could hardly have been a vital factor in the increase of Confederate monuments. Why such a discrepancy between the two charts? I suspect that the data was intentionally manipulated by the SLPC on the Confederate monument timeline in order to buttress a false assumption/allegation—that the main motivation for the building of the Confederate monuments was racism.




The first factor is fairly obvious based on the tendency of Americans to celebrate certain events at fifty-year increments. For example, what is considered a couple’s Golden anniversary? Their fiftieth. How many years mark the centennial anniversary of a town, church, or business? Its one-hundredth. Now, take the year in which the first spike in Confederate monument building occurred (somewhere between 1910 and 1915) from the SPLC’s monument timeline. If one subtracts fifty years from these dates, one arrives at somewhere between 1860 and 1865. Well I’ll be darned—the fifty year anniversary of the Civil War! Take 100 years away from the second spike (slightly after 1960), and one arrives at around 1861—the one-hundred year anniversary of the start of the Civil War. Not rocket science, folks.

The second factor requires some historical research, but not a whole lot. One of the more noteworthy Confederate monuments is the enormous obelisk that stands at the Jefferson Davis State Historic Site in Fairview, Kentucky. Taken as a case study, it sheds some light on this second factor of motivation for the building of such monuments.

In a 1907 reunion of the “Orphan Brigade,” one of the last surviving Confederate soldiers that achieved the rank of lieutenant general—Simon Bolivar Buckner—proposed that a monument dedicated to the memory of Confederate President Jefferson Davis be constructed. Begun a decade later but halted in 1918 due to World War I, work on the project resumed in 1922. But an ongoing lack of finances was to periodically interrupt the project over the course of the next two years. In 1923, it was a group of women—not the Ku Klux Klan—who took the lead in raising funds to complete the project. Each month, the pages of Confederate Veteran magazine were filled with pleas from the president of United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) directed towards subscribers to consider making donations of any size.

Jefferson Davis State Historic Site



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9 replies to this post
  1. It has been my theory – and I don’t have evidence to prove it – that the reason most of these monuments were built were to bind the wounds of the Civil War and unite the nation. That’s why many were built in the north. It’s a show of mutual respect: you honor our dead and we’ll honor yours. That 50 year mark even makes sense under this rubric. Too close to the War and you would be opening up old sores, but at fifty years the sores are healed and nostalgia has kicked in for those who are still alive. Anyway, it’s a theory.

    • Manny,

      I wholeheartedly agree and have thought the same…

      I read that when Lee surrendered, General Grant had the Union band play “Dixie” as a recognition of the vanquished Confederate Army…

      Regarding racism… I am thoroughly disgusted with the overuse of the term…

  2. The monuments were built as a way to memorialize the conflict as an American one and mend relations between North and South. United Daughters of Confederacy didn’t just lead the way with monuments but also providing Confederate cemeteries as well. Women were at the heart of much of the reunion and commemorative culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  3. Not too complicated, they lost the war but still had their pride, from which monuments arose, a natural reaction to those who died on their side of the war.


    Sounds a bit controlling to me.


    Was Mrs. Schuyler being naive, or just willfully ignoring the differences between the principles that guided the Independence of the United States? Like “all men have been created equal”?

  6. I think Mrs. Schuyler was referring to the political self-determination that both Washington and Davis espoused. It would be hard to argue that Washington was fighting a war to bring equality due to the fact that the United States retained slavery before, during, and after the Revolution, and that Washington himself owned slaves until the day he died.

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