A Confederate veteran speaks: What the monuments mean

Eric Etheridge | Guest columnist

Show Caption Hide Caption Tragedy in Charlottesville: The Unite the Right rally In 2017, an assortment of alt-right and far-right affiliated groups gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the removal of Confederate monuments and names from a city square. It ended in the death of a Charlottesville woman.

“The South will rise again!” chanted white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia, a year ago this month. But since then the monuments, at least, have been falling: 49 Confederate monuments have been taken down across the country, 29 of them in the states of the Confederacy.

Despite spectacular removals in 2017 in Memphis (Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest) and New Orleans (Davis again, Robert E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard), efforts that began even before Charlottesville, there have been no changes in between.

All of Mississippi’s 50-plus monuments still stand, and their presence and prominence continue to be defended locally in terms of heritage, which we should all “earnestly strive to understand and appreciate,” and remembrance, as memorials to “honor the dead and the veterans.”

Could there be other meanings? One local historian recently told a reporter he “has never heard nor read about the statues being a testament to white supremacy.”

Perhaps Wiley N. Nash, Mississippian and Civil War veteran, can add something to the conversation.

"What good purpose," he asked in 1908, "is subserved, promoted and supported by the erection of these Confederate memorials all over the South?"

Nash had studied both literature and law at the University of Mississippi, so his answer came fully attired in his best rhetorical finery:

"Like the watch fires kindled along the coast of Greece that leaped in ruddy joy to tell that Troy had fallen, so these Confederate monuments, these sacred memorials, tell in silent but potent language, that the white people of the South shall rule and govern the Southern states forever."

Wiley was the featured speaker on Dec. 2, 1908, when the white citizens of Holmes County gathered in Lexington for ceremonies to unveil their new monument. It was typical of the memorials then going up across the state and the South: A common soldier standing atop a stone column installed in front of the county courthouse.

The monument in Lexington is of decent height. It’s not as tall as the one in Natchez, say, nor does it feature any secondary statues at its base, as the one in Greenwood does. Both were richer cities. Still, the monument's debut was something to be celebrated. The “A&M Band” played "Dixie." A group of school children sang "The Bonnie Blue Flag." Civil War veterans paraded along with 11 girls chosen to represent the 11 seceding states of the Confederacy.

The 62-year-old Nash was eminently qualified for his leading role in the events of the day. He was a Mississippian by birth, raised in Oktibbeha County. In 1908, he was widely regarded as “a representative man of Mississippi,” a prominent Starkville attorney who had served several terms in the state Legislature and one term as the state's attorney general.

More to the point, he had fought in the war, enlisting at the age of 16. He was seriously wounded in Georgia — “shot through the right thigh” — but recovered and later rode with Harvey’s Scouts, a famously effective small troop from Mississippi.

Equally important, after the war he joined the cause of Redemption, the campaign to restore white rule in Mississippi, which culminated in stealing the elections of 1875 by violence or the threat of it, keeping most blacks from voting.

“Victory for the vanquished” is how Nash described it in Lexington.

“Mr. Nash has done yeoman service in the many efforts of the white people of Mississippi to wrest the state from radical rule and negro domination,” historian Dunbar Rowland wrote in 1907, praising Nash’s efforts “in the great and memorable struggle of 1875, the year, as the negroes say ‘when de white folks riz.’”

"To him, Mississippi should be ever grateful,” read another tribute to "Nash the Redeemer."

We may be ever grateful to Nash as well, for among his fulsome remarks in Lexington, which run to roughly 7,000 words, he included a clear, concise, nine-point, itemized list on what the monuments actually mean.

Monuments honor “the Southern cause” and its “brave defenders, the living and the dead” (item one), and also "keep honored and honorable" the "present and future dominant and ruling Southern Anglo-Saxon element" (item two).

They "keep the white people of the South united — a thing so necessary — to keep, protect, preserve and transmit our true Southern social system, our cherished Southern civilization” (item six).

The ruddy leaping joy of perpetual white power is item seven: “The white people of the South shall rule and govern the Southern states forever.”

The final item, number nine: Monuments “will teach the South through all the ages to love the Southern Cause.”

On this matter, Nash is an unimpeachable source: a Mississippian, a veteran, a Redeemer and a monument-unveiler. This is what the monuments mean. His is a direct expression of the original intent, if you will, of the people who erected them.

Small changes have begun to appear in the state’s monument landscape. In 2016, the University of Mississippi added a contextualizing plaque to its Confederate statue, and Lafayette County supervisors are now working on a plaque for the statue on the Oxford square.

Current Mississippi law prevents monuments from being taken down, but it does allow, according to an opinion from the state attorney general’s office, for a city or county to relocate one under certain conditions.

A few of the city board members in McComb believe they will be able to do just that with the monument that now sits in front of city hall. If they are successful, their action will carry a certain historical rhyme. In 1960 sit-ins spread like wildfire all across the South — but only just barely to Mississippi. The state’s Civil Rights movement did not really get going until a year later, in the fall of 1961, with a voter registration drive and high school walkout in McComb.

Maybe a year after so many monuments have fallen elsewhere, the state’s de-Dixiefication can begin there as well.

Eric Etheridge grew up in Carthage and Jackson and currently lives in New York City. A new edition of his book Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders will be out in September.