In Alabama’s taxpayer-funded Confederate Memorial Park in Chilton County, a library promotes the message that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War.

Placards and pamphlets posted on the front of the library explain the basis of that argument, including quotations from President Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in 1861.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans, a private group, runs the library with volunteers in a small building near the entrance to the 102-acre park, spread over rolling, shady hills a short drive off U.S. 31, near Clanton.

This year’s state budget directs more than $600,000 to the park. The money is an annual appropriation from a 1-mill tax initially pledged to support a home for disabled and indigent Confederate soldiers and their wives that operated on the same site until the 1930s.

In the 1950s, the Legislature began allocating that money to other purposes, including what is now the Department of Human Resources. Today, the tax that goes to the park is a sliver of a 6.5-mill state property tax. It’s 1 percent of 1 mill and goes to the Alabama Historical for maintenance and capital improvements at the park under a law passed by the Legislature in 1975.

The state funding of the park recently received attention in a Smithsonian Magazine article about taxpayer funding of Confederate memorials across the South. The article examines another aspect of the ongoing debate about government support and protection of Confederate memorials, statues and flags on taxpayer-owned property.

Derryn Moten, professor and chair of the Department of History and Political Science at Alabama State University, said Confederate memorials give a distorted view of history.

“The issue I have with the Confederacy and the Lost Cause is that people aren’t truthful,” Moten said. “There’s no question in my mind that the main purpose for the South’s secession and for the formation of the Confederate States of America was to protect the institution of slavery. And anybody, I believe, who argues to the contrary is just being academically dishonest.”

Moten points to an 1861 speech by Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens in which Stephens said the “cornerstone” of the new government rested “upon 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.”

“There’s no gray here,” Moten said. “It’s clear that the Confederate government wanted to continue the institution of slavery. And why wouldn’t it? Slavery was the economic bread and butter.”

‘The truth, regardless of what the truth is’

The Confederate Library has about 1,800 books, including reference books about the Confederate and Union armies and alphabetical rosters of Confederate soldiers. Carl Jones of Cullman, state commander of the Alabama Division of Sons of Confederate Veterans, said visitors generally use the materials for genealogy research.

Jones said there’s a clear justification for why the organization uses the library to promote its interpretation of the Civil War’s cause.

“It’s important to promote the truth regardless of what the truth is,” Jones said. “I think people have been educated to a degree to where they conflate secession with war.”

Jones concedes that the preservation of slavery was a reason for the southern states to secede. But he said Lincoln caused the war when he invaded the south largely because the federal government depended on tax revenues and tariffs generated by the southern states.

Jones said Lincoln’s own words, in his first inaugural address in 1861, support the assertion that slavery did not cause the war:

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

In the same speech, Lincoln said he would not oppose a proposed constitutional amendment to protect slavery.

“In other words, Lincoln was telling the southern states, ‘If you will rejoin the Union, I will give you slavery and I will be in favor of putting it in the Constitution,” Jones said.

Jones said no reasonable person today can defend the institution of slavery but said it’s dishonest to judge the actions of people in the 19th century based on today’s world view.

“I don’t think pointing out the fact that the war was not fought over slavery diminishes the fact that as 21st century enlightened people we regard slavery as contrary to human liberty,” Jones said.

No clear threat to funding

The debate over the preservation of Confederate monuments rages on across the nation and state.

In 2017, Alabama lawmakers passed and Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law the Memorial Preservation Act, which makes it illegal to remove monuments that date back 40 years or more, effectively protecting Confederate statues statewide.

ASU professor Moten said that move was more about sending an offensive message than preserving history.

“This current debate about the protection of monuments and so forth has little to do with the history of the Confederate government or the Civil War,” Moten said. “This is about, I believe, demonstrating to a certain demographic who is in charge. And it’s insulting. It’s an affront. And people need to own up to this.”

Confederate Memorial Park was originally the site of the state home for Confederate soldiers who had become disabled or indigent. The last Confederate veteran died in 1934. The facility closed in 1939 when the last of the Confederate widows were moved.

Along shady hills and trails, the park includes two cemeteries with the graves of 298 Confederate veterans and 15 wives and widows. Other features are reproduction soldiers’ barracks, an old post office that served the Mountain Creek community and the old Marbury Methodist Church. The post office and church were moved to the park. There’s a birding trail and picnic pavilions.

Park admission is free. There’s a $4 charge to tour the museum. It’s filled with Civil War artifacts, narrative panels and a gallery of photos to honor the rank and file soldiers. At least 81,000 Alabamians served in the Confederate army, and at least 20,000, possibly as many as 30,000, lost their lives, according to the museum’s accounts.

The glass cases display and describe the rifles, sabers, bayonets, cannon balls, uniforms, eating utensils and many other artifacts from the 1860s conflict. The museum displays a variety of Confederate flags, including some that were carried on battlefields. Exhibits depict the hardships the war brought to white southerners, including the plight of soldiers who returned to their families with crippling injuries.

A narrative panel says that four million slaves lived in the south in 1860 and says that southern leaders warned that emancipation would mean certain economic ruin and probable social chaos.

Joshua Rothman, professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Alabama, said he does not believe state and local governments should fund Confederate memorials.

“To me the Confederacy was a cause that was pretty explicitly in the defense of slavery,” Rothman said. “I know that not every soldier was a slaveholder, not every soldier was in the war specifically to defend slavery, but I don’t think there’s any way to separate the cause of the Confederacy from the defense of slavery.

“Not to mention that the Confederacy is a cause whose purpose was to break the United States into pieces. And so, personally I don’t think that’s a cause that’s particularly worth valorizing.

“And if individual people want to do that, that’s certainly their prerogative to do. But particularly in a state with a pretty sizable population of people who are descendants of enslaved people, I just don’t think it’s appropriate for them to pay for that.”

Rep. Steve Clouse, R-Ozark, chairman of the House Ways and Means General Fund Committee, said the state funding for Confederate Memorial State Park has been the source of some controversy. But Clouse said it’s more about the amount of funding and the fact that other state parks receive far less.

A bill proposed in the Legislature in 2012 would have allocated much of the tax that goes to Confederate Memorial Park to Historic Blakely State Park, Fort Gaines, Tannehill Ironworks State Park and the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum. Confederate Memorial Park would still have received an amount estimated at about $120,000.

The bill died without a vote in the House of Representatives. It even received the House’s annual “Shroud Award,” a designation presented in a comical way to signify the “deadest” bill of the session.