BLOOMFIELD, Ia. — If anybody comes to this sleepy patch of rural Iowa trying to remove the Confederate monument she helped build, Nancy Clancy would be willing to dig her fingernails into its craggy surface and shield it with her very body.

It might seem surprising to see Iowa with its pro-Union history — more than 76,000 Iowans fought in blue during the Civil War — embroiled in the national debate that has reignited over Confederate monuments in public spaces.

But southern Iowa has a stronger Confederate legacy than you might suspect.

The state is home to two Confederate monuments, both recently established:

One is south of Bloomfield, built in 2005, and remembers a band of Confederate soldiers who terrorized the countryside.

The other has stood since 2007 along the Des Moines River in downtown Bentonsport, commemorating a Confederate general who spent a year of his life there as a child.

Like their counterparts scattered across the United States, these monuments have become the centerpieces of a fierce debate: Do these stones and statues immortalize American history, or whitewash it using thinly veiled symbols of white supremacy?

These commemorations of the Confederacy occupy a significant chunk of our national landscape: More than 700 rebel monuments and statues are spread across 31 states, according to a recent study by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, Alabama.

But in the wake of the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that left one person dead, more than a dozen Confederate monuments have been removed, either by sober decision or brute force. And a national debate has raged about whether they belong in public settings such courthouses and state capitols.

It's the latest phase of the amplified racial tension buffeting America since the shooting of Michael Brown and subsequent riots three years ago in Ferguson, Missouri.

Mark Meek, a Van Buren County supervisor who also serves on the county conservation board, said that he has received a couple of emails about the Confederate stone in Bentonsport from Iowans who "think it absolutely ought to be removed, and that it's disgracing the country and dishonoring people."

Lynn Sutton, a former city councilwoman in Dubuque who is African-American, characterized removing at least some Confederate monuments as "one small part" of addressing the larger racial problem.

"You have to get to the heart," she said. "Racism is not an easy thing to tackle. It takes time. Sometimes it takes a generation."

RELATED: Iowa has dozens of Confederate flags tucked away in an underground vault

But others such as Clancy see removals as a dangerous attempt to erase the past and forget its hard-learned lessons.

"It doesn't make any sense to me at all," Clancy said. "We have to remember our history."

Complicated legacy of our 'free' state

The sign at the southern edge of Bloomfield points to what it calls a “Civil War historical marker” 5 miles south at Lilac Avenue and 265th Street.

That’s where three massive rocks sit atop a concrete slab, flanked by a pair of flags.

The U.S. flag on the north side of the monument has 35 stars, which is consistent with the Civil War era.

To its south, 1 inch lower, is the “Stars and Bars,” the first official flag of the Confederacy, which features a circle of seven stars and was raised in 1861 over the temporary Southern capital of Montgomery, Alabama.

Previously, the more infamous and well-known Confederate battle flag had been flown there. But it kept getting stolen.

The Confederate battle flag is visible as a 4½-inch-by-3-inch monochromatic depiction on a bronze plaque that reads: “Confederate partisan rangers came from Missouri to this point, the furthermost north of any Confederate incursion during the Civil War. Donated in 2005 by Sons of the Confederate Veterans of the Civil War.”

The Union stone next to it honors "those citizens of Davis County who sacrificed and served to preserve the Union.”

The 76,000 Iowans who fought for the Union in the Civil War represented the second-highest percentage of adult men of any state, North or South, except for Ohio.

The center stone provides more detail about the Oct. 12, 1864, raid by a dozen Confederates who disguised themselves in Union uniforms, wreaking havoc, robbing dozens of Iowans and murdering three men.

This basically marks as far north as Civil War fighting reached — 3 miles farther than in Ohio, according to GPS measurements, and not counting Confederates who swept down from Canada into New England.

Clancy, 67, is a widow who was part of a small, passionate group of history buffs whose Davis County Civil War Guerrilla Raid Society spearheaded this monument more than a decade ago.

She's also president of the broader Davis County Historical Society and believes strongly in remembering the past and what it has to teach us now.

"I worry that we will get back in a situation like we were during the Civil War," she said.

Clancy lives just down the gravel road that turns into a dirt lane, on 40 acres of an original farm that those Confederate soldiers crossed during their raid.

Her great-grandmother Ida Mae Cruikshank and family settled there after the war.

The Cruikshanks came to Iowa from Virginia by way of Kentucky with an estimated 20 slaves — some of them given as a wedding gift.

Clancy speaks of all this as unavoidable historical fact.

"I don't feel any responsibility for it," she said. "I couldn't change it if I wanted to."

She sees her passion to establish and maintain the monument as a responsibility handed down from her ancestors, a mandate to accurately preserve local history.

"It was always instilled in me as a child to take care of the Guerrilla Raid Trail," she said.

Stories of Civil War-era Iowa tend to emphasize that we were a “free” state in the Union.

Historians have restored homes and added to the detail of Iowa's Underground Railroad, the network of abolitionists who helped usher escaped slaves to freedom.

But research by Clancy and others shows a Davis County that roiled with deeply divided loyalties between the North and South.

Jeff Bremer, an associate professor of history at Iowa State University who's writing a new book on Iowa history, said that while slaves were forbidden in the 1838 Iowa Territorial Constitution, enforcement was lax.

“Southerners dominated the early Iowa territorial legislature,” he said, “and they helped write a 'black code' for Iowa to exclude blacks, keep them from schools and not allow them to vote and (keep them) off of juries.”

Even Iowa’s first state constitution for more than a decade granted rights only to white men.

'Stupid liberals wanting a civil war'

Talk of removing monuments is not a popular idea with most Americans.

Some recent polls have found that as many as 62 percent of Americans believe that Confederate monuments should remain in place. And even a sizable fraction of African-Americans say they should be left alone.

Those sentiments were evident last week in Davis and Van Buren counties, where residents said that any attempt to remove Confederate monuments was nothing more than absurd overreach.

Since President Barack Obama’s election, Richard Coy in Bloomfield has scrawled daily editorial messages on a giant dry erase board posted in his front lawn along the main U.S. Highway 63 north-south route through town.

It's hard to miss when driving to the Confederate monument.

One of his recent inscriptions offered timely commentary: “Stupid liberals wanting a civil war because of the first Civil War. Don’t they know it would last about 3 minutes.” (The presumption being that liberals would surrender quickly because they tend to own fewer guns.)

An appreciative couple from Minnesota stopped to shake Coy’s hand and pose for a photo with his sign. The man wore a “Don’t tread on me” T-shirt.

Coy has a kindred soul in Bentonsport: Randy Hardin, who operates an antique shop across the street from the stone here honoring "Iowa's Confederate general."

This bronze plaque (embossed with a 7½-inch-by-4½-inch Confederate battle flag) marks the birthplace of Lawrence Sullivan "Sul" Ross, a Confederate general born in 1838 who spent the first year of his life here before his family moved to Texas.

Ross went on to serve as governor of Texas and president of Texas A&M University. (A statue of Ross on the campus in College Station still remains.)

Hardin called the Confederate monuments debate the “biggest joke in this country so far.”

“If we did away with everything that people found offensive,” he said, “we’d have a bare Earth.”

History as the study of change

President Donald Trump himself has waded into the controversy of Confederate monuments with tweets and comments.

"You can't change history, but you can learn from it," he wrote. "Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson — who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!"

Supporters of the monuments similarly sound a consistent drumbeat that they represent history that shouldn't be erased or forgotten.

But Kathleen Hilliard, an associate professor of history at Iowa State University who was born in Virginia and raised in the South, rejects the definition of history as something fixed and rigid and frozen in time.

"I joke about historians not wanting to change," she said. "Of course we do. I study history, I study change.

"Monuments are erected and removed all the time. It’s absolutely not removing history."

Hilliard was surprised and happy to see the Confederate flag plucked from the South Carolina Capitol two years ago in the wake of the slaughter of nine African-Americans at a Bible study in Charleston. They were killed by Dylan Roof, a Confederate battle flag-flying white supremacist.

“I’ve long wanted to see (the flag) removed," Hilliard said, "and I see it as a symbol ultimately of white supremacy.”

It may be true that everything from “Gone With the Wind” to “The Dukes of Hazzard” to Lynyrd Skynyrd have helped to spread the Confederate battle flag and muddy its meaning. But that's not what has given the flag its power, Hilliard said — that has come from its use by hate groups.

“The idea that it is leftists or liberals imposing this meaning" on the flag, Hilliard said, “or Hollywood imposing that meaning, I think is ridiculous.”

'Confederacy personified the best qualities of America'

The Civil War may be 150-year-old history, but the work on many Confederate monuments and commemorations is surprisingly recent.

The Iowa Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, chartered in 2001, is dedicated to more than monuments.

For instance, it has identified more than 240 graves of Confederate soldiers buried in Iowa, in all but about seven counties — one more example of a substantial Southern imprint on our Union state.

Sherman Lundy, a geologist in Cedar Falls and a Sons of Confederate Veterans member, helped establish the southern Iowa monuments.

"I’m not going to stick a statue of Robert E. Lee up here in Cedar Falls, Iowa," he clarified. "It doesn’t belong here."

But Lundy also makes a plea that Confederate soldiers shouldn't be judged by modern morals and sensibilities.

"It's difficult to go from the 21st century, from our parameters and our concerns and our feelings," he said, "and thrust those back 150 years ago and think that everybody should have been aware and thought like we did."

Even so, Lundy would not go so far as to endorse what the Iowa SCV's own website declares as its mission statement:

"The citizen-soldiers who fought for the Confederacy personified the best qualities of America. The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South's decision to fight the Second American Revolution. The tenacity with which Confederate soldiers fought underscored their belief in the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. These attributes are the underpinning of our democratic society and represent the foundation on which this nation was built."

Contrast that, Hilliard said, with Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens' "Cornerstone Speech" from 1861, in which he lambasted the Union because it “rested upon the assumption of the equality of the races.”

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea," Stephens said. "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, 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. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.”

Despite his stand (or, perhaps, because of it), Stephens was elected after the Civil War to the U.S. House of Representatives and governor of Georgia.

Those notions of white supremacy are still evident in America, as well as in southern Iowa.

It was just four years ago that residents in and around Keosauqua wrangled with the aftermath of KKK recruitment fliers tossed on lawns by another incursion from Missouri.

Sutton was so rattled by the incident that she drove from her northeast Iowa home to attend a community forum in southern Iowa on the KKK activity.

"You can’t say how someone is being overly sensitive," she said, "because you don’t realize the impact it has had."

'It's beyond disturbing. It's hurtful.'

If Americans, including Iowans, rely on monuments to serve as our official record of history, future civilizations may look at, say, the world's largest popcorn ball in Sac City, or the giant frying pan in Brandon, and get funny ideas about what we valued in the 20th and 21st centuries.

That's a flip way of echoing a serious point about Confederate monuments made by Jessica Welburn Paige, an assistant professor of sociology and African-American studies at the University of Iowa.

"It’s possible to have a record of our history through written texts, through discussions," she said, "without having these monuments and statues and things that for a lot of people in this country symbolize something that’s deeply, deeply disturbing.

"To those of us who are descendants of slaves, it’s beyond disturbing. It’s hurtful, and it doesn’t help to move the country forward."

Paige, Hilliard and other critics of the monuments point out that, if anything, many have been erected in an attempt to rewrite or distort history, rather than preserve it.

They say Confederate flags and monuments — as with the SCV mission statement — often perpetuate the “Lost Cause” myth of the Civil War, that the South fought the war primarily to defend states' rights, not to preserve or even enshrine the institution of slavery.

But the articles of secession drawn up by Southern states made it clear that maintaining slavery, which was ingrained in their economy, was integral to the decision.

The SPLC study identified building booms in Confederate monuments at precisely those times when America's white majority felt most threatened, such as the Jim Crow and Civil Rights eras.

America, Paige said, has yet to confront its own "brutal racial history" as directly and effectively as, say, Germany, which has worked to eradicate its Nazi past.

But down in Davis County, Clancy sits atop her rock and sees a tribute to local history, not a remnant of a vicious dispute stretching back to the Civil War.

“If somebody comes to tear this down, I’ll be sitting right here,” she said. “And I won’t move.”

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to credit Iowa with sending the second-highest number of soldiers per capita to fight with the Union in the Civil War. Ohio sent the most.

Kyle Munson can be reached at 515-284-8124 or kmunson@dmreg.com. See more of his columns and video at DesMoinesRegister.com/KyleMunson. Connect with him on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (@KyleMunson).