Why Knoxville doesn't have many Confederate monuments

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that a Union monument was erected in the Knoxville National Cemetery in 1901. An earlier version of this story incorrectly referenced to the Union monument honoring the 79th New York Highlanders in Fort Sanders, which was erected in 1918.

In Memphis, the city has prepared to sue the state over the removal of a Gen. Robert E. Lee statue. In the Tennessee Capitol, protesters called for state leaders to remove a bust of Nathan Bedford Forest, a Confederate general and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

But as the debate around whether to remove Confederate monuments from parks, buildings and courthouses has become more urgent, Knoxville remains conspicuously absent from the conversation.

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That's because the city has few Civil War monuments of any kind.

"The short answer is East Tennessee was a heavily pro-Union part of the South," said Aaron Astor, a history professor at Maryville College. "Obviously there were many Confederate sympathizers, but East Tennessee was decidedly pro-Union -- and it maintained its pro-Union sentiment after the war."

Other Union states, like Kentucky, shifted allegiances after the war, and the rest of Tennessee remained a Confederate stronghold.

"A lot of people decided they just weren’t going to build anything," Astor said of East Tennessee. "It was a miserable memory, too. The community was so divided that people were not eager to remember it."

The debate over what to do with Confederate monuments was the launching point for a rally in Charlottesville over the weekend that turned violent when white supremacists and neo-Nazis descended on the town and one drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one. Two Virginia state policemen with East Tennessee ties were also killed when the helicopter they were using to monitor the protests crashed.

The "Unite the Right" rally was organized after the city council there voted to rename a park memorializing Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and remove his statue.

One day later, the mayor of Lexington, Ky., said he would be removing two statues of Confederate leaders from the former courthouse there. Other cities across the country -- and the state -- are having similar debates.

The monuments were typically erected during three eras: immediately after the war, during the 1890s and early 1900s and again during the Civil Rights Movement, said Derek Alderman, a geography professor at the University of Tennessee who studies Southern memory and commemorative culture.

The earliest memorials were small and located in cemeteries as people grieved their dead loved ones. In the turn of the century, they became more statuesque and shifted from private memorials to public displays in courthouses and parks, Alderman said.

They were again prominent during the 1960s as the cities in the South enforced Jim Crow laws and used statues of Civil War generals to remind all sides who had the power, Alderman said.

But while Knoxville had Jim Crow laws, it did not have the monuments to go with them.

"They accepted the Jim Crow stuff, but they did not accept the Confederate memory because they still maintained they were pro-Union and they were proud of that," Astor said. "Neither side was that fond of remembering. That was really it."

One of the few Confederate monuments resides in Bethel Cemetery, located off Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue in East Knoxville. The cemetery is the resting place of about 1,600 Confederate soldiers, about 100 of whom died in the Battle of Fort Sanders.

The north side of the monument, which was erected in 1892, reads "Our Confederate Dead." A union memorial in the Knoxville National Cemetery on Broadway was erected shortly after that, said Calvin Chappelle, director of the Mabry-Hazen House and the cemetery.

Just two years earlier, the city hosted a blue and grey reunion, bringing together families from both sides of the war.