I try to stay out of the political fracas. Most of it is pointless anyway....just one party ripping the other party a new one and directing attention away from their own misdeeds. Don't get me started on the banality of the two party system that just won't go away. 8-(
This current removing Confederate statues by the ultra-left extremists is just such a waste of energy and thought.
But it just turned personal to me on Tuesday evening in Columbus, Ohio.
I was born and raised in the South. One of my parents was also born, raised, lived her whole life and died in the South.
If you haven't lived there for a length of time you just have no business commenting on the Southern "way of life and outlook" and you can't know the mind of a true Southerner.
You probably really don't know Southern history. What you were spoon-fed in a school history class wasn't the "whole" story(it was most probably the Union revisionist history as the victor writes the bulk of the history books)and taken as a chapter in a book without any context tells you nothing about being Southern, the Southern causes, the Southern mentality and how the South fits into and relates to the US as a whole.
Add in that I bet most people weren't really paying much attention in those history classes either so many just operate throughout their whole lives after the schooling is done on generalizations and myths that have grown up around historical figures and events.
On Tuesday evening, unknown criminals(because that is what you are if you destroy property)snuck into a cemetery in Columbus Ohio and destroyed a statue in that hallowed ground.
Here is the statue in question atop a stone archway in the cemetery before it was defiled.
Notice that the arch says "Americans", not Southerns or Confederates.
And here is the statue after the act of cowardice. Someone scaled that stone arch and pushed the zinc statue to the ground. The impact broke the head off the statue and the criminals absconded with said head.
I take this personally because, being a genealogist and being very connected to my own ancestral roots, I know that I have family in that particular cemetery.
If you've been reading this blog for a length of time you'll remember that Hubs and I took a trip to Columbus Ohio back in 2012 as a Summer getaway. On that trip we made a stop at this cemetery so I could take photos of my ancestor's headstone and visit with him.
Me in June 2012 at the grave of my 4 x Great Uncle.
That blog post is
HERE is you care to read it. (The part about the trip to the cemetery is near the end.)
Joseph James Hamilton was 43 years old when he enlisted into the Confederate Army on 16 April 1864. He was part of the Reserve forces or the Home Guard. I believe he only enlisted at that time because the Union forces were invading the area of Virginia where his family resided by this date.
Joseph fought in the 1st Battle of Saltville, 2 Oct 1864, when the Union forces tried to capture an important saltworks in Western Virginia. Back in the mid 19th century salt was still a pivotal commodity without which civilization couldn't be sustained, so losing access to a salt works meant death.
Joseph Hamilton was wounded and captured by the Yankees in this battle and transported up North, to Camp Chase outside of Columbus, OH.
Camp Chase began as a training and munitions storage area for Union troops soon after the outbreak of war. As the war raged and time went on it became a facility to imprison captured Confederate POW soldiers.
Joseph Hamilton died there at Camp Chase 6 Dec 1864, just over two months after his capture. He died needlessly from gangrene brought on by infection and lack of medical treatment to the wound he sustained at the Battle of Saltville.
While folks make great noise about Southern POW camps like the notorious Andersonville, little protest is made of all the soldiers who perished in Northern POW camps. I find it much more reprehensible the treatment the Union meted out to it's prisoners of war.
The North had many greater times the supplies, especially medical supplies, than the nearly vanquished Southern states of the Confederacy did, especially by late 1864. Letting any POW held in the North go without needed medical treatment and/or supplies in the North where supplies were plentiful, was excessively punitive and morally unconscionable(dare I say evil).
My photo of the generic Confederate soldier statue taken in Jun 2012.
But I digress......
The fact is that unknown persons broke into this cemetery and defiled it. Besides being a sacred space, a burial ground for 2,260 Americans(mostly POWs but some Northern workers at the camp who died during their time at Camp Chase)this area is also federal property, overseen by the Veterans Administration.
If the perpetrators are caught I hope the legal system persecutes them to the fullest extent of the law.
Why are people lashing out at statues anyway? I just don't "get it". This statue wasn't of any specific historical figure or even in a public space(courthouse grounds, in a park, etc.). This statue was just a generic representative of a CSA soldier standing watch over a small number of Southern men who fought for their states' rights/the Confederacy and were buried far, far from their homes.
I posted the following on Facebook back when this craziness began in Charlottesville. It's not written by me but there are truths in it that need sharing and considering.
"It is a fact of humanity that people need a place to go and grieve their loved ones who pass on. Even if a loved one is cremated, the ashes are lovingly preserved somewhere easily accessible or scattered in a specific place that can be returned to. As human beings, we need a place to go grieve, which is why we go to cemeteries where our loved ones are buried and place flowers or mementos for special occasion and do so regularly.
The truth is the people in the South were the same way. The vast majority of Confederate soldiers did not die at home. They died on a battlefield, in a hellish prison camp or in a hospital far from home. Sometimes the bodies were retrieved but that was not the case most of the time. That is the reason the South is salted with Confederate monuments. Our people needed a place to grieve. How can outsiders come to our home and demand gravestones to our father be removed? How?
Those monuments have stood for 100+ years. How dare you? How dare you?
Confederate monuments are NOT monuments to white supremacy and you know it.
Confederate monument were not erected to intimidate anyone and you know it. They were erected for the grieving family members to have a place to grieve and they put them where everyone in town could have access to them, and see them on a regular basis so as not to forget. We, in the South, do NOT forget.
What you may not know is how the monuments were paid for, erected and dedicated. The majority of the men in the South, did not survive the war and the women, daughters, mothers, wives, sisters, grandmothers and nieces raised the money out of their poverty. Their abject poverty. There are ads in Confederate Veteran magazine that are heartbreaking as it lists the donations from bereaved orphans, wives, and family members of dimes, nickels and quarters. These bereaved persons did without sugar for their tea or butter for their bread in order to raise money to pay for the monuments, which serve as gravestones for their loved ones.
The truth is, the monuments you are removing in our South are gravestones for the ones who did not get to come home......"
A large number of news outlets have recently been saying that erecting Confederate monuments during the Jim Crow era was a deliberate move on the part of political leaders in the South . It was just a way to repress the black citizenry and assert white supremacy during the first part of the 20th century below the Mason-Dixon line.
There may be a grain or two of truth in regard to some monuments but the number of monuments erected after the Plessy vs. Ferguson court ruling was more a coincidence rather than cause and effect. Between suppressed recovery in the South after the war, widespread poverty and the slow recovery of it's citizenry due to an inadequate diet-from 1865 until well after World War I, a delayed response toward erecting Confederate monuments can be easily explained.
Though many would like to point to racism it is not always the cause.
I have a number of ancestors who were Confederate soldiers. Many were killed in action, like John Lee Holt, a school teacher from Virginia who died during Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg. Their bodies were never found and returned home, or were buried in mass graves whose locations are lost to time.
An image of Joseph James Hamilton shared by another descendant of his on Ancestry dotcom.
It is "lucky" that Joseph Hamilton died while imprisoned in Ohio and his burial place is well marked.
At least his people have a place to go to honor his memory and sacrifice.
Removing Confederate monuments will not erase our national past. In order to move forward we need to accurately remember what went before so as not to repeat history.
Sluggy
