On the Gospel Coalition web site Joe Carter has an article about the removal of Confederate memorials, “Should Christians Support Removal of Confederate Memorials?” The removal of statues of Confederate generals and other Confederate memorials has been a hot button issue in the South and other parts of the United States for a number of years. In the last few months it came closer to home. First, I received an email from a local pastor campaigning for the preservation of Confederate memorials. Then a MSU assistant football coach drafted a letter to Murray city officials requesting the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee that stands on the courthouse square. Since that time Murray State University and the City of Murray have also called for the statue’s removal.
The statue of General Lee was erected on the square in 1917, 52 years after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia. It was erected during a resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan during the early twentieth century.
During the American Civil War the Commonwealth of Kentucky was divided in its sympathies. Kentuckians fought on both sides. At the outbreak of hostilities the governor of the state supported the Confederacy. The majority of the state legislators supported the Union. The state legislature passed a bill in favor of neutrality. The governor vetoed the bill and the state legislature overrode the veto.
The Jackson Purchase, the westernmost region of Kentucky, in which Murray is located, had strong Confederate sympathies. A convention to succeed from the Union was held in Mayfield. This convention led to the establishment of a successionist shadow state government. Union troops would occupy Paducah at the northwest corner of the Purchase. A number of battles were fought in and around the Purchase.
In 1915 white Protestant nativists organized a revival of the Klu Klux Klan in part in reaction to the surge of immigration that the United States experienced in the early part of the twentieth century. The statue on Murray courthouse square was erected by the Daughters of the Confederacy during this revival.
In the South and elsewhere the Confederate battle flag has been used by the Klan and other groups as a symbol of white supremacy. These groups often express Neo-Nazi sympathies.
In 2016 the Jackson Purchase voted heavily for President Trump. In the wake of the election an element of the Klan attempted to stoke racial tensions in Murray and to recruit new members. A coalition of local pastors led the community in resisting these efforts. Around the same time a Neo-Nazi group also tried to recruit new members on the MSU campus.
More recently two men from Paducah were arrested for threatening and attacking peaceful demonstrators calling for the removal of the statue.
The removal of Confederate memorials is one of those contentious issues into which Christians will be drawn. Joe Carter’s article offers one viewpoint. The local pastor who is campaigning for the preservation of these memorials offered another viewpoint: they memorialize a part of the nation’s history. In the case of the statue on Murray courthouse square two question are frequently asked: “What part of the nation’s history does it memorialize? Is it a part of the nation’s history that we should be commemorating?”
The number of casualties in the American Civil War exceeded the United States’ losses in all its wars from the Revolutionary War through Vietnam War. The largest number of casualties were from disease. Hundred of thousands returned home permanently maimed by the wounds that they had sustained. It was the first modern war—a dubious honor to say the least. Among the forms of warfare and weapons that were first introduced in that conflict were trench warfare, artillery bombardments, massed infantry attacks, observation balloons, an early form of the machine gun, torpedoes, mines, iron-clad battle ships, breech-loading rifles, and chlorine gas shells. It is not a war to romanticize, much less to celebrate. Its horrors are only exceeded by those of World War I.
At a time in American history when the number of casualties from the COVID-19 pandemic far exceeds the casualties of the Vietnam War, it might be better to commemorate all who died in the American Civil War, not out of a sentimental attachment to a lost cause, a cause that treated men, women, and children as less than human and would have kept them in bondage and servitude for the pleasure and the profit of their owners, but as a reminder that war is a terrible thing and a war that is fought between brothers is the most terrible of all.
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