A War Won and a Remembrance Lost: A History of Confiscation, A Failed Reconstruction, and the Dark Legacy of Monuments to the Confederacy

Abstract

The land confiscation that had its first usage under the US government that was utilized against the Loyalists failed in its subsequent use in the Civil War to redistribute land and power. Since the planter aristocracy retained, almost ubiquitously, their pre-war lands, they were able to reenter the political sphere and social elite. The former Confederate elites easily transitioned back into power during Johnson’s amnesty-focused reconstruction plan, which immediately followed with the suppression of black republicans, racist laws, and segregation under Jim Crow laws. Due to the land, power, and wealth being restored to the former masters and their descendants, at the expense of the promises left unfulfilled to the former slaves by the Freedmen’s Bureau and President Johnson, the remembrance of the Civil War was effectively won by the rebellion. As stewards of the “lost cause,” the heirs of the Confederacy built monuments to their cause, influenced the retelling of the Civil War for generations, and even today has a wide following amongst white Southerners. Yet, this remembrance is being challenged with the focal point being the Confederacy’s monuments and statues that embellish, reframe, and celebrate the supposed glory and honor of the Southern State’s heroic stand for states’ rights. In an ironic twist, the issue of the land in which these monuments stand is now the battleground in how the Civil War is memorialized for future generations. In this moment, across dozens of states, the Union is still fighting a war it had won in the field but lost in its remembrance.