Think you know your Kentucky history?
Okay, what Bluegrass State native said slavery was a blessing for African Americans because their white masters converted them “from brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized laborers” and provided them “not only with bodily comforts but with careful religious instruction”?
Hint: He’s the same guy who also said white folks like him acknowledged “the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race of men by the Creator.”
And: “We recognize the Negro as God and God’s Book and God’s Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him. Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.”
And: “”African slavery, as it exists in the United States, is a moral, a social, and a political blessing.”
Last hint: His statue has stood tall in an honored spot in the Capitol Rotunda since 1936.
The slavery fan was Fairview-born Jefferson Davis, the first and only Confederate president. Gov. Andy Beshear wants Jeff jettisoned from the statehouse.
“I believe the Jefferson Davis statue is a symbol that divides us, and even if there are those that think it’s a part of history, there should be a better place to put it in historic context,” the Louisville Courier-Journal quoted the governor. “Right now, seeing so much pain in our state and across our country, can’t we at least realize that so many of our fellow Kentuckians [are hurting] … we’re talking about having compassion in terms of COVID, we ought to have compassion for all pain — can’t we understand that it is, at the very least, so hurtful to them? Doesn’t that at least justify it not sitting where it does right now?”
Officials are looking into removing the statue, Beshear said. A move to knock Jeff off his pedestal failed a few years back. But the state did pull off the plinth a bronze plaque hailing Davis as a “patriot” and a “hero.”
On the campaign trail in 2015, Tea Party-tilting, Yankee-born Republican Matt Bevin, Beshear’s predecessor, said Jeff needed to go. But after he won, Bevin changed his mind, probably because he figured out that the Confederate flag-waving, “heritage not hate,” noisy white guys are part of the Kentucky GOP base.
So Bevin started crooning the neo-Confederate tune: getting rid of statues and monuments that glorify the Lost Cause “whitewashes” or “sanitizes” history.
“The argument that removing monuments tries to erase history misses the point,” said Bill Mulligan, a retired Murray State University history professor. “Monuments are not documentation; they assert this person did some good and positive thing that should be remembered.”
Added Mulligan: “They are inherently political in a broad sense. Removing a monument simply states that society no longer sees what this person did as good and positive. It no longer reflects our values as a society. That cannot be clearer than the monuments erected between roughly 1890 and 1920 – secession and waging war to defend slavery should not be seen as something positive to celebrate, especially on government land.”
Mulligan pointed to “a large and growing historical literature that clearly shows the monuments of this era that are at courthouses and cemeteries were statements of white supremacy, even if sometimes unconscious. They are part of a larger effort to rewrite the history of the Civil War by eliminating the main cause, slavery.” He added that the effort “began in the 1890s and to a certain extent continues today.”
Marcus Ray, NAACP Kentucky State Conference president, doesn’t buy the “whitewashing” or “sanitizing” line either. He said Confederate leaders and apologists “starting rewriting history the day the war was lost.” They churned out history books and magazine and newspaper articles that omitted “the brutality and horror that was necessary to keep another human subjected to slavery.”
Those books and articles also left out “the brutality and horror of lynchings and mob violence that surfaced after the Civil War to keep the freedmen in their place.” Instead, they perpetuated “the watered-down version of how slavery was a good thing because those slaves would have still been in Africa in the wild.
“They continued the ‘Birth of A Nation’ — and the ongoing — belief that the descendants of American slaves will always be savage and a threat to European — white — women.“
The white stone statue of Davis is up to its neck in irony. During the Civil War he was anything but a “patriot” and a “hero” to most Kentuckians. They trashed him as a traitor worthy of the gallows or at least a long stretch behind bars.
While Lincoln got only 1,364 votes in slave state Kentucky in 1860, the General Assembly firmly rejected secession in 1861. (The state was neutral for a while, but that was neutrality within the Union.)
Unionism prevailed in every region except the Jackson Purchase. (Dubbed the “the South Carolina of Kentucky,” the state’s westernmost territory was rebel to the core.)
Statewide, thousands more Kentuckians donned Yankee blue than suited up in rebel gray.
During the Civil War, Kentucky Republicans were scarce as May blizzards. But they were the most loyal supporters of Bluegrass State-born Abraham Lincoln and his full use of federal military, economic, and political might to defeat the Southern rebellion.
But even members of the state’s majority party — the conservative, pro-slavery and anti-Lincoln Union Democrats — would have been aghast at putting a Davis statue in the statehouse. (They also would have hated the bronze Lincoln statue, which was unveiled in the Rotunda in 1912.)
The Davis likeness has more to do with how Kentuckians later came to view the war than with the war itself. Kentucky embraced the Confederacy only after Davis’s side was whipped in 1865, historian Anne E. Marshall explains in her book, Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State.
“In a postwar world where racial boundaries were in flux, the Lost Cause and the conservative politics that went with it seemed not only a comforting reminder of a past free of nineteenth century insecurities, but also a way to reinforce contemporary efforts to maintain white supremacy,” wrote the Lexington native, who’s a history professor at Mississippi State University.
The Davis statue and the other Confederate monuments in the South and border states like Kentucky sprouted in public spaces long after Appomattox. They went up in the Jim Crow era when segregation and race discrimination were the law and the social order, and such pervasive racism was buttressed by violence, or the certain threat of violence, against blacks.
The monuments were a stark warning to African Americans: we may have lost the war, but white supremacy is still the rule, just as it was in slavery days.
Ray invites Kentuckians to take an honest look at history, including at least a glance at what Davis and the other Confederates said about slavery and why they exited the Union. A great place to start is Charles B. Dew’s Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War (University of Virginia Press, 2001). “Let’s take a look at why the statue was placed there,” Ray said. “Let’s take a look at what history — ‘heritage’ — it preserves.” He’d like to see “a real conversation about President Davis and what his statue represents.”
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