Wade Hampton, Robert E. Lee, John C. Calhoun, and Kirby Smith
I read this article while waiting at one of my two appointments earlier. I’m compelled to share it with my Fifth Column friends…
Mother Jones
When a statue of civil rights icon Rosa Parks was unveiled in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall in late February, it joined an exclusive club. The collection includes generals and statesmen, inventors and priests—as well as some of the most notorious leaders of a five-year armed insurrection that left 600,000 people dead in the name of protecting white Americans’ rights to own black Americans as slaves. What all the people portrayed in Statuary Hall have in common, with few exceptions, are two things: They are white, and they are men.
There is one Latino represented in the collection today. There are six American Indians, one Hawaiian, and zero African Americans. (Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. are both featured as part of a separate collection.) If it were any less diverse it would look like the Senate. But if the Architect of the Capitol is uncomfortable with the composition of its collection, it has an odd way of showing it. The biographies of the collection’s most notorious members make no mention of their hard-earned legacies perpetuating and reinforcing a culture of white supremacy.
According to Hilary Shelton, the Washington director of the NAACP, the collection’s biographies amount to a “whitewash” of history.
“It becomes revisionist when they don’t talk about the real context in which these struggles that are going on,” Shelton told Mother Jones. “We would not want to see them edit it out either. But we would like to make sure that there is a clear understanding of what was going on in the country at those times.”
Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy and one of two Georgians in the collection, is described in his official bio as “a dedicated statesman, an effective leader, and a powerful orator.” But his most famous oration, the 1861 speech in which he explained that that the South’s “foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man,” goes unmentioned—as do all of the blemishes on his record. The biography make no effort to explain how someone whose singular legacy split the country in half might be considered a statesman.
Representing the South Carolina delegation is former Senator, Vice President, and Secretary of War John C. Calhoun—who blocked the annexation of Mexico on the grounds that only white people could be free—and Wade Hampton, a Confederate cavalry commander best known for expediting the end of Reconstruction in his state through a paramilitary organization known as the Red Shirts, who massacred black voters. On his Capitol résumé, Hampton is described as “a symbol of South Carolina politics,” glossing over the bloody tactics that made him so.
As journalist Nicholas Lemann documented in Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War, “an anti-Reconstruction historian later estimated that 150 negroes were murdered in South Carolina during the [1876] campaign, while the Democrats’ official leader…was campaigning as a statesman.”
Related articles
- Villain or Hero? The truth about Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy. (burnsandcohistorical.com)
- Rosa Parks Enshrined in Statuary Hall, but so is Alexander Stephens (guardianlv.com)
