With the late-night dismantling of the Liberty Place obelisk, it’s looking increasingly likely that New Orleans will succeed in removing at least some of the monuments it has promised to remove for years. In some respects this is kinda surprising: the political will to do so has been somewhat timid, and the city council and mayor both greatly underestimated the backlash from voters (ranging from racist to apathetic) who are convinced that the monuments represent something inevitably historical, and therefore beyond politics as such.
Of course that’s nonsense, but why it’s nonsense hasn’t gotten nearly enough press. So here is a brief history of how those three of those monuments came to be, and why the city would be better off without them.
Nothing is a “part of history” unless it truthfully represents that history... Take the monument down, for it represents a lie, no matter how unwilling we are to admit it. The Confederacy lost. It deserved to lose.
- local activist Betty Wisdom, letter to The Times Picayune, Feb. 5, 1981; quoted in Dell Upton, What Can and Can't Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South
First, some scene-setting. During the Civil War, New Orleans was captured early and without a fight, despite being the largest city in the Confederacy (by a significant margin) and its major economic engine. Union forces administered the city from mid-1862 through the Confederacy’s unconditional surrender in 1865 and well into the Reconstruction era. Occupation breeds resentment, and resentment, of course, breeds violence. Already in 1866, a march in favor of voting rights for former slaves was met by a violent mob of ex-Confederate counter-protesters (including the police force), and some dozens were killed, upwards of a hundred injured. In response to events like these, the first Reconstruction Act was passed the next year.
But by 1874, Reconstruction was already ending as southern Democrats gained more power, and for the state of Louisiana that benchmark was reached with the 1876 elections, with the Democrats’ retaking of the legislature. One of the major players behind this shift was the White League, a racist paramilitary organization (or rather, an umbrella name for many such local organizations) founded by ex-Confederate Democrats to oppose the so-called radicalism of Reconstruction politics, and to mete out violence against black Southerners. For example, in 1873 the White League joined forces with the Klan and other sympathizers to commit the single worst racial massacre of the Reconstruction Era, murdering up to 150 people in Grant Parish, Louisiana.
The central character in our story of monuments is a White League member named Charles E. Fenner, a former Confederate captain and later Louisiana Supreme Court justice who became a pivotal figure in the state’s Lost Cause revisionism. Here’s how one volume (written in 1941) describes Fenner’s role in the turbulent times:
[After the war] Captain Fenner returned to New Orleans and resumed the practice of law, to which he gave his attention until his death. He was a member of the first legislature after the war. In 1880 he was appointed an associate justice of the Supreme Court of Louisiana from which he resigned in 1894, after a continuous service of fourteen years. During the era following the Civil War when the negro element became so abusive to the whites and the Crescent regiment of volunteers in old state militia was organized by the White League, Judge Fenner was made Colonel.
- Herman De Bachelle Seebold, Old Louisiana Plantation Homes and Family Trees, p.355
On September 14, 1874, simmering local (read: white) opposition to the abusive “negro element,” meaning the managed government of Reconstruction and protection of black suffrage, burst into the largest of its violent acts of rebellion. In the words of coup leader General F.N. Ogden, scion of a large slaveowning family, it was hard to imagine an “injustice so great” as life under Reconstruction. This injustice led to a “popular” uprising against the restrictive Republican government installed over Louisiana, pitting thousands of white militia against local police. The coup attempt was largely carried out by local White League chapters, who installed a temporary government for three days until federal troops arrived to scatter them.
But this failure of the Liberty Place coup was only a short-term setback in the counter-Reconstruction, displaying the increasing boldness of the movement: its long-term success was evident in the way it galvanized white southerners to strike a final blow against Reconstruction, which was officially ended by newly-elected President Hayes the next year. Jubilant Democrats now controlled local government. One of the greatest beneficiaries of this tidal shift was the Lost Cause movement, an ideology broader than merely immediate politics, which sought to recast the Civil War as a noble defeat in the name of white supremacy and the promise of renewal once the chains of Reconstruction were removed.
After the death of Robert E. Lee in 1870, a group of ex-soldiers had founded a monument society to design and build a statue to the general, despite Lee’s total lack of connection to the city: Lee would stand as an avatar for Southern resilience against Northern tyranny, a daily reminder that Reconstruction’s days were numbered. Broader enthusiasm for the project was slim, and donations hard to come by — that is, until the Liberty Place coup and its aftermath. As Confederate Veteran wrote a few years later, the Democratic victories in 1876 provided the city’s white population with the impetus to begin constructing their Confederate hagiography in full force:
Those [pre-1876] were dark days with every citizen of Louisiana, and poverty and anxiety sat by every honest hearthstone in New Orleans. Subscriptions came [for Lee’s monument], but not as the hearts of the people would have given if able, and the enterprise languished. In 1876 the overthrow of radicalism and negro rule in Louisiana was about accomplished. There was a rift in the dark cloud that hung like a pall upon New Orleans, and a reorganization of the association was effected on the 18th of February of that year.
— Confederate Veteran, vol. 6, no. 12 (Dec. 1898), p. 549.
In other words, the backlash against “radicalism and negro rule” had resurrected the moribund attempt at monument-building (literally moribund: most of the original fund’s board members were already dead) with a new sense of purpose. The new president of the Lee Memorial Fund was, as you can probably guess, our friend and White League colonel Charles E. Fenner, who also composed the keynote address for its unveiling, a long and winding defense of Southern secession that praised Lee as “the chivalric chieftain of the lost cause.” The term “Lost Cause” had been coined just ten years before by historian Edward Pollard, but had recently become a widespread talking point thanks in part to the publication of Jefferson Davis’ memoirs in the early 1870s (Davis himself was present at the Lee monument unveiling).
With Lost Cause ideology gaining popularity across the South and Fenner’s success driving up subscriptions for the statue, New Orleans was slowly being transformed into a city-wide monument to enduring White Supremacy. In the 1880s, veterans’ benevolent associations had statues of Stonewall Jackson and Albert Sidney Johnston added to Metairie Cemetery. The Liberty Place obelisk, celebrating the attempted coup, went up in 1891. The latter listed the names of the conspirators who had briefly taken over the state government, and in the 1930s, the city added an inscription making explicit to passersby the purpose of that coup: it “recognized White Supremacy in the South and gave us our state.” (The “compromise” plaque added in 1993 commemorates victims from “both sides,” which is just... wild.)
Meanwhile, Jefferson Davis continued his Lost Cause tour of the South through the late 1880s until he fell ill in New Orleans. His days numbered, Davis was taken to the home of — guess who? — our good friend Charles E. Fenner to live his last weeks in relative peace. After Davis’ death Fenner began advocating in earnest for a monument to the former Confederate president. Fenner lived long enough to deliver an address at the dedication of the Davis statue in 1911, an opportunity he took to lament the end of slavery (in Dred Scott terms, no less) as he had many times before. In Fenner’s version of history, Davis had become the South’s ultimate symbol of martyrdom, the man who alone “had to bear the brunt after all others made their peace, whom the North proscribed and visited with obloquy.”
If the work of Confederate apologists was limited to erecting monuments, it’d be bad enough, but as the White League was absorbed into the Louisiana National Guard and its brothers-in-arms in the Klan grew in power, violence against black Southerners and their sympathizers spiraled out of control. Former members of the League and of associated groups like the Knights of the White Camellia murdered dozens of people in the small town of Thibodaux. One Louisiana county in particular earned a gruesome nickname for the sheer number of people murdered over these decades.
Others installed themselves at all levels of local and regional government. It is against this backdrop that we get, for example, the towering injustice of Plessy v. Ferguson, arguing that the Constitution had permanently enshrined the separate and unequal status of black Americans into law. The case had begun in New Orleans through the efforts of an early civil rights group, the Comité des Citoyens. Do you want to guess which of the state’s associate justices wrote the 1893 opinion for the Louisiana Supreme Court? Do we even need to play this game anymore?
There’s a danger in this kind of historicism, linking everything to a single bad actor, so I want to be clear: Fenner was a major but not the sole member of the White League, he was president but not the sole officeholder in the Monument fund, he was hardly the only friend of Jefferson Davis or only justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court. What happened — what continued to happen for a century after the Civil War — was not the sole responsibility of Charles Erasmus Fenner, Sr. But recognizing him for what he was, and his goals for what they were, helps us avoid the bigger historical sin that we commit as a culture, the belief that certain things happen because of “the times,” that it’s “nobody’s fault” but some vaguely-understood “history,” that these are subjective and uncharitable interpretations of public motivation that can’t possibly be understood.
Fuck that noise: Fenner tells us exactly what we need to know about these monuments, about what they represent, and what he wants them to say to us in the future. Our apathy and ambivalence toward them today, our treatment of them as the normal historical backdrop of the city, is just another long-term victory of the Lost Cause movement.
Of course there are people who argue that the monuments are now part of history, and as such should be protected, even if only for “teaching the controversy.” I can’t think of a weaker justification for maintaining a willful act of racist, historical revisionism — a revisionism that simultaneously erased the histories of the “negroes and radicals” who stood against it — than an appeal to a process that has never taken place and shows no signs of ever happening in earnest. Next time someone tells you “heritage not hate,” ask them if they know the name Charles E. Fenner. Ask them if they’ve ever investigated that heritage in earnest.
Urban landscapes are in constant states of renewal and reassessment: Lee Circle is no more or less an inextricable part of the city’s history than the Place du Tivoli that preceded it, or than whatever (we hope) will succeed it in the future.
So in closing, I’d like to savor the unintentional resonance of this line from Fenner’s eulogy on Lee, which looks mighty different a hundred and fifty years later:
In such an hour let some inspired orator, alive to the peril of his country, summon the people to gather round this monument, and, pointing to that noble [sic] figure, let him recount his story, and if aught can arouse a noble shame and awaken dormant virtue, that may do it.
That may do it, indeed.