“Furl That Banner”

 

During the past few decades, there has been an ever-growing sentiment throughout the Unites Sates to erase from the public mind, if not from American history itself, all vestiges of the Confederate States of America, and in particular, all memorials dedicated to the heroes, leaders and symbols of the Lost Cause. Following the senseless murder of a number of African-American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, two years ago, and this year’s fatal riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, the mounting cry to remove most, if not all, of the more than fifteen hundred Confederate statues and memorials located in twenty-seven states, both North and South and the District of Columbia, has developed into a raucous harangue that has led to the legislative, as well as the vandalistic, removal of a number of those monuments.

Most Americans undoubtedly believe that such memorials are unique to the South and while over twelve hundred are properly located in the eleven states of the former Confederacy, the remaining three hundred are scattered throughout the North, including a monument placed in Boston Harbor by the Massachusetts chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy over a half century ago to honor the thirteen Confederate prisoners of war who died in Fort Warren on Georges Island. There are even Confederate memorials in such unlikely places as British Bermuda and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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