Saturday, January 6, 2024
Grand Ballroom (Hilton Union Square)
Confederate monuments have recently taken center stage in both public and academic consciousness. Historians of the Lost Cause often use these statues to show how white supremacists used the Civil War to shape political policies and social norms by reminding viewers that the South is willing to use violence to achieve its goal. Using mapping software to visualize the locations of Confederate monuments can be used to test a number of theories about the different ways monuments have been used to support the Lost Cause. The silent marble soldiers undeniably stand in opposition to local African Americans, but they may also be equally about class and gender. While previous historians, such as Gaines Foster, have catalogued Southern Confederate monuments and some, like the Southern Poverty Law Center, have mapped Confederate monuments and references, no one has yet mapped a detailed visual of Confederate monuments.[1] Some historians have commented that it seems every Southern county and parish has a Confederate memorial. However, when viewed not as a list on a database but as a plotted map, strange negative spaces devoid of monuments appear. For example, in Louisiana, Confederate monuments almost exclusively stand along the Mississippi and Red rivers, which were the prime locations for Antebellum plantations because of their easy access to water transportation.[2] Formerly enslaved people often remained as sharecroppers on the same plantations they used to be confined to, providing the most obvious audience for symbols of the Confederacy’s goal to maintain slavery. But other factors are needed to paint a more complete picture. In addition to having large Black communities, these areas were simply more populated than other regions and likely had more capital in their communities to put towards expensive public art.[3] The poster will use multiple overlaid transparent maps to show how different layers of data can be combined to explore various aspects of the Lost Cause. For example, preliminary research suggests that monuments and lynching sites rarely overlap, indicating that they represent two distinct philosophies regarding white supremacy.
[1] Gaines M. Foster Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).; Southern Poverty Law Center. “Whose Heritage?” February 1, 2022. https://www.splcenter.org/20220201/whose-heritage-public-symbols-confederacy-third-edition.
[2] Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census. Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910: Statistics for Louisiana. 1913.
[3] Wes Muller, “With Census Figures in, Louisiana Turns to Redrawing Political Maps.” Louisiana Illuminator, August 23, 2021. https://lailluminator.com/2021/08/23/with-census-figures-in-louisiana-turns-to-redrawing-political-maps/.