New Job, New History

ECW welcomes back guest author Samuel Flowers

One of the great things about being from North Carolina is that every town boasts Civil War history and memory. I recently took a job as an assistant professor with Louisburg College, a small school in Franklin County, north of Raleigh. On the campus lawn near the chapel, a marker by Civil War Trails details how the school was briefly occupied by Union soldiers marching away from the battle of Bentonville and toward Bennett Place in Durham. Although Louisburg College is slightly bigger than it was in 1865, the open ground in front of the marker pictures camp life for soldiers who had marched for weeks and were near what many thought was the end of the war. Although the marker from Civil War Trails is visible on campus, there was another larger monument that used to be a part of the campus.

The college is cut in half due to Main Street running through campus. Next to the pedestrian crosswalk is a large grassy median with a concrete square hidden by a school board sign. What used to sit at this crosswalk was a Confederate Soldier Monument. Unveiled and dedicated in 1914, the monument stood atop a low-rising hill overlooking the town, and students passed under it for the next century.^[1] During the summer protests over the death of George Floyd, some members of the Louisburg community, including faculty at the college, began to call for the removal of the monument. On June 23, 2020, a virtual board meeting voted 4-3 in favor of the monument being removed for the purpose of protecting it from vandalism.^[2] Some local organizations, like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, were concerned that the monument, once removed, would sit in storage for years, so they asked Franklin County for it to simply be moved to a nearby cemetery. After a few months of talks, the Confederate Soldier Monument was relocated to Oakdale Cemetery in Raleigh, where a section of Confederate veterans were buried.

Despite those removals near campus, other Confederate monuments are still located nearby, like the “First Confederate Flag Marker and Monument.” It was built in honor of Louisburg resident and supposed creator of the first Confederate flag, Orren Randolph Smith. Organized and fund-raised by the local chapters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the dedication for the monument marker took place in September 1923.^[3] What was different about this monument was that although the one closer to the college was designed to dedicate Confederate soldiers and their “undying devotion to duty and country,” the flag monument was more of a reflection of the 1920s’ condition of North Carolina. On both sides of the main tablet are two fountain cups, one labeled “White People” and the other “Colored People.”^[4]  According to UNC-Chapel Hill’s database, “Documenting the American South,” this was the original design for the monument, but after I examined it in person, it seems as though the labels on the fountains have been removed. It is unclear when this occurred, but it is possible that it happened around the time the Civil Rights Movement picked up momentum in the fight for desegregation and equal rights.

The past few weeks I took my students out to the markers and monuments to show them that history and memory of the Civil War surround them daily. One student asked as to why, nearly a hundred and sixty years after the end of the war, the Civil War is still a contentious debate. The answer I gave was that the debates over the past few years have not been over the war itself, but instead, the way that war was remembered by the generations who came after. Historian David Blight said it best when he stated that Americans in the decades following the war grappled with the “tangled relationship between two profound ideas – healing and justice.”^[5] For some, the Civil War memory comes through movies, video games, novels, and even college sports teams. For others, their memory of the conflict is monuments and flags that littered their communities along with streets and segregated buildings named after former Confederate veterans. Every county, city, and town in the Tar Heel State has its own story tied to the memory of the war, whether it be a patch of grass where soldiers camped or a monument dedicated decades later for political and social purposes.

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Sam Flowers is an assistant professor and teaches American History at Louisburg College. He received his B.A. from UNC-Charlotte and graduated with his M.A. from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington under the guidance of Angela Zombek, PhD. His thesis looked at the significance of the Overland Campaign from the lenses of military significance, common soldier experience, and memory and memorialization. He is researching the Third North Carolina Infantry as its war service transitioned, perpetuating Confederate myth and memory.

Endnotes:

[1] Douglas J. Butler, North Carolina Civil War Monuments: An Illustrated History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2013), 153-154.

[2] Quillin, Martha. “Confederate Statue Has Literally Divided NC Town’s Main Street for Years. But No More.,” News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), June 23, 2020.

[3] Butler, North Carolina Civil War Monuments, 76.

[4] Description of fountain tablets is found on UNC-Chapel Hill’s database, “Commemorative Landscapes of North Carolina: Documenting the American South.”

[5] David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 3.