The Fairfax County, Virginia Board of Supervisors this week set up a task force to suggest renaming two major roads in the county named after Confederate generals, a topic discussed six years ago by CN‘s founding editor Robert Parry.
The task force will come up with new names for the Lee Highway and the Lee Jackson Memorial Highway, the first road named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and the second after Lee and Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, The Washington Post reported. Arlington County is about to rename its portion of the Lee Highway after John M. Langston, an abolitionist who was elected the first black Virginia congressman in the 1880s.
“In Fairfax County, our diversity is our greatest strength and it’s important that we honor and celebrate that diversity,” board Chairman Jeff C. McKay said in a statement. “We cannot ignore what the Lee and Lee Jackson Memorial Highway names represent in our community and especially to our African American neighbors.”
Robert Parry, the founding editor of Consortium News, was ahead of his time, arguing in this February 2015 piece, republished today, that Confederate leaders should not be honored with streets named after them. This was before the movement, now underway, to remove monuments and street names honoring defenders of slavery. Parry writes here about the Jefferson Davis Highway in Virginia and the resistance he met to his idea to change its name. In 2019 Arlington finally changed it to Richmond Highway.
CN‘s current editor’s residence is on Taney Avenue in Alexandria, Virginia, named after Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (1836-1864), who infamously ruled in 1857 with the majority to deny Dred Scott his freedom from slavery. In his written opinion, Taney decried “Northern aggression” against slavery, which he said was critical to “Southern life and values.” So far there is no indication that Alexandria is ready to join Arlington and Fairfax in erasing their connection to this shameful period of U.S. history.
By Robert Parry
Special to Consortium News
Feb. 12, 2015
A new study of Southern lynching of blacks, sharply raising the total to nearly 4,000 victims, adds some context to the decision in 1920 to attach the name of Confederate President Jefferson Davis to parts of Route One, including stretches near and through African-American neighborhoods. That period was a time when the number of lynchings surged across the South and whites were reasserting their impunity. [The Jefferson Davis Highway was a planned nationwide route.]
According to the study by the Equal Justice Initiative, the use of lynching mob killings and mutilations of blacks by hanging, burning alive, castration, torture and other means was nearly as high around 1920 as it was in the latter part of the Nineteenth Century. There was a gradual decline in lynchings in the early Twentieth Century, but the pattern reversed and the use of lynching surged to about 500 during a five-year period heading into 1920.
A Civil War-era African-American soldier and his family. (Encyclopedia Virginia)
That period also marked a determination by many Southern whites to reaffirm the rightness of the Confederate cause and to reassert white supremacy. Thus, in 1920, to drive home the point of who was in charge, the Daughters of the Confederacy had Southern states name portions of Route One after Jefferson Davis, who was hailed as the “champion of a slave society” when he was chosen to lead the Confederacy in 1861.
Besides honoring a dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist who favored keeping African-Americans in chains forever, the Daughters of the Confederacy saw these designations of Route One as a counterpoint to plans in the North for a Lincoln Highway in honor of assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.
But bestowing this honor on Jefferson Davis was also a political message of pro-Confederate defiance that was not limited to the brutal era of 1920. The Jefferson Davis designation was extended to parts of Route 110 near the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, in 1964 as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement were pressing for landmark civil rights legislation to end segregation and as white Virginian politicians were vowing to resist integration at all costs.
A year or so ago, I wrote to the five members of the Arlington County Board and urged them to seek an end to this grotesque honor bestowed on a notorious white racist. When my letter went public, it was treated with some amusement by the local paper, the Sun-Gazette, which described me as “rankled,” and prompted some hate mail.
One letter from an Arlington resident declared that it was now her turn to be “RANKLED by outsiders like Mr. Parry who want to change history because it is not to his liking. I am very proud of my Commonwealth’s history, but not of the current times, as I’m sure many others are.”
I was also confronted by a senior Democratic county official at a meeting about a different topic and urged to desist in my proposal to give the highway a new name because the idea would alienate state politicians in Richmond who would think that Arlington County was crazy.
But the new study on the terrorism of lynching reminds us that attaching Jefferson Davis’s name to roadways wasn’t just some romantic gesture to honor an historical figure beloved by Southern whites who in 1920 still pined for the ante-bellum days when they could own black people and do to them whatever they wished.
Jefferson Davis Highway, Spotsylvania County, Virginia (Famartin/Wikimedia Commons)
The years around 1920 marked a violent revival of the carnival-like scenes in which whites treated the lynching of blacks as a moment for community hilarity and celebration, often posing with their children for photographs next to the mutilated corpses. Stamping Jefferson Davis’s name on a highway that passed near and through black neighborhoods was another way to send a chilling message to African-Americans.
In my 37 years living in Virginia, I have always been struck by the curious victimhood of many Southern whites. Because of the Civil War, which some still call “the War of Northern Aggression,” and the Civil Rights Movement, which finally ended segregation, they have been nursing grievances, seeing themselves as the real victims here.
Not the African-Americans who were held in the unspeakable conditions of bondage until slavery was finally ended in the 1860s and who then suffered the cruelties of white terrorism and the humiliation of segregation for another century. No, the whites who lorded over them were the real “victims” because the federal government finally intervened to stop these practices.
Yet, while some white Virginians remain “very proud” of that history, there has been a studied neglect of other more honorable aspects of Arlington’s history, including the role played by Columbia Pike as an African-American Freedom Trail where thousands of former slaves, freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, traveled north to escape slavery.
Many were given refuge in Freedman’s Village, a semi-permanent refugee camp along Columbia Pike on land that now includes the Pentagon and the Air Force Memorial. Some of the men joined the U.S. Colored Troops training at nearby Camp Casey before returning to the South to fight for freedom, to end the scourge of slavery once and for all.
As blacks joined the Union Army, Confederate President Jefferson Davis ratified a policy that refused to treat black men as soldiers but rather as slaves in a state of insurrection, so they could be executed upon capture or sold into slavery.
In accordance with this Confederate policy, U.S. Colored Troops faced summary executions when captured in battle. For instance, when a Union garrison at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, was overrun by Confederate forces on April 12, 1864, black soldiers were shot down as they surrendered. Similar atrocities occurred at the Battle of Poison Springs, Arkansas, in April 1864, and the Battle of the Crater in Virginia. Scores of black prisoners were executed in Saltville, Virginia, on Oct. 2, 1864.
Yet, while Jefferson Davis’s name remains on roadways through Arlington — and as the Confederate president is effectively honored whenever people have to use his name — there is still no commemoration of Freedman’s Village (though something is supposedly being planned) and no one apparently even knows the precise location of Camp Casey, arguably one of Arlington’s most significant and noble historical sites. (Camp Casey is believed to have been located close to where today’s Pentagon now is, an area that in the 1860s was called Alexandria County before being renamed Arlington County in the Twentieth Century.)
Apparently, recognizing the place where free African-Americans were trained and armed to defeat the Confederacy and end slavery might “rankle” some white Arlington residents.
The late investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s and started Consortium News in 1995.
The Jefferson Davis Hwy almost reached Oregon. There was a stone marker at Hilt, northernmost California town on Interstate 5. For some reason the marker was relocated to Hornbrook, a few miles south. It is still there.
The text of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address:
hXXp://www.abrahamlincolnonline.com/lincoln/speeches/1inaug.htm
This speech had its origins in the back room of a store in Springfield, Illinois. Abraham Lincoln, who lived in Springfield for nearly 25 years, wrote the speech shortly after his election as America’s sixteenth President. Before leaving town in January 1861, he sometimes eluded hordes of office seekers by taking refuge in his brother-in-law’s store. There he used just four references in his writing: Henry Clay’s 1850 Speech on compromise, Webster’s reply to Hayne, Andrew Jackson’s proclamation against nullification, and the U.S. Constitution. The desk Lincoln used has been preserved by the State of Illinois.
A local newspaper, the Illinois State Journal, secretly printed the first draft, which he took on his inaugural journey to Washington. He entrusted the speech to his eldest son Robert, who temporarily lost the suitcase, causing a minor uproar until it was found. Once in Washington, Lincoln allowed a handful of people to read the speech before delivering it. William H. Seward, his Secretary of State, offered several suggestions which softened its tone and helped produce its famous closing. Although meant to allay the fears of Southerners, the speech did not dissuade them from starting the war, which they initiated the following month.
Californians read the speech after it traveled via telegraph and Pony Express. It was telegraphed from New York to Kearney, Nebraska, then taken by Pony Express to Folsom, California, where it was telegraphed to Sacramento for publication. Today you can see the First Inaugural Address manuscript and the Bible from the inaugural ceremony online or at the American Treasures exhibit, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Jeff Davis’ policy of executing or enslaving black United States soldiers was never put into effect. Lincoln immediately checkmated it with his “Retaliation Proclamation” of July 30, 1863, “It is therefore ordered that for every soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed; and for every one enslaved by the enemy or sold into slavery, a rebel soldier shall be placed at hard labor on the public works and continued at such labor until the other shall be released and receive the treatment due to a prisoner of war.”
The numerous atrocities carried out by insurgent fighters were policies of local commanders. The officer who gave the command to butcher the POWs at Fort Pillow was none other than the future founder of the KKK himself, Bedford Forest, known to loyal troops as “that devil.”
The Civil War was a war against the free institutions of the American republic. The slaveholder aristocracy had been contemptuous of democracy from the start (read Madison’s Federalist articles) and when they finally lost control of the White House, they abandoned the charade altogether. In the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which dramatically increased the policing power of the federal government, the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and the 1857 Dred Scott decision, the lobby pushed hard to eliminate all controls over the expansion of slavery into the territories, which the American people wanted open for free homesteading. Coming on the heels of gag rules in Congress, violent attacks on free speech, free assembly, and the free press, it became clear that a radical new “slave power” faction was fast gathering strength, endangering the liberty of all Americans. The Republican Party formed not to end slavery, but to contain the growing power of the aggressive slaveholder lobby by limiting the expansion of the source of its wealth.
I was raised in SE Alabama, so I saw racial prejudice and injustice, and it affected me deeply as a child. Intolerance of any kind is abhorrent to me. In the woke culture today, I’m seeing intolerance, once again. It doesn’t seem that the world will be unified within my lifetime, I fear. Wake up people, but not in a woke culture or white supremecist way. Let’s just love and support one another in spite of differences in culture or skin color. We are all ONE.
I lived in Virginia for several years and was always amazed how, when visiting historical sites and battlefields of the Civil War era, how things were stated by tour guides.
Things like, “Our boys put up a good fight.” When I asked, “Which boys put up a good fight?,” I would receive dirty looks and told, “Confederate soldiers.”
When I would ask, “Who won the war?” no one wanted to comment.
Even worse than the monuments erected to the Confederacy and its leaders, were the deplorable present day working conditions and poverty wages I experienced.
In one sweatshop in Virginia Beach, working conditions were so deplorable and harsh, one elderly Black woman told the plant manager, “Why don’t you just bring back the chains?”
Just recently I visited the Lyndon B. Johnson exhibits in Texas and one exhibit about Civil Rights noted that Texas has more KKK chapters than any other state and Texas is often held up as an example of “the new South.”
I also learned that it is in Texas where what is published in school text books becomes the standard for the entire country and a bunch of right-wing racist bigots dominate the Texas text book commission. So, it is no wonder people have become so ignorant about the Civil War and who the real heroes of this period were.
More people visit the Alamo where, when the truth is told, died for the defense of slavery, than who visit the Lyndon B. Johnson ranch, the Texas White House where one learns the evils of racism and how Johnson ended up supporting George McGovern— another little fact the textbooks omit.
While those like slavery defender Jefferson Davis are given prominence and honored, others like W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson are being written out of history and text books and it is workers paying the ultimate price as Wall Street corporations use racism to try to squeeze more and more production (profits) out of workers using many of the same methods as the slave owners along with the same sick racist ideas modified to better fit “the new South” and its corporations which have replaced the slave plantations for generating tremendous wealth.
It isn’t just the naming of streets and highways in honor of these defenders of human barbarity that is repugnant and indecent— it is the way our society is being built on their very ideas with profits of the wealthy still not being explained in order to put an end to human misery the product of a sick system of exploitation held in place— largely by racism in all of its ugly forms— social, institutional and historic.
But doesn’t a sick society and economic system need to elevate those like Jefferson Davis and all the evils he stood for in order to continue its own evil existence?
Still fighting the Civil War Bob? Considering what the USA has become, a war criminal state, hard to imagine your criticizing any people in any time.
The USA has become what the Confederates always aspired it to be, mr. hammersmith. happy?
Still fighting the Civil War Bob? Amusing: if you look at what the USA has become, one would wonder how you gather the nerve to launch these moralistic attacks.
Fairfax County, VA, changed the name of Rt. 1 from Jefferson Davis Highway to Richmond Highway. I am not sure when, superficial research indicates that its was sometime after 1965. I am surprised by the response in usually liberal Arlington County.
(third attempt at posting this – hope the others don’t eventually show up as well)
Lynching and Jeff Davis Highway
Mr. Parry makes a good start, but I fear he drastically understates the problem. The “culture” in the Old South ranked among the most evil in human history. The heirs of that period haven’t learned anything at all except to continue with the arrogance of the era.
Naming a highway after Jefferson Davis. It’s a deliberate and calculated insult to decency. When I’m driving north on I-75 (somewhere near the Florida state line) I pass a filling station with the largest flag I’ve ever seen. That enormous Confederate battle flag is giving the middle finger to everybody on the interstate. The US and the world were very fortunate that the traitors Jeff Davis and Bob Lee were not very good at what they did. Yes, General Lee was a tactical genius, but had he not also been a strategic moron the world would have become a much worse place than it actually did.
There is not only anger that the North did not recognize the need to compensate direct and consequent damages to slaveholders…
It’s amazing that in 2015 this nonsense is still to be found. The South did not want compensation. No, it demanded total subservience to the loopy system it had constructed, for negro slavery was the will of God!
Why Non-Slaveholding Southerners Fought
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/civil-war-overview/why-non-slaveholding.html
I’ve been tracking down and verifying the information the author presented. So far he’s been spot-on. From a South Carolina lawyer:
Mississippi would “rather see the last of her race, men, women, and children, immolated in one common funeral pyre than see them subjugated to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the negro race.”
http://tinyurl.com/mcgu47r
An 1860 preacher in New Orleans:
We, too, have our responsibilities and trials; but they are all bound up in this one institution, which has been the object of such unrighteous assault through five and twenty years. If we are true to ourselves we shall, at this critical juncture, stand by it and work out our destiny.
This duty is bound upon us again as the constituted guardians of the slaves themselves. Our lot is not more implicated in theirs, than their lot in ours; in our mutual relations we survive or perish together.
Rev. Palmer’s rant described the abolitionists as atheistic monsters – defying God’s directives that negro slavery was a positive good.
http://civilwarcauses.org/palmer.htm
Finishing with the first link:
Reverend Furman of South Carolina insisted that the right to hold slaves was clearly sanctioned by the Holy Scriptures. He emphasized a practical side as well, warning that if Lincoln were elected, “every Negro in South Carolina and every other Southern state will be his own master; nay, more than that, will be the equal of every one of you. If you are tame enough to submit, abolition preachers will be at hand to consummate the marriage of your daughters to black husbands.”
The prospect of a young white woman loving and marrying a Negro was too horrible to contemplate, yet the absolute right of white masters to rape the daughters and wives of negro slaves was not to be questioned.
I’ve found an amazing letter dating to 1911. It was written by a Confederate veteran, and shows the delusional ‘reality’ the southerners had already constructed by then. Sample:
It is a deplorable fact that after more than forty years of civil liberty by the Africans in America so many of them are untrustworthy. In former days the planter without fear intrusted his wife and daughters to “Uncle Tom” and his sable sons. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was a fort of protection for the family. Mr. Tom’s sons are terrors to the AngloSaxon woman. She once could visit her neighbors without fear; but not now. The Southern people are censured because of mobs. Mobs should be discouraged in all righteousness everywhere. The mobocrats do not all reside in the South; and it is Safe to say that mobbing will usually follow the “nameless crime.”
http://tinyurl.com/n62ba5t
Notice that righteous bit about the North lynching and murdering too
Enough! I’m writing a blog post, not a book. How Negro slavery ended white slavery and led to the “melting pot”, why Black US soldiers wouldn’t fight in WW2, and why black students in the South do so poorly in school, the easy American acceptance of torture’s return; for those and many other connections there is no space.
The fact that slavery is wrong does not eliminate “the need to compensate direct and consequent damages to slaveholders per Amendment V.” Any negotiation must consider the alternatives of the other side. The Constitution certainly does require that, not because slave owners should be paid to justice, but because it was previously lawful, so Southerners made commitments that they could not easily change. Now of course, no one could afford to do that: ending slavery with no transition plan or subsidy would have ruined the South. So if the southern-controlled Supreme Court had simply stated in the Dred Scott decision that he was now free, but the liberating state must pay all consequent damages, that would have been legally correct and fair. But it would have been expensive, so the North would have been forced to consider a cotton tax to subsidize wage labor on plantation. But the South missed the chance.
When we simply get angry about the underlying issue of justice, without a practical plan to eliminate the problem, we get war instead of practical progress.
The fact that slavery is wrong does not eliminate “the need to compensate direct and consequent damages to slaveholders per Amendment V.â€
Well sir, I’ve looked at every Civil War history book in my small library, and also checked online with all the keyword searches I can devise. Result: I’ve been quite unable to locate reports of the southern slave-owner class being willing to engage in Compensated Emancipation. Rather the contrary: the idea supposedly met with universal ridicule from the South.
So would you kindly share with me your knowledge of the pre-war instances when the Slave South offered to allow its slaves to become free US citizens and to accept taxpayer money in compensation for doing so. I emphasize “pre-war”, for after they pulled their 1961 “Pearl Harbor” attack on Fort Sumter that possibility disappeared.
1861
Why can’t we have a 5 minute “edit” window?
I agree; I too have found no very deep consideration of the issues of secession or emancipation on either side. As you note, much of the South was as irrationally defensive of slavery as the North was blindly offensive. But I consider the war to be a mistake almost as terrible as the slavery, so I have considered solutions.
The question for me is why diplomacy was so poor? I attribute the lack of debate to the regional demagogues on both sides, spewing fiery rhetoric to command elections, without concern for the consequences. The rise of regional demagogues parallels the aging of the founders, and their generation’s view of regional reconciliation in the interest of nationhood. That tolerance was result not the of threats against secession, but of tolerance of variation, and negotiation. Admittedly, the three-fifths compromise (federal representation of slaves) was hardly a deep reconciliation, but the intent was clearly compromise to make things work. But in 1820-1860 the compromises became ever less agreeable without consideration of what now seem fairly simple expedients. Perhaps forward-looking regional diplomacy is too much to expect, as in Ukraine, or perhaps democracy engenders right wing tyrants, who as described by Aristotle, invent foreign monsters to demand domestic power and silence critics?
Sorry to be verbose.
Not to mention Robert E. Lee, who was nothing more than a traitor to his nation. Many try to justify him by saying that he was loyal to the State of Virginia, but I think it more likely that he defected to the South because he was a white supremacist.
That is the most ignorant statement about Lee I have ever read.I am no racist myself but I am a history scholar.Lee actually freed slaves that he inherited because he felt owning them was morally wrong.his motivations for his choice of loyalty took place in a context that is obviously not on your radar.grant on the other hand married a woman who owned slaves and didn’t see a thing wrong with it.read a book not an article
According to this Atlantic article what you are saying is not supported by historical records as well as Lee’s own written statements.
hXXps://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/the-myth-of-the-kindly-general-lee/529038/
Mr Parry, if you posted an on line petition, you would have my vote. My grand children don’t need to pay honor to such people as Jefferson Davis. Owning people is not what the U.S. should be about.
NOT ONLY SOUTHERN TREES BORE THIS FRUIT
Although it may be argued thast lynching was primarily or most enthusiastically
southern as in the song “Strange Fruit”, a magnificent signature song sung
by Billie Holliday (but not with text written for her as she so often and harmlessly
claimed as the lights dimmed). Lynching was also prevalent in the North.
See the excellent book by Philip Dray, “AT THE HANDS OF PERSONS UNKNOWN:
THE LYNCHING OF BLACK AMERICA” (Random House, The Modern Library, 2002).
This appears to be caused by early identification with geographic location and historic identification. I recently spoke with Virginia professionals of the relative simplicity of avoiding the Civil War (taxing slave product to subsidize free labor and transitional support), blaming the regional demagogues on both sides equally, and met outrage. There is not only anger that the North did not recognize the need to compensate direct and consequent damages to slaveholders per Amendment V, which would have made North/South negotiations rational, but anger that slavery is held against them as a moral wrong that cannot be expunged, rather than what their ancestors considered a practical necessity.
That’s an odd use of “practical necessityâ€, in other words a fake excuse for the mass abuse of other people.
Thereby entirely undermining those who defend the south’s insistence that the enslavement of blacks was some how necessary and right.
Yes, it is an excuse from our perspective. But it was not practical for any plantation owner to unilaterally employ wage labor because the market price would be the same. And it was incorrectly believed by some that plantations with wage labor would not work, having been tried unsuccessfully by northerners in the south.
So the solution was to force up the cotton price to permit wage labor. This was quite feasible because the centers of abolitionism were also the cotton consuming centers: the northern states and England, so they would pay the price. But this had to be done by government, not unilaterally, and it requires a large administration to track slave cotton and assess taxes, or else prohibit slavery all at once with construction of towns etc. for freed slaves. Apparently no one even considered such modern means, it was simply unthinkable.; there is no mention in Emerson, Calhoun, Lincoln, or earlier thinkers. No practical means to eliminate slavery, either gradually or at once, was offered to the South. In that sense it remained a practical necessity however wrongful.
Here’s a practical means-I put you into servitude, split you from your family, and beat you if you don’t like it-out of economic neccessitty.
Apparently no one even considered such modern means, it was simply unthinkable.; there is no mention in Emerson, Calhoun, Lincoln, or earlier thinkers.
This is well known to be false. Lincoln supported compensation over war. The South refused.