The Mt. Hope Cemetery Confederate Monument is uniquely complex and defies easy answers about what should or should not be done to address its existence in our community. I do not offer solutions but only unease at our readiness to agree that the monument should continue to be ignored and left alone as in the past.
Three years ago, I called attention to the Confederate Monument that stands sixty feet tall near the south west corner of the Mt. Hope Cemetery, close to the intersection of Jackson Ave and Saw Mill River Road. At the time, I did not call for a specific remedy, only discussion.
Town Supervisor Paul Feiner proposed the possibility of the monument’s removal but quickly withdrew that idea when then Hastings Mayor Peter Swiderski objected. Swiderski argued that the monument represented reconciliation and should remain undisturbed. Mt. Hope Cemetery also objected to any change in the monument’s status. At the same time, Paul Feiner received an apparently serious threat on his life related to his removal proposal. Although I questioned the reconciliationist framing of the monument, any attention given to the monument and its fate quickly faded.
Now, as Confederate monuments across the South are falling or facing imminent removal, Greenburgh may soon find itself, ironically, as host to one of the largest Confederate monuments left standing.
Beyond Feiner’s initial tentative, and quickly withdrawn, proposal three years ago, there has been zero public call for the monument’s removal. There are no demonstrations or protests or petitions challenging the monument like we are seeing in Southern states. To the contrary, consensus suggests that the obelisk should simply be left alone.
The argument for allowing the monument to return to obscurity is articulated eloquently by Michael Bennett who has led several local history groups and is a Civil War expert and a friend (slightly edited for length):
Statues of Confederate leaders should never have been erected in public spaces. As honorable as someone might believe the individuals to be, they committed treason against the United States. It’s really that simple. Some may say they had a right to secede. We can discuss that if it matters. But with a right or not, they formed an army to fight against the US. You don’t even have to bring up slavery. They started a war, lost it, were forgiven, and were then welcomed back into the fold. And the country went on. The history of what took place should be remembered and taught and studied. No one should have erected monuments to them.
The monuments to Confederate military leaders were erected, quite inappropriately in town squares and at city halls, in large part long after the war ended, and specifically as part of an effort to re-write history and glorify an imagined lost-cause of “heritage and honor.” That’s not what the war was about. It MAY certainly be what the service of some poor boy from Alabama was about. But that’s not why his state voted to secede and draw arms against the United States.
And we, those of us - or our forefathers - who watched those statues go up and who don’t share that view of history let them do it. Taking down those statues now is merely righting a wrong that should never have been committed.
(I’m not speaking of statues and monuments and markers at historic battlefields. That story, and the story of those who were there, is appropriate to tell.)
But I also believe that a memorial marker placed at the final resting place of confederate veterans, by those veterans, especially a marker with a particularly remorseful and conciliatory message engraved, is a very different matter than a monument glorifying the lost cause (of treason for the purpose of perpetuating the institution of slavery) placed in front of a southern park or school or courthouse.
These men weren’t glorifying their cause or expressing their belief that they should still have slaves. The were honoring their friends who they shared a unique bond with, and mourning the loss of so many of their southern brethren so many years before. These were men who survived the war, moved north - to NY of all places - were loyal citizens of the country again, contributed to its development, and left behind generations of descendants who would do the same. If they wanted to note their participation in the Confederate Army on the monument at their gravesite, I’m ok with it.. It isn’t glorifying them or their cause to identify them (or allow them to identify themselves) at their graves.
But put that monument downtown or on the local college campus and it sends an entirely different message, and my opinion changes dramatically.
The monuments to Confederate military leaders were erected, quite inappropriately in town squares and at city halls, in large part long after the war ended, and specifically as part of an effort to re-write history and glorify an imagined lost-cause of “heritage and honor.” That’s not what the war was about. It MAY certainly be what the service of some poor boy from Alabama was about. But that’s not why his state voted to secede and draw arms against the United States.
And we, those of us - or our forefathers - who watched those statues go up and who don’t share that view of history let them do it. Taking down those statues now is merely righting a wrong that should never have been committed.
(I’m not speaking of statues and monuments and markers at historic battlefields. That story, and the story of those who were there, is appropriate to tell.)
But I also believe that a memorial marker placed at the final resting place of confederate veterans, by those veterans, especially a marker with a particularly remorseful and conciliatory message engraved, is a very different matter than a monument glorifying the lost cause (of treason for the purpose of perpetuating the institution of slavery) placed in front of a southern park or school or courthouse.
These men weren’t glorifying their cause or expressing their belief that they should still have slaves. The were honoring their friends who they shared a unique bond with, and mourning the loss of so many of their southern brethren so many years before. These were men who survived the war, moved north - to NY of all places - were loyal citizens of the country again, contributed to its development, and left behind generations of descendants who would do the same. If they wanted to note their participation in the Confederate Army on the monument at their gravesite, I’m ok with it.. It isn’t glorifying them or their cause to identify them (or allow them to identify themselves) at their graves.
But put that monument downtown or on the local college campus and it sends an entirely different message, and my opinion changes dramatically.
On Facebook on June 29, 2020, Greenburgh’s Human Rights Advisory Council posted the following in response to my inquiry about their position on the Greenburgh Confederate Monument (my question came in response to the GHRAC’s endorsing the removal of the Columbus relief statue in Tarrytown).
Like so many Americans who are actively opposing the countless manifestations of racism in the U.S., we abhor the celebration and romanticizing of the Confederacy and those who supported Slavery, segregation and white supremacy throughout America's history. Unlike many of the statues and memorials now under scrutiny, including the Columbus plaque, however, this local cemetery pillar seems to have some notable nuance to it. In this case, these veterans of the South's military who are buried around it chose to live in the North after the defeat of the Confederacy, and wanted to be buried together. They purchased these grave sites and this monument marks their small portion of the larger cemetery. Our Town Supervisor, who initially raised objections to this monument a few years back, subsequently investigated and came to believe -- in large part due to a conversation with the then-Mayor of Hastings -- it was not erected as a celebration of the Confederacy or white supremacy but more as a monument of reconciliation between North and South. The inscription on the monument from the poem “The High Tide at Gettysburg,” by Will Henry Thompson honors all the war dead, not just those of the South, and has more of an anti-war message to it, although it certainly does reference the veterans of the Confederate Army who are interred in its shadow. So this structure seems less of a celebration of the mythical glorious South and its pseudo-romantic Lost Cause than the others. It must also be noted that this memorial is in a private cemetery, not on public land which the Columbus plaque is, as are so many of the monuments and statues that still openly celebrate the Confederacy throughout the country. Their existence has long been troubling and even traumatic to African Americans especially and all anti-racists who walk past them on a regular basis. Many protesters who have long spoken out against these many highly-conspicuous Confederate monuments have argued that they should be relocated to museums and private property and away from public spaces. This one is already there. None of this excuses the fact that these soldiers participated in war against the United States in defense of slavery. But it appears that nothing about the monument praises, glorifies or celebrates that.
As articulated by Swiderski, Bennett, the GHRAC and others, the argument to continue to leave alone the Confederate monument is as follows:
1. It’s located in a private space, not in a public square like most of the offending Confederate statuary being removed.
2. It’s an unobtrusive obelisk, not a statue of Robert E. Lee or a Confederate soldier. No one has ever noticed or been bothered by it.
3. The intent of the monument is to honor a group of Confederate veterans who chose new homes in New York, and not to memorialize the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause” of rebellion in defense of slavery.
4. The message conveyed by the monument and its inscription is sectional reconciliation, not division.
While these arguments appear persuasive, I believe they undersell the complexity of the monument’s intent and the context of its construction.
1. Mt. Hope Cemetery is a private space, but it is supported by the public by a complete property tax exemption which gives the public the right to express interest, although not to determine, its operations. It’s not as though the Town of Greenburgh has no history of intrusion into cemeteries: the town just won a federal court case brought by Ferncliff Cemetery which failed to persuade the Court that the town’s zoning rulings are intrusive. Private property rights do not immunize the owner from public scrutiny when the property at issue – here a 60’ tall monument – is notorious and visible. There can be no other possible explanation for the obelisk’s size but that, while crowning the circle of veterans’ graves in Mt. Hope Cemetery, it was designed to be observed by the passing public. In various studies of Confederate monuments, I cannot find a close parallel example of a monument standing on private space that similarly invites public scrutiny. This private/public blurring is just another aspect that makes this monument unique and complex.
2. Indeed, the monument is a simple obelisk (not a pillar) in contrast with the obtrusive statues of Confederate soldiers commonly found in public spaces in the South. The fact that the obelisk does not broadcast obvious Confederate iconography is a strong argument for its continued neglect by the public. Yet, I am not convinced that previous public obliviousness toward the monument justifies ignoring its meaning, regardless of public engagement in the past or today. Nor does the apparent neutrality of the image presented subsume the message conveyed, and interpreting the message is where I depart from the other commentators.
3. I hesitate to ascribe motivations to the United Confederate Veterans New York chapter that purchased the plot and arranged for the monument funded by Confederate veteran Charles Rousse. We do not know if these men moved to New York for principled reasons as well as economic. We do not know if they foreswore the white supremacy which was the cornerstone of the Confederacy’s cause. We do know, however that for these men, their Confederate military service was so important that they chose to be buried as group of Confederate veterans.
4. To me, the reconciliation message inferred by the proponents of leaving the monument alone is most problematic.
For example, the passage from the poem “High Tide at Gettysburg” inscribed on the monument is mournful and regretful of the waste of war. But when reading Thompson’s entire poem, the context of that regret is the failure of Pickett’s charge on Gettysburg’s third day and the eventual defeat of the Confederacy. Just a few stanza’s above the passage selected for the monument, we read that “Above the bayonets, mixed and crossed, Men saw a grey, gigantic ghost, receding through the battle-cloud, And hear across the tempest loud The death-cry of a nation lost.” Thompson’s poem, while eloquent, is the epitome of post-Civil War Lost Cause mythology regretting the Confederacy’s demise. The veterans who chose the poem for their monument signaled that indeed war is waste, but that lament arises specifically because Confederate lives were lost in defeat.
I agree that Reconciliation is the message of the monument. But this Reconciliation message exists within a specific context. By the May 1897 dedication ceremony at Mt. Hope, post-Civil War Reconciliation had indeed reached its apex: reconciliation, that is, among white Americans.
While white Americans celebrated national reconciliation in the 1890s at ceremonies like the Mt. Hope monument dedication, millions of formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants experienced the war’s legacy differently. The Reconstruction era, when Southern blacks experienced dramatic advances in civil and political rights, was long in the past by 1897.
The white, Southern “redeemers” who overthrew Reconstruction initially found themselves stymied by the constitutional legacy of the Union’s triumph in the Civil War: the XIII Amendment barring slavery, the XIV Amendment ensuring black citizenship, and the XV Amendment promoting voting rights. Determined to retain power, Southern whites resorted to a web of legal and regulatory schemes imposed over two decades which nearly eliminated black voting, restricted blacks’ legal rights, and segregated public spaces and facilities. The result was the pervasive, oppressive system better known as “Jim Crow.” The legal system sanctioned this imposition of apartheid, culminating in the Supreme Court’s notorious Plessy v. Ferguson decision in May 1896 – twelve months prior to the Mt. Hope monument dedication – affirming the validity of “separate but equal.” It is no coincidence that the 1890s was also the pinnacle of construction of Confederate monuments across the South as whites reclaimed public spaces.
As Caroline Janney writes in Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits or Reconciliation, the extent of North and South reconciliation has been exaggerated as Union veterans refused to forgive Southern treason or to forsake their African American comrades in arms. But while many veterans resisted reconciliation, much of the Northern public, who shared the racial prejudices of the Southern whites, willingly put aside the war’s bitterness in service of National unity and, toward that goal, acquiesced in the establishment of formalized segregation in the South. Few Northerners believed in black civil rights to the degree that they were willing to dissent from the public spirit of reconciliation that prevailed by the mid-1890s. Ignoring the erosion of African American rights smoothed the path for ceremonies like the Mt. Hope monument dedication in 1897. David Blight’s Race and Reunion is the seminal work on the emergence and meaning of post-Civil War reconciliation.
To complicate matters further and add yet another tangent, Westchester County had a very troubling history of resistance to the Union cause in the Civil War and interference in the service of African Americans. Perhaps the UCV Chapter knew well they would find little resistance to their memorialization project in Hastings-on-Hudson. For the story of the struggles of Westchester’s Black Civil War soldiers, see Dr. Edythe Quinn’s Freedom Journey.
The “leave it alone” arguments summarized above from politicians, historians, and even a human rights advocacy group may be correct and the only practical response but still leave me uneasy. It does not sit well with me that my town hosts the largest Confederate Monument in the North, private property or not. I don’t have an answer or even a concrete proposal for what do to with the monument. There is no public will for its removal and practicalities would interfere even if this were the case. Contextualization through construction of markers explaining the monument is a possibility. Or perhaps raising funds for a monument to honor the men remembered in Dr. Quinn’s work. Or maybe education through teaching the monument and its context in local schools is the best response. In any event, we need further public discussion and not to continue to ignore our history.
