Once More: Greenburgh's Confederate Monument - even back in 1897, not everyone was so pleased with this immense problematic memorial

I'm taking a moment from local politics to return to my preoccupation with Greenburgh's Confederate Monument inspired by some recent research findings. 

First background: five years ago, I called attention to the sixty foot tall Confederate Monument that has stood for 125 years in the south-west corner of the Mount Hope Cemetery, hiding in plain sight, near the intersection of Jackson Ave and Saw Mill River Road, within unincorporated Greenburgh but inside the Hastings-on-Hudson zip code.   

Prompted by my inquiries, Town Supervisor Paul Feiner proposed the possibility of the monument’s removal but quickly withdrew that idea when then Hastings-on-Hudson Mayor Peter Swiderski objected.  Swiderski argued that the monument represented reconciliation and should remain undisturbed.  Mt. Hope Cemetery also rejected any change in the monument’s status.  Shortly after his initial proposal, Paul Feiner received an apparently serious threat on his life.  Although I questioned the reconciliationist framing of the monument, any attention given to the monument and its fate quickly faded.

Three years later, in the wake of Charlottesville and then the George Floyd protests which spurred public calls across the South to remove Confederate monuments from public spaces, I raised the issue once more. I sought the input of the Greenburgh Human Rights Advisory Council. The GHRAC - to my surprise - affirmed Swiderski's reconciliation interpretation and argued that, as the  monument stood on private property (Mount Hope Cemetery), it should return to its quiet obscurity and be left alone. I argued against this reasoning, and concluded my response writing:  

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. 

There was no further public discussion. While over the past two years Confederate monuments have been removed from public spaces across the South, Greenburgh's (admittedly complicated) Confederate monument stands undisturbed.  

It turns out that I was not alone in challenging the reconciliationist framing of the monument.  Recently, I found even more strident objections to the Confederate monument coming from Union army veterans 125 years ago.  It is true that several Union army veterans groups participated in the monument's 1897 dedication ceremony in cooperation with Confederate veterans living in the New York area.  However, at least one "Grand Army of the Republic" veterans post bitterly objected.

In the (White Plains) Westchester News, on May 22, 1897, the following appeared, the same day as the dedication ceremony at the Mount Hope Cemetery: 

[copy courtesy of the Westchester County Historical Society]

The James Cromwell G.A.R. Post #466 was founded in 1884 and placed the much more modest soldiers/sailors marker and accompanying cannon in the White Plains Rural Cemetery.  These veterans refused to forget the repellant cause - sundering of the union and, implicitly, preservation of slavery. -for which the "rebels" brought catastrophic war upon the nation, resulting in an excess of 700,000 military dead, and even more deaths of enslaved people ensuing from dislocation, disease, and neglect.  

Predictably, the Cromwell Post veterans' defiant resolutions elicited outrage from the notorious Eastern State Journal:

[Eastern State Journal, June 5, 1897]

Published for years by Democratic Party officeholder and boss Edmund G. Sutherland, the Eastern State Journal had been Westchester County's "official" newspaper during the Civil War when it railed against President Lincoln and sympathized with the Confederacy.   In Freedom Journey, her excellent book about Black Civil War soldiers from Westchester's The Hills community, Dr. Edythe Quinn recounts Sutherland's relentlessly racist editorializing.  Throughout the Civil War, Sutherland printed at the top of his local news page his declaration that "Mr. Lincoln is not the United States Government. The Government is ours, and we owe allegiance to it; Mr. Lincoln is not ours, and we do not owe allegiance to him."  Sutherland died in 1883, but his newspaper reliably projected the forgive and forget approach toward the Civil War in ascendance precisely at the time that Jim Crow became de jure entrenched across the land in the wake of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision the prior year.  

As Lost Cause sentimentality prevailed, along with acceptance of racial segregation, unquestioned for a century, the protests of veterans like the members of the Cromwell GAR Post were drowned out. This legacy of false reconciliation, paid for with Jim Crow and segregation, haunts us still today.  To ignore Greenburgh's Confederate Monument is to ignore Westchester County's complex and problematic past with respect to the Civil War specifically, and with respect to race and American history generally.