Mississippi Civil War Monuments

Timothy Sedore

Description

Soaring obelisks, graceful arches, and soldiers standing tall atop pedestals recall the memory of the Civil War in Mississippi, a former Confederate state that boasts more Civil War monuments than any other.
In Mississippi Civil War Monuments: An Illustrated Field Guide, Timothy S. Sedore combs through the Mississippi landscape, exploring monuments commemorating important military figures and battles and remembering common soldiers, from rugged veterans to mournful youths. Sedore's insightful commentary captures a character portrait of Mississippi, a state that was ensnared between Northern and Southern ideologies and that paid a high price for seceding from the Union. Sedore's close examinations of these monuments broadens the narrative of Mississippi's heritage and helps illuminate the impacts of the Civil War.
With intriguing details and vivid descriptions, Mississippi Civil War Monuments offers a comprehensive guide to the monuments that make up Mississippi's physical and historical landscape.

List of Maps

Preface

Introduction

1. Vicksburg National Military Park

2. The Vicksburg National Monument Park Landscape

3. Northern Mississippi

Alcorn County

Tishomingo County

Tippah County

Prentiss County

Lee County

Pontotoc County

DeSoto County

Lafayette County

Yalobusha County

Tallahatchie County

Chickasaw County

Monroe County

Grenada County

Bolivar County

Washington County

Leflore County

Carrol County

Montgomery County

Oktibbeha County

Clay County

Lowndes County

4. Central Mississippi

Humphreys County

Holmes County

Attala County

Winston County

Noxubee County

Yazoo County

Madison County

Neshoba County

Kemper County

Lauderdale County

Rankin County

Hinds County

5. Southern Mississippi

Adams County

Jefferson County

Claiborne County

Copiah County

Lincoln County

Amite County

Jones County

Jasper County

Clarke County

Wayne County

Forrest County

Pearl River County

George County

Harrison County

Selected Sources

Sujets

• HISTORY
• Héroes
• Yanqui
• Confederación de Sistemas Independientes
• Interest group (disambiguation)
• Monuments of Japan
• GUIdebook
• Point of interest
• Skirmisher
• War memorial
• Confederacy
• Travel
• Military
• South
• Building
• Museum
• History of the Americas
• American Civil War
• Yankee
• Vicksburg
• United States
• Battles
• Union
• KY
• MS
• Guerre de Sécession
• Tours
• Architecture

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 03 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780253045591
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 112 Mo

Extrait

MISSISSIPPI CIVIL WAR MONUMENTS
MISSISSIPPI CIVIL WAR MONUMENTS
An Illustrated Field Guide
TIMOTHY S. SEDORE
Indiana University Press
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2020 by Timothy Sedore
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sedore, Timothy S. (Timothy Stephen), author.
Title: Mississippi Civil War monuments : an illustrated field guide / Timothy S. Sedore.
Description: Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019020822 (print) | LCCN 2019021898 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253045577 (ebook) | ISBN 9780253045553 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780253045560 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Mississippi-History-Civil War, 1861-1865-Monuments-Guidebooks. | Confederate States of America-Monuments-Guidebooks. | Monuments-Mississippi-Guidebooks. | Monuments-Southern States-Guidebooks. | Soldiers monuments-Mississippi-Guidebooks. | Soldiers monuments-Southern States-Guidebooks. | War memorials-Mississippi-Guidebooks. | War memorials-Southern States-Guidebooks. | United States-History-Civil War, 1861-1865-Monuments-Guidebooks. | Collective memory-Mississippi.
Classification: LCC F342 (ebook) | LCC F342 .S43 2020 (print) | DDC 973.7/6-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020822
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Dedicated to my wife and fellow traveler,
Patricia
Faith, hope, love .
Dedicated to my parents,
Michael and Annie M. Sedore,
from the North and from the South, respectively, who formed a union that lasted fifty-six years .
In memory of Michael Sedore s service, US Army Air Force, 1941-1945 .
Contents
Maps
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Vicksburg National Military Park
2. The Vicksburg National Military Park Monument Landscape
3. Northern Mississippi
Alcorn County
Tishomingo County
Tippah County
Prentiss County
Lee County
Baldwyn
Pontotoc County
Marshall County
DeSoto County
Lafayette County
University of Mississippi Campus
Yalobusha County
Tallahatchie County
Chickasaw County
Monroe County
Grenada County
Bolivar County
Washington County
Leflore County
Carroll County
Montgomery County
Oktibbeha County
Clay County
Lowndes County
4. Central Mississippi
Humphreys County
Holmes County
Attala County
Winston County
Noxubee County
Yazoo County
Madison County
Neshoba County
Kemper County
Lauderdale County
Rankin County
Hinds County
5. Southern Mississippi
Adams County
Jefferson County
Claiborne County
Copiah County
Lincoln County
Amite County
Jones County
Jasper County
Clarke County
Wayne County
Forrest County
Pearl River County
George County
Harrison County
Selected Sources
Index
Maps

Mississippi Regions

Vicksburg National Military Park

North Mississippi

Central Mississippi

Southern Mississippi
Preface
T HIS BOOK is based on a quest to come to terms with the way the American Civil War is commemorated in monument form on the Mississippi landscape. If America is a venture in exegesis, as historian Sacvan Bercovitch avers, then it seemed appropriate to test that proposition by examining the public text of Civil War monumentation in the Southern state where the decisive campaign of the war-at Vicksburg-was fought.
Over the course of four successive summers, I traveled across Mississippi in order to document some eight hundred Civil War monument inscriptions, images, and settings. We drove by car, my wife and I, often working as driver and spotter, moving from county to county for several weeks each summer. During the intervening academic years-fall, winter, and spring-the archive was shaped and edited into its present form. This task was often laid aside in favor of family responsibilities, professional obligations as a professor of English, the pursuit of a seminary degree, and preaching and ministry obligations.
It was always close at hand, however, and these interruptions enriched my experience with this archive. That was one of my goals for this project. It was my desire to live with the text and at least imagine something of the experience of the war that these monuments commemorate. From that experience I can testify that the words and images have a life of their own, even in the Bronx, even twelve hundred miles from Vicksburg. They form a kind of liturgy on the landscape that is worthy of extended consideration, scrutiny, and meditation.
It is on this basis that I aver that the complexity of this multimedia text has been misjudged, if for no other reason than it has never been read collectively. Other forms of media dominate public discourse today, but Civil War monuments still command public space in the way generations of Americans in the North and the South wanted the war to be remembered. The words and images emplaced in plein air on monuments across Mississippi (most of them Union) are variously cryptic, revealing, hopeful, vexing, offensive, banal, and provocative. Read collectively or holistically, it is more than this: it is a testimony to the best and worst in humanity.
Just weeks after completing the field research for Mississippi (and one day after completing the field research for Tennessee), protests erupted near the statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. In February 2017, the City Council of Charlottesville voted to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee. On August 10, white nationalists objected to the city s plan to remove the statue; counterdemonstrators opposed them. The demonstration descended into violence, resulting in the death of a counterdemonstrator and two state troopers. Further, it drew national attention, controversy, and opprobrium to this genre. Among other events, four Confederate statues had already been removed from public sites in New Orleans in May 2017. Four Confederate statues were removed from public sites in Baltimore in August. Also in August, administrators at Bronx Community College, CUNY, arranged the removal of busts of Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. Stonewall Jackson from the Hall of Fame. In December, statues of Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest were removed from sites in Memphis.
In the wake of this violence, polemics, and other actions, I have been led to question how to reconcile this sudden storm with a long-term movement that has no comparable history of controversy.
There are at least three ways of looking at this phenomenon, some of which I have considered in other books in this series. First, although many monuments represent causes that contemporary Americans find objectionable, immoral, or racially insensitive, numerous courthouse monuments were erected to commemorate veterans service rather than advocate causes, in the same way that monuments were erected to commemorate the service of men and women of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the gulf wars. Second, many Confederate cemetery monuments are focused on mourning the dead rather than politics-again, much as many veterans monuments of other American wars are. Not always, of course, but often enough for readers to scrutinize each monument on its own terms. Politics was one thing; monument commemoration another. A careful reading of the county, state, and cemetery monuments will show that they make only infrequent reference to particular battles. With a few exceptions, the emphasis is on collective sacrifice.
I am not Southern, nor am I a politician. I do not know what the future holds for this archive. It may not matter what the monument makers were trying to express. Every age is political, and while it may be the case that cemetery monuments on private ground are ceded sanctity, the presence of sentiment and commemoration of Confederate soldiers in public space, such as courthouse squares, may be deemed offensive and sufficient cause to remove them.
There are compelling reasons to conclude that this is because-third-monuments symbolize a continuum of conflict whose course cannot be arrested or controlled. Why this is, is beyond the scale of this book to examine, but the outlines of the phenomenon are discernable. Reflecting on this phenomenon, historian Gregory P. Downs, author of After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War , writes that since the war, many of America s military conflicts have followed the same course as that of the trajectory established at Appomattox. He continues:

Cheers at the end of fighting are replaced by bafflement at the enduring conflict as the military struggles to fill the defeated government s role, even as the American public moves on. After defeating Spain in the Spanish-American W