November 10, 1916 was a pleasant fall Friday in Georgetown, Texas, with a clear blue sky and a high of 73 degrees. Fifty-one years after President Lincoln’s assassination, the closely-knit community had a growing population of 2,871. Southwestern University, founded in 1840, moved to its present location on the eastern side of town in 1870. Georgetown and the University were halves of a whole, with the 29 faculty and 764 students being active members, civic leaders, and residents of the community. The excitement about the day’s event—a statue unveiling before the county courthouse—had been building for months. An article published in the Williamson County Sun two months prior proclaimed, “This monument should be erected to commemorate for all time the bravery and patriotism of the soldiers of Williamson County who fought for the Lost Cause more than half a century ago.”

The speakers that day had impressive credentials and engendered great respect from local constituents. James P. Buchanan was a 13-term congressman and chair of the House Committee on Appropriations for four years. (After Buchanan’s death in 1937, Lyndon Baines Johnson won a special election for Texas’s 10th Congressional District, thus starting his political career.) Kate Daffan, affectionately referred to as Katie, served five terms as president of the Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), was third vice president general of the UDC, and was a life member of its executive board. Her father was an enlisted Confederate soldier and fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the war: Seven Pines, Thoroughfare Gap, Suffolk, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. A chapter of the UDC had been founded in Georgetown twelve years earlier, named after Colonel Samuel D. Sanders, a South Carolina native and plantation owner who had fought for the Confederacy. After coming to Texas, he became a faculty member at Southwestern. Sanders’ son, Samuel G. Sanders, was a key faculty member who was deeply influential at Southwestern; his daughter was also listed as a member of the faculty. When the UDC came to Georgetown, the Sun urged “all the ladies in Georgetown, who are eligible to membership, to join this chapter… . The old vets expect and request you to do it.”

Not one to miss an opportunity for local businesses to prosper, the Sun tied the event to holiday shopping:

There will be a large crowd of people in Georgetown on this day to see the unveiling of the CONFEDERATE MONUMENT. There will also be speeches made by men of National Reputation that will be worth hearing. For the benefit of those who can not [sic] come to Georgetown every day, and who would like to be here for this special occasion we are making some inducements for them to come and do their shopping.

The Southwestern University student newspaper, The Megaphone, included a mention of the event:

Unveiling Confederate Monument on Court House Lawn, South Side. Hon. James P. Buchanan, Member of Congress, will deliver the address at the occasion. Miss Kate Daffan will also speak. Music by the Y.M.B.L. Band and the Southwestern University Glee Club. The Students and the Faculty of Southwestern University are Invited.

Friday’s festivities began at 2:00 p.m. with a crowd of approximately 5,000 people. The Southwestern faculty canceled afternoon classes.

Leading the parade through town, marching behind “the old flag” (the stars and bars), were 45 elderly Confederate soldiers followed by members from local chapters of the UDC, several hundred children from area schools, and undergraduates from Southwestern University.

Williamson County Judge Richard Critz was the first to make remarks:

… the purpose of the occasion, more than fifty years after the war, is not to rake up the ashes of the past and to rekindle the animosities engendered during the strife, but as true sons and daughters of the Confederate soldiers to express anew the love and reverence in which the South will ever hold them. The monument was erected … to the heroism of the men who, for four years, made sacrifices, endured hardships and incurred dangers for a cause they believed was right, and while we are today loyal to the stars and the stripes, we are loyal also to the memory of the stars and bars, and the South as a people will hold in reverence forever the greatest army that ever marched to battle in any country.

Daffan was similarly effusive, encouraging the crowd to rejoice and give thanks: “It is the custom of all countries … to build monuments to commemorate important events, honor great deeds, and to mark the progress of civilization.” She was quick to clarify that the “purpose was not to keep alive any sectional bitterness, but to honor bravery and patriotism.” She concluded by emphasizing “the necessity of studying history and keeping a close watch so that no injustice shall be done to [sic] the cause so dear to every Southern heart.” At the conclusion of her speech, a thousand school children sang “Dixie,” which elicited a “Rebel yell, and prolonged applause … as the drapery was drawn revealing the beautiful marble statue.” The celebration ended with A. L. Manchester, dean of the Fine Arts Department at Southwestern University, and the Glee Club singing, “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” with the crowd silently listening with “tears in many eyes.” Southwestern students departed before the conclusion of Buchanan’s address as they were required to return to campus to attend a football game.

What goes unmentioned in the local newspaper’s stories or the speeches given that November day was any mention of the 599 Black citizens of Georgetown, who represented 21% of the population as compared to just 4% today, or their reactions to the ceremony. The first Blacks who arrived in the area in the 1840s were enslaved and worked on farms or ranches and in homes. By 1916, they and their descendants were no longer enslaved, but were subjected to the racial caste system of Jim Crow that legally sustained Whites’ dominance over Blacks for another 50 years until the Civil Rights Movement helped dismantle it. 

The implicit whiteness of the Georgetown monument unveiling ceremony is reminiscent of what Frederick Douglass described as a “scorching irony” in 1852, when he delivered his incandescent “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” speech:

I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.

This absence that Douglass identified is reflected in the speeches and news accounts of the time and brings to mind Toni Morrison’s 1992 Playing in the Dark, where she concludes: “The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination.”

The Georgetown celebration of the monument, a half century after the Civil War, served to honor elderly veterans before they died, as well as those who had fought. Yet, the monuments “were as much about the past as they were the present,” according to historian Gaines Foster, and represented multiple purposes and messages. The statue of a humble soldier was a reminder of a hierarchal Southern social order, “when Confederate soldiers loyally followed aristocratic leaders like Lee into battle,” and also served as public notice that the Lost Cause and Jim Crow were firmly in place. That the statue was referred to as a monument, indicating “a victory achieved, a heroism, as well as a defeat to be mourned,” instead of a memorial honoring the dead  was a deliberate choice, according to Katherine Hite in her article “Texas, monuments, toward a politics of self-reckoning.” 

The Lost Cause the Sun referenced was the Southern belief that the war was a conflict over states’ rights, a conflict the South lost while fighting for their rights to self-determination. Yet the historical record is in conflict with this revisionist ideology. In January 1861, the Texas Secession Convention met in Austin, the state capital, and on February 2 adopted “A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union.” The document makes it clear that Texas seceded to maintain white supremacy in general and the institution of slavery in particular:

[Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery—the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits—a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy… . We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

 That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations. 

Confederate and Union soldiers possessed a clear understanding of the reason for the war: “The fact that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of the infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun,” wrote a Union soldier in 1862. “Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks is either a fool or a liar,” wrote a Confederate soldier for his brigade’s newspaper that same year.

By 1871, Douglass warned of a growing revisionist narrative, namely “the spirit of succession,” that was taking form “as a deeply rooted, devoutly cherished sentiment, inseparably identified with the ‘lost cause’, which the half measures of the Government towards the traitors has helped to cultivate and to strengthen.” By the 1880s the myth of a bucolic South and adoration of the Lost Cause was firmly in place. Historian W. J. Cash noted in his book, Mind of the South, that “it is probably no exaggeration to say [Southerners] were to become in Reconstruction years the most sentimental people in history… . [The] Southern legend … moved, more powerfully even than it moved toward splendor and magnificence, toward a sort of ecstatic, teary-eyed vision of the Old South as Happy-Happy Land.”

The demand for Confederate monuments increased during two distinct eras in the 20th century: the first came as the 50th anniversary of the war approached along with the rise of Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan, and resegregation after the end of Reconstruction, during which time the Georgetown statue was erected. During the 1920s, it is estimated that as many as 400,000 Texans belonged to the Klan. The second demand occurred during the Southern “massive resistance” to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Over the years, despite being denied education and living under Jim Crow laws, some Black citizens of Georgetown had managed to acquire property, started small businesses, and were regarded as highly skilled cowboys. The Rev. Richard Haywood founded the Wesley Chapel AME (African Methodist Episcopal) Church in 1869, which stands today at 508 W. Fourth St. On that November day in 1916, the formerly enslaved doubtless well-remembered another date: June 19, 1865, or “Juneteenth,” when federal troops arrived in Texas and brought an end to slavery in the state two and a half years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, six months after the passage of the 13th Amendment, and two months after the end of the Civil War. And while today Juneteenth is a day of celebration, recently made a federal holiday, it awakens a similar “scorching irony.” The Black citizens of Georgetown lived both morally free and politically enslaved for decades, yet there is no public recognition honoring their heroism or their “endured hardships and incurred dangers.”

For over a century now, a Confederate statue has stood on Williamson County property in Georgetown directly in front of a Beaux-Arts courthouse in the middle of what many consider to be the most picturesque town square in Texas. For the past 106 years, people have walked past the statue. As is the case for so many monuments, in so many towns across the United States, it has now become a battle flag of sorts inciting opposing sides—North and South, Black and White, present and past—in an effort to determine who will write (or right) our future. As contemporary historians have asserted, despite their marbled and weighty dimensions, these statues were always meant to be battle flags in a Civil War that appears to many never to have ended. 

However, as complex as the issues are, responses to these Confederate relics have become relatively simplistic: tear them down or keep them up; erase the past or enshrine it. There are nuances to this debate needing to be addressed in order to move past the question of what to do with this particular statue and toward framing a much more difficult question about how to represent American history without repeating or recreating it. A statue is a totem by virtue of its very existence. It embodies the intentions of the creator, as well as those of the specific historical context in which it was fashioned. The relationship between the object and the viewer is formed by the individual view, as well as by the passage of time and changes in culture. In other words, while we may imagine that a statue represents history set in stone, history is far more fluid, much more susceptible to new narratives, and less a marble tablet than a dynamic conversation. 

Of course, even here irony complicates history. In 1866 Edward Pollard, former Confederate journalist, published The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates. Just as The Crucible became for many readers the history of the Salem witch trials, or dime novels seemed to tell the true story of the West, or Hamilton became the soundtrack of the American Revolution, Edward Pollard’s romance spawned cotillions of Rhetts and Scarletts endlessly courting at Tara. More importantly, it became the narrative that justified the politics of Jim Crow and the violence of the Klan. When the Sun alluded to the Lost Cause of “more than half a century ago,” it missed the mark by decades. In 1916, the Lost Cause was still very much a work in progress, and Confederate Monuments built from durable materials designed to “stand the test of time” were a way to ensure that the Lost Cause ideology would continue to shape the future.

The statue that elicited such emotion and reverence had been purchased from the McNeel Marble Company in Marietta, Georgia, for $2,500, approximately $63,000 in today’s dollars. It is inscribed: “In memory of the Confederate soldiers & sailors, erected under the auspices of the U.D.C. of Williamson County.” The Sun gave an expansive description: “The statue is seven feet three inches at the base and twenty-one feet high. There will be a drinking fountain about three feet from the base, and a few feet above this a graceful insert, where an electric light will be placed. Surmounting the shaft is the figure of a Confederate soldier standing at ‘ground arms.’” The figure of the soldier standing at the top of the column was mass produced and repeated on other McNeel monuments throughout the South. It was regarded as well constructed, although not particularly artistic. The brothers Morgan and R.M. McNeel, owners of the company, were prodigious marketers and ran advertisements in newspapers and magazines throughout the South: “A marble or granite memorial fount will beautify your city park or street and will slake the thirst of man and beast, and whenever used or merely looked upon will be a reminder of the heroism and sacrifice of the Soldiers and Women of the Confederacy.” The “memorial fount” might have slaked the thirst of White Texans and their beasts, but the segregated Black community in Georgetown would have to seek relief elsewhere.

The McNeels’ purchase of the marble business in 1892 was strategic, coming just two years before the founding of the UDC. By 1912 the company claimed to be “the largest monumental plant in the South.” The McNeel brothers provided advice on how to raise funds, sold their monuments on credit, and offered incentives to UDC presidents for project completions. A McNeels advertisement in a 1911 issue of Confederate Veteran offered a free “five-dollar marble breadboard” to the “President and Secretary, or any other two officers or members of any Chapter or Camp, as they may designate … if they will furnish the names of one or more Chapters or Camps that propose to erect a monument next year.” The McNeels sold more than 140 Confederate monuments before shuttering their business in 1965.

That the Georgetown monument is just one of scores of identical statues is a jarring, slightly disconcerting revelation. Some in the crowd that day may have assumed that the monument was sui generis, the creation of a local artisan laboring to design an original work. Instead, what sits outside the Georgetown courthouse is less an artwork than a testimonial to 20th century free enterprise, targeted marketing, production efficiency, credit lending, and monetary inducements.

As successful as the McNeels were in profiting off the Lost Cause, their efforts pale when compared to the success of D. W. Griffith and The Birth of a Nation, released just a year before the Georgetown statue was erected. In each case, visionary entrepreneurs translated history into romance—one in marble, one in celluloid—with their White audience applauding the result. In Griffith’s film, the antebellum South appears as an idyllic Walter Scott-infused realm, complete with happy, contented slaves and generous, smiling masters. Once the war is lost, chaos reigns and the virtue of the South is threatened, represented by the attempted rape of Flora Cameron by Gus, a Black freedman. Flora kills herself rather than submit, and Gus—played in blackface by White actor Walter Long—is lynched by members of the Klan, who appear dressed all in white, like avenging angels. (Thirty-one years earlier in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain warned about the Lost Cause when he named “a steamboat that had killed herself on a rock” the Walter Scott: “I see in a minute there warn’t much chance for anybody being alive in her,” Huckleberry Finn breathlessly observed. “I pulled all around her and hollered a little, but there wasn’t any answer; all dead still.”)

The Birth of a Nation was the first film to be shown in the White House. The next night there was a viewing at the National Press Club with guest of honor Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Edward Douglass White (reportedly a former Klansman). Also in attendance were the Secretary of the Navy Josephus P. Daniel, 38 U.S. senators, and approximately 50 members of the House of Representatives. Despite nationwide protests and condemnation by the NAACP, not to mention the widespread violence the film provoked against Black Americans, it became the highest-grossing film in American history until it was surpassed by Gone with the Wind in 1939. Across the country, the film was hailed by newspapers for its realism and its faithful representation of the past; after viewing it in the East Room, President Woodrow Wilson purportedly said that it was “like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is so terribly true.” The film was not shown in Georgetown during its initial release, but it was shown in movie houses in nearby Taylor and Austin. In Dallas, an orchestra of 40 provided the soundtrack and played “Dixie” for the sold-out audience. The film came to Georgetown eight years later in February 1923, playing at the Monarch Theater for three days. The student newspaper commented that the reason for the film’s “wonderful record of triumph and success has been that ‘The Birth of a Nation’ carries a message which touches the hearts of all humanity and illustrates pages in one of the important eras of all history, colorfully tinged with romance and made intense by a permissible degree of dramatic license.”  

Where the success of Griffith’s film mirrors the effect of the McNeels’ statues is in the response of the audience. What White audiences saw on the screen in 1915 is what the White citizens of Georgetown saw when they unveiled their McNeel Confederate statue: a fictionalized history they preferred and a narrative they wanted to preserve. Only after the premiere of the film did Klan members begin to wear white capes and hoods, to burn crosses, and to fashion themselves after their cinematic role models. The film, like the statue that stands before the courthouse in Georgetown, didn’t represent history; it created it.

Confederate Memorial Drinking Fount

Confederate Veteran: Confederate Monuments

Within the small community of Georgetown, there was not unanimity regarding the Lost Cause. In fact, Williamson County voted against Texas secession. While prominent people in the county and at Southwestern supported the Lost Cause, many others did not. A sampling includes Southwestern University alumna, Jessie Daniel Ames, class of 1902, who spent much of her life in Georgetown. Ames founded the Texas League of Women Voters in 1919, and in 1930 she established the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. She published two books about the subject and worked to discredit the Klan. Southwestern sociology professor John Cowper Granbery, Jr. was an anti-Klan activist and professor Norman Spellmann was a member of the Committee for Better Schools, an organization that brought state and federal lawsuits seeking integration to court. Dr. Douglas Benold, a Southwestern alumnus, former trustee, and longtime Georgetown physician, who treated all the members of the community, donated funds to the Committee enabling them to hire a lawyer to force the segregationist school board to integrate. It was not until a decade after the Supreme Court ruled “separate education facilities are inherently unequal,” that local school integration began. A music faculty member, Iola Bowden, founded the Negro Fine Arts School in Georgetown in 1946. As an educator, she was concerned that the students of Carver School—Georgetown’s only black school—would not have access to the resources that White students had, particularly in the fine arts. Over the years she added vocal music and art to the curriculum. Her Southwestern students worked with her providing piano lessons. Due to the efforts of Bowden and others, Southwestern admitted its first Black student, Ernest Clark, in 1965, to whom she became a mentor.  More recently, Rev. Dr. Ron Swain, long time Georgetown resident and former senior advisor in the Office of the President at Southwestern, is the convener of Courageous Conversations, an interracial, multicultural and multiethnic group creating space for civil and respectful discourse and collaborative solutions to issues of institutional and systemic racism in Georgetown. 

For our part, Southwestern University recognizes our culpability and the role the institution and its community members played in the establishment of the statue. This is a time for truth telling. Today, Southwestern is one of the most diverse liberal arts institutions in the nation, but we recognize that much work remains to be done. We are still coming to terms with our past and the role we played, and our faculty and students are working in the great tradition of the liberal arts in researching, discussing, and teaching what they have found. In recent years, the University has established the Office of Diversity Education to promote diversity and social justice initiatives on campus, hosts an annual Race and Ethnicity Studies Symposium, and made fostering diversity, inclusion, belonging, and equity for all members of the Southwestern community a key component of our 2021–2026 Tactical Plan. We have also established a thematic hiring initiative in the area of race, ethnicity, and social justice with an emphasis on Black Studies and LatinX Studies that will commence next year. Between 2017 and 2021, our percentage of faculty members representing underrepresented minorities increased from 16% to 27%, surpassing the national average of 20%. Our underrepresented minority students have increased to 40%, and 17% of our first-year students in fall 2021were first-generation. The University is pursuing designation from the Department of Education as a Hispanic-Serving Institution and Southwestern is a member of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), Liberal Arts and Colleges Racial Equity Leadership Alliance (LACRELA), Universities Studying Slavery Consortium, and the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.

Today, most Saturday mornings see people protesting about the statue’s future. The statue sits on county, not city land. That a Confederate soldier marks the entry to the halls of justice is not a coincidence. It resurrects a time in our history—insists on it—when Black Americans were treated as chattel. Before taking any action regarding the statue that dominates not only Georgetown’s public square but also our current public discourse, we should carefully examine the story it tells. This Confederate statue—like its dozens and dozens of duplicates—represents the anxiety and fears of those who erected it in 1916, not just the deaths of those 50 years earlier. Even more broadly, it represents the cultural and economic machinery that inspires and profits by those fears.

Historical facts and culture are often formidable opponents. In June 2020, a resolution put before the six member Georgetown city council requesting the Williamson County Commissioners Court to consider taking action regarding the monument failed by a 4-2 vote. In December that same year, the four Williamson County commissioners and the county judge approved the creation of a 15-member committee to “study the monument.” The committee would be tasked to consider “options for [the monument] in case commissioners decide to move it.” To date, the Williamson County Commissioners Court has not established the committee. Therefore, as a member of the Georgetown community and the oldest institution of higher education in Texas, Southwestern University strongly urges the formation of this committee and offers our expertise and assistance. As we were over a century ago, Southwestern and Georgetown still constitute two parts of a whole, and the time has arrived for us to strengthen and renew our union. May we find other icons to venerate, other heroes to praise.

Williamson County Courthouse ca. 1911 Williamson County Courthouse ca. 1911