Marie Camara, Guide to American Civil War Monuments, Chapter 41, South Carolina (Atlanta: Memorial, 2016)
The
Arch of the Rising, along with the Black Marianne in Charleston harbor [1], is an iconic monument of South Carolina, instantly recognizable throughout the world as a symbol of the state. It has been the backdrop for thousands of political speeches, rallies, and memorial services, and is both a mandatory stop for official visitors to Columbia and the place where six governors have taken the oath of office.
A monument to the Great Rising [2] was first suggested soon after the end of the Civil War, with proposed designs ranging from traditional equestrian statues to abstract Gullah-inspired emblems of freedom. But the politics of the immediate postwar era were unfavorable to this idea. The Robert Smalls administration [3] feared that its campaign to reconcile poor whites to black rule, and the state’s still-fragile civic peace, would be endangered by a public symbol of triumph. Although Smalls and his successors encouraged local communities to build their own monuments and made funds available for this purpose, the proposal for a statewide memorial site was shelved.
For the first generation after the war, therefore, the Rising was remembered mainly by the Freedmen’s Circles, most of which built shrines to their own heroes and their own dead. Many of these sites exist today, and some, like the bayonet-leaved Iron Tree at Yemmassee and the rough-cut Whitehall Family lifting each other out of the symbolic captivity of a stone plinth, are visually striking. The Rising, in South Carolina’s civic mythology, has always been a participatory revolution – a story of families and communities choosing the ground where they made their stand [4] – and these early memorials were both consistent with that myth and part of its creation.
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the political equation changed. The older generation of Rising veterans was beginning to die out, and there were increasing calls for a statewide monument that would symbolize the revolt to those who knew it only as history. The violent 1888 election in North Carolina in which thousands of Rising veterans took part in the successful defense of the biracial Republican-populist government [5], and the beginnings of a new Underground Railroad into the Redeemer states [6], fostered the notion that the Rising and all it stood for were something South Carolina should proclaim to the world. And at home, with the first stirrings of opposition to the increasingly ossified Republican and Circle establishment [7], the state government warmed to the idea of a shrine that would re-dedicate the state to revolutionary values.
In 1891, at the suggestion of Governor Robert Elliott, the South Carolina legislature appropriated funds to purchase land in what was then the outskirts of the state capital and build a statewide monument to the Rising. The memorial park and sculpture were designed by George King, a Charleston architect who had been born a slave in Beaufort, and were completed and opened to the public on New Year’s Day 1896.
The park consists of a nine-acre seasonal garden – honeywort and sweet alyssum in winter, an array of native wildflowers for spring and summer, and pink autumn-blooming sweetgrass – surrounding a lake. Unusually for its time, the garden is designed to look unsculpted, with large stones left in place and shade trees in groves rather than lines. And on an island in the center of the lake, reached by a stone bridge, is a 108-foot marble-clad arch in the shape of an inverted Y with sweeping ribbed abutments that suggest Islamic architecture and Gullah basket-weaving. An eternal flame has burned under the arch since the dedication ceremony, accompanied at night by green and white floodlights.
The Arch was controversial during the first decades of the twentieth century, symbolizing what many saw as the state government reaching for cultural hegemony. Harriet Tubman, during her independent campaign for governor in 1920, pointedly declined to speak there. But with the dawning of a new era in South Carolina’s politics, the monument’s soaring and awe-inspiring form won the people over, and by 1930, it had assumed the iconic status it holds today…
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Civil War Veterans’ Monument… Affectionately named “The Ramparts,” the Veterans’ Monument across from the state capitol in Columbia is South Carolina’s first Civil War memorial, completed in 1866 toward the end of Robert Smalls’ first full term as governor. The monument, uniquely among war memorials of that era, embodies the delicacy of reconciliation and the difficulty of remembering all the war dead, even the fallen Confederate soldiers, without valorizing the Southern cause.
The Ramparts are exactly that: four ramparts of unpolished red-brown stone meeting at a central plinth. Each length of stone remembers one of the Civil War armies: one for the Union soldiers, one for the Confederates, one for the battalions of the Rising, and one for the armies of the Gullah republics [8]. The reliefs on the Confederate rampart – a soldier embracing his wife and children as he leaves for the battlefield, a nurse tending the wounded, a burning farmstead, loved ones kneeling by a grave – emphasize the sacrifices of war over battle scenes, and the other ramparts are carved with similar themes.
At the center, a soldier from each army jointly supports a broken staff, holding it up together so that the palmetto flag of South Carolina can fly at its summit. This design subtly rejects the idea, common to monuments elsewhere but which the bitterness of the Rising would not allow, that the soldiers were brothers
during the war – hence the broken staff – but affirms that all have a part in the rebuilding. That message is softened only somewhat by the inscription carved around the top of the plinth - "To all the people of South Carolina who fought and died during the Civil War: may the earth be a soft pillow for your rest" - which also carefully fails to mention any one cause or sense of shared comradeship.
The Confederate battle flag, along with the flags of the United States, South Carolina and the Sea Island republics and the green and white standard of the Rising, flies at the entrance to the memorial; this is the only place in Columbia, and the only publicly owned site in all of South Carolina, where a Confederate flag is displayed.
Not all former Confederate soldiers appreciated the Ramparts when it was constructed; at the time, the upstate counties were still heavily Democratic, and the more restive parts of their population saw the monument less as a symbol of reconciliation than one of subordination. In 1871, the United Confederate Veterans of South Carolina erected their own monument, a cast-iron statue of an unknown soldier, on private property in Abbeville, and for years this statue served as a rival gathering place. But as the die-hard Confederates left for greener pastures and the remainder got used to (and in some cases came to appreciate) the new order, the Ramparts’ central location made them the natural location for memorial gatherings. By the 1890s, veterans of all four armies held annual Remembrance Day services at the site, separately but peaceably, and in 1928, the last survivors and their descendants held the first joint remembrance ceremony. Though their causes could never be reconciled, the sacrifices of war had indeed proven to be a foundation for common memory…
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Longstreet Statue in Edgefield… Although military historians consider James Longstreet one of the best battlefield generals in the Confederate army, for many years his memory was virtually erased in the states where the Confederacy was held most dear. When the Edgefield County Historical Society commissioned South Carolina’s Longstreet statue in 1920, one could find a memorial to him in Zanzibar where he led colonial troops during the Great War, but not in Louisiana where he had commanded the Reconstruction-era militia or in Georgia where he lived during his retirement.
The South Carolina Longstreet memorial was nevertheless the second one built in the United States. The first, in Mississippi, was erected in 1889 on the site where he led the successful defense of Jackson against an attempted Redeemer takeover, depicting him on horseback in the uniform of the state militia. The statue at the Edgefield courthouse near Longstreet’s birthplace also shows him mounted and armed, but he is wearing civilian clothes. He is not riding to battle, but instead leading a family out of the darkness of Jim Crow and into safety.
The statue was inspired by Longstreet’s role in Harriet Tubman’s postwar Underground Railroad, on which his Georgia house was a station from 1898 until his death in 1905. His participation in the Railroad was just becoming known in 1920, and also, the ratification of the 1919 civil rights amendment [9] and the fierce resistance that was sweeping Georgia and the other Jim Crow states [10], made the time ripe for the citizens of Longstreet’s birthplace to send a message to those of the state where he had died fighting the Redeemers. The fact that Edgefield County was on the Georgia border and that its freedmen had fought off Redeemer raids during the 1870s made the message all the more pointed; it is entirely by design that Longstreet’s equestrian image faces away from Georgia and that he is leading his charges out of that state.
The struggles of the 1920s would eventually pass, though, and by 1942, Georgia too was ready to remember Longstreet. In that year, the Hall County government commissioned a monument to him in a public square in Gainesville. This statue too is equestrian, and is the only one of the four in which the general is depicted in Confederate uniform…
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Tubman Museum… There are no statues of Harriet Tubman in South Carolina; she opposed them when she was alive and forbade them in her will, and even ninety years after her death, few state politicians are brave enough to oppose Miss Harriet’s wishes. Her homes, however, are another matter. She had four during the time she lived in South Carolina: the Congaree swampland where she commanded a battalion of the Rising; the modest Columbia house where she oversaw the early Freedmen’s Circles; the South of Broad townhouse in Charleston she owned when she represented the low country in Congress; and the home on St. Helena Island where she lived during the years of her retirement and returned as often as she could when she was governor.
Tubman herself had no particular desire to preserve her homes for history: she sold the Columbia and Charleston houses when she was done with them and willed the one on St. Helena Island to the neighbor family who cared for her in old age. But the people of South Carolina were another story; within a few years after Tubman’s death in 1922 [11], her homes – especially the Congaree encampment which had become a state park in 1921 and the St. Helena Island house where she was buried – had become places of pilgrimage [12]. In 1948, the state finally made it official: the government bought the three houses and designated them, along with the Congaree site and a room in the state capitol that held an exhibit on her childhood and escape from slavery, as a collective Tubman Museum.
To those looking for Civil War monuments, the branch of the museum that is of most interest is the one in the Congaree; the other locations focus on periods earlier and later in Tubman’s life. The Congaree site (which is actually one of many places where Tubman’s battalion camped during the constantly-moving conflict of the Rising) is a faithful recreation of an 1863 guerrilla camp with exhibits on weapons, tactics and the struggle for survival. The main collection contains materials on Tubman’s campaigns and her role in the Free South Carolina Convention, including rare letters and photographs.
In recent decades, however, the emphasis of this collection has shifted away from Tubman herself and toward the men, women and children who served as fighters and in the Rising’s labor battalions. The museum’s aim is to document, as much as possible, each family who lived and fought in the Congaree, and more than a thousand of them have been featured in rotating exhibits. The iconography of South Carolina’s Civil War memory is shifting once again toward the war as participatory revolution, and given Tubman’s views on the matter, this would likely not displease her…
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[1] See post 1040.
[2] See post 386.
[3] See post 486.
[4] See post 1281.
[5] See post 1273.
[6] See post 2941.
[7] See posts 1273 and 3365.
[8] See posts 367 and 386.
[9] See post 3324.
[10] See post 4591.
[11] See post 4215.
[12] See post 4628.
