#4: The Confederate War Memorial in Forsyth Park
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.”
—Frederick Douglass
The Confederate War Memorial in Forsyth Park
Savannah is a city of the Old South. Its past is its past, and that past cannot be denied, nor fully redeemed. Slavery is the ‘institution’ that made the Old South the ‘Old South.’ When Savannah founder James Oglethorpe was in charge, slavery was outlawed in the Georgia colony. But when he returned to England for good and rule by the Trustees ended, slavery was soon-after adopted and widely practiced.
The Confederate Monument that is located in Forsyth Park was completed in 1879. Like most such monuments built throughout the South—beginning just after the Civil War all the way through the 1920s—it was built to honor those who lost their lives defending the Confederate States of America.
Being an artist born in the old U.S.S.R., I may not know a lot about American Civil War history; but I do have a fair grasp about the paranoid longings of restorative nostalgia. Harvard Professor Svetlana Boym (who, like me, is a former Soviet-born Russian and now an American citizen) wrote in her 2001 book The Future of Nostalgia: “The Twentieth Century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia.”
I know this was true for Soviet citizens after the fall, and (I’m speculating) for the typical Confederate supporter after the Civil War. Boym defined ‘restorative nostalgia’ as an intense longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. When the Soviet Union came crashing down during my formative years (I was 18 at the time), many of my fellow Russians pined with nostalgic dreams of rebuilding our broken homeland. They did this despite knowing the abominable history of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the murder of millions of Russians that occurred during its creation and maintenance.
In her book entitled Secondhand Time, a Pulitzer-Prize winning chronical of the demise of communism, Svetlana Alexievich recounted life in the fallen U.S.S.R. where so many people carried memories of oppression, terror, famine, and massacre, yet also displayed authentic feelings of pride of country, including the hopes they’d long-carried in their minds-eye and in their struggles to create a utopia. I’m suggesting that a similar emotionally-driven flaw of mind guided the ‘lost cause’ of the Old South.
In this regard, another Pulitzer-Prize winning author, Tony Horowitz, has left us two fabulous books to ponder. The first is Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War, and the second, published earlier this year just before his premature death, is: Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide, which re-tells Frederick Law Olmsted’s 14-month tour of the pre-Civil War South in which he traveled undercover as a reporter for the New York Times and chronicled the lives and beliefs of Southerners—white and black, rich and poor, free and enslaved. All magnificent reads!
Of course, another eye-witness to the era was Frederick Douglass. Interestingly, Savannah is home to an incredible and extensive archive collected by Dr. Walter O. Evans of Douglass memorabilia that was used extensively by David W. Blight in his recent biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.
Luba’s Confederate War Memorial painting in progress.
