Answer to "Who's That Statue?"

Here's the answer to Name That Statue.

Okay, yesterday I posted that I am a former member of the Children of the Confederacy. I guess if I had stayed in I would have one day been a Daughter of the Confederacy. I have no idea. I'm not a joiner unless I'm in fifth grade and think it's a dog-training club.

The Civil War wiped out most of the males of fighting age in my family tree. My mother's grandfather (or was it great grandfather?) was a POW when the war ended and had to walk home to S.C. from Virginia. My mother said he used to tell these boring war stories and they would nod their heads and say "uh huh" and pretend to be interested and probably were day dreaming about teaching their dogs tricks or something. (She often regretted that she hadn't listened.)

On the other side of the family, a grandfather with a great or two was too old to fight, so he was home trying to feed his family by scraping out some kind of living from the rocky soil of Kershaw County, S.C., when some of Sherman's men came through. Sherman's raiders, assisted by the family dog who had been taught to catch chickens, took what little my family had. My however-many-greats grandfather tried to stop the dog, and ended up falling in the mud, to much ridicule by the Yankee soldiers. At least they didn't burn down the farmhouse, which my father owns and loves. He spent his summers there as a boy.

Columbia, the city I grew up in, was burned by Sherman's troops. There are bronze stars marking the spots where Sherman's cannonballs hit the State House, which was under construction at the time. The devastation of Sherman's march took this area 100 years to get over.

So who was the man riding the horse at the entrance to Central Park? General William Tecumseh Sherman.

I hope you can read the inscription by clicking on the photo of the statue's base.

I'm glad the U.S. is a single, mostly united country. I think Abraham Lincoln is one of our greatest presidents. Slavery is an abomination. There is much that is wrong with the South (and the North). But there is just something unbelievably eerie about seeing a giant, golden statue erected to honor the man who burned your city (and others) and whose troops robbed your impoverished civilian family and humiliated your however-many-greats grandfather for trying to save his chickens.

Comments

[Transylvanianhorseman]

Europe is littered with statues of men who are heroes only in their own land.

The odd thing is, if Sherman hadn't ordered Atlanta burned, most likely Lincoln would not have won the presidential election a couple of months after. His Democrat rival supported the Southern seccession. So the Civil War would have ended differently, with two rival American states. History would have proceeded very differently.

Sherman might have been the "first modern general" through applying "total war" (an invention of Napoleon, incidentally). However he did cause remarkably few civilian casualties, ordering non-combatants to leave cities before they were destroyed. It seems that today's generals have forgotten that lesson.

[Angry]

Civil war certainly makes a land's history a lot more colourful, it's unfortunate that a lot of the colour is 'blood red'. And as you say, it's usually followed by a very long healing process.

When Australia went through it's period of becoming a Federation of States there was a lot of argument in the various the Parliments, but fortunately the citizens of Aus weren't so fussed about it to take up arms. Which makes us one of the few countries to achieve such a change without bloodshed. And besides, I think it meant holding the civil war over a weekend and it takes a lot to get an Aussie to give up his weekend.

[Lori]

"Civil War" my hind foot! The victor writes the history books, but it was a war between two sovereign nations. Sherman waged war on women and children - and if they weren't killed outright, he certainly tried to leave them without homes or food.

[Transylvanianhorseman]

Well, I found out about Sherman from Wikipedia. Presumably Wikipedia is a Yankee creation. Or written by communists. One has to be so careful these days. Looking from a distance, it is hard to respect seccessionists who left the Union to maintain black slavery, or to regard their self-declared historical "sovereign state" any more highly than Apartheid South Africa or 1990's Serbia or Croatia. It never ceases to amaze me that, within my lifetime, blacks in the Southern States had to give up their seats for whites in buses. Sorry, Lori, however it can be necessary to intervene to protect human rights of victims, as in Washington removing the Jim Crow laws, as in former Yugoslavia, as in Europe during WW2 (albeit a couple of years late in the case of the US), as should have happened in Rwanda and Darfur.

Not long ago, a visitor from South Carolina refered to the blocks of ice that hang from my car's mud flaps as "nigger heads". So attitudes haven't really moved on, have they?

[Angry]

I think the 'white tree' in Jena, Louisiana, shows how little things have progressed.

[Angry]

I think the 'white tree' in Jena, Louisiana, shows how little things have progressed.

[Anne]

You hear about the white tree in Jena. You meet a bigot from S.C. But they are no more representative of most of the South than the disturbed teenager who gunned down innocents in the Omaha mall is representative of the residents of Omaha.

I live in a predominantly black area. I'm sometimes the only white person in the grocery store. They're nice. I'm nice. I've had some fun conversations and lots of laughs.

Contrast that to an unreported incident where a black student in a private school here traveled to Philadelphia on a field trip. A group of blacks took offense that the black student was hanging out with white friends, and there was an incident where the police were called.

Not all racism is in the South, nor is it all by whites.

The point of my post was not about racism, but about seeing a statue erected to honor someone who had caused such devastation to my city and my family. He burned down people's houses and robbed poor farmers. Perhaps this had to happen for the war to end with a United States (and by the way, the war was not only about slavery). Still, the pain and devastation was real to my family members who experienced it. They weren't wealthy plantation owners or influential people. They hid no silver in the woods because they had no silver. They were poor farmers, just trying to hang onto the family's few chickens. There is no statue erected to them or their fortitude for surviving. This same family sent forth soldiers that fought in subsequent U.S. wars and were great, though unknown, patriots.