Man On A Horse - Statues Are Better For Lying About History Than Educating You About History

The niece I am closest to, perhaps of anyone in my large family, is a sculptor.  I don't have anything in particular against sculpture as an art form, though, as she was in school I tried to nudge her in the direction of painting.   I thought it would give her a better chance of being able to do one of the hardest things that has to be done by anyone who goes into the arts, having a livable income.   But I also thought she had more to communicate than sculpture lends itself to communicating.  Statues as a form of communication leave a lot to be desired in all but a few cases.   That is something I touched on in that piece I wrote about the oldest currently known depiction of a human form from 35,000 years ago and the stories that so-called scientists and scholar made up about it and the intentions of its creator or creators.  We don't even know if the object, as we have it, was the product of one hand and, so, mind or if more than one person had a hand in producing what we've got today.   We don't even know if a second, third or more people who shaped it had one idea of it or many, perhaps conflicting intentions. When you look at a photograph of the Mona Lisa that some 12-year-old, expressing his inner Trump has drawn on, that's an example of the kind of thing I'm talking about.

Anyway, the babble and chatter about the removal of statues honoring and lying about racists like Robert E. Lee as "changing history" or "lying about history" is complete bull shit.  No one learns anything about the real man or his role in history from looking at a an equestrian statue of him.  Without knowing who the man on the horse was supposed to be from words, you don't even know it was supposed to be him.

I put up the photo of the St. Gaudens' relief, the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, showing Shaw on a horse with the Black 54th Regiment because it is the only statue I can remember seeing that informed me of something important about American history and what it informed me of was that there were regiments of Black soldiers in the Civil War at a time when they were entirely erased from grade school history books and the depictions of the Civil War in entertainment media.   I was 7 when our grandfather took us to Boston to see the historical sights, all the others I remember having to do with the much falsified and romanticized Revolutionary War history found there.  I remember being disappointed to find that Benjamin Franklin was not buried there with his family members.

But as important as seeing the Black soldiers in St Gaudens' bas relief* was, it told me little about the history of the 54th Massachusetts, even the defeat and murder of them by the Confederates had to be related to me, there was nothing said about the infamy of the unequal pay of the Black Soldiers,** or they being disappeared from history, the information I got from it was hardly enough history to justify calling it that.  What I got out of it I got from what my grandfather and mother told us about it. If it had been just Col. Shaw sitting on horse, it would have taught me nothing at all.

History as found in objects, especially objects created for ideological and political purposes, is more likely to mislead, in the case of so much statuary of historical figures, it lies either through intention or ignorance.   That statue of Lee in Charlottesville is a lie.  Here's a short and incomplete list of what it covers up, including atrocities like what befell the 54th.

During his invasion of Pennsylvania, Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia enslaved free blacks and brought them back to the South as property. Pryor writes that “evidence links virtually every infantry and cavalry unit in Lee’s army” with the abduction of free black Americans, “with the activity under the supervision of senior officers.”

Soldiers under Lee’s command at the Battle of the Crater in 1864 massacred black Union soldiers who tried to surrender. Then, in a spectacle hatched by Lee’s senior corps commander A.P. Hill, the Confederates paraded the Union survivors through the streets of Petersburg to the slurs and jeers of the southern crowd. Lee never discouraged such behavior. As the historian Richard Slotkin wrote in No Quarter: The Battle of the Crater, “his silence was permissive.”

The presence of black soldiers on the field of battle shattered every myth the South’s slave empire was built on: the happy docility of slaves, their intellectual inferiority, their cowardice, their inability to compete with whites. As Pryor writes, “fighting against brave and competent African Americans challenged every underlying tenet of southern society.” The Confederate response to this challenge was to visit every possible atrocity and cruelty upon black soldiers whenever possible, from enslavement to execution.

As the historian James McPherson recounts in Battle Cry of Freedom, in October of that same year, Lee proposed an exchange of prisoners with the Union general Ulysses S. Grant. “Grant agreed, on condition that blacks be exchanged ‘the same as white soldiers.’” Lee’s response was that “negroes belonging to our citizens are not considered subjects of exchange and were not included in my proposition.” Because slavery was the cause for which Lee fought, he could hardly be expected to easily concede, even at the cost of the freedom of his own men, that blacks could be treated as soldiers and not things. Grant refused the offer, telling Lee that “Government is bound to secure to all persons received into her armies the rights due to soldiers.” Despite its desperate need for soldiers, the Confederacy did not relent from this position until a few months before Lee’s surrender.

I would say that the majority of statues ever raised to generals and many of them allegedly depicting heroic politicians tell similar lies that it takes real history to demolish.  The other day I proposed melting down statues like the one of Lee to make sewer pipes.   The lies they have inserted into the national consciousness are already serving that purpose, only in reverse.   Maybe that's why Trump wants to champion them, it's imbibed sewage that has enabled his regime.

*  A bas relief can contain more information of the type that produces history than a stand-alone equine statue does.  It doesn't have to but it can, like a painting or photograph can.

**  The story of the struggle for Black soldiers to equal pay and equal treatment is worth recounting.  The boycott of the pay table by Black soldiers to protest the outrageous discrimination against them, culminating in the outrage of the Congress granting equal pay but only to those who had not escaped slavery to fight for emancipation is a story in itself.  As is he story of Shaw's successor,  an odd duck of a Quaker officer in the Army who, having to get the soldiers to swear they had been free and not slaves, devised an oath that is a masterpiece of turn-about,   "You do solemnly swear that you owed no man unrequited labor on or before the 19th day of April 1861. So help you God" to which no slave would have ever, honestly had to say they did as slave labor is never owed to anyone.

Update:  Editing this again, I can't help resisting pointing out, again, that historical fiction is an even worse way to learn history as it is, sorry to break this to you, trolls, FICTION.   One of the worst pieces of sentimental crap about Lee, falsifying and covering up his evil was the goddawful piece of cloying, pseudo-sentimental  crap, "Traveller," by Richard Adams.  It tells the "history" of the Civil War and pseudo-biography of the "heroic" Lee from the point of view of his famous horse, perhaps appropriate because the image it builds of Lee and the Confederacy is horse shit.  It is not the only thing that made me allergic to historical fiction but it is one of the strongest allergens in that genre I was exposed to   If I recall correctly, it was in a period I couldn't escape someone else listening to the Radio Reader at lunchtime.  Someone I had to bite my tongue around.  It hurt.

Update 2:  Editing again, it occurs to me that as "Traveller", narrating the novel after the war, believes that Lee won and is now the President of the country, it might, actually, have unintentionally said something about how the Confederates, manipulating the in-built slave power enhancing aspects of the U. S. Constitution, are still exercising a controlling hand on the American government, preventing egalitarian democracy from happening.   That Constitution put the loser, Trump in the presidency and he put Jefferson Beauregard Sessions in the Attorney General's office, from where he's still waging the same war against equality.