The Real Reason for Union Monuments

If you listen to the woke idiots on the left (and neocon right), Confederate monuments were built to honor and perpetuate white supremacy and slavery.

This would logically mean that the Union monuments built during the same period would explicitly state that they were built to honor abolition and egalitarianism.

Except very few of them say anything about either.

In fact, they don’t typically mention slavery or racial egalitarianism at all. Instead they point to the preservation of the Union as the primary cause of the War while reverently mentioning the men who died in that cause.

This is the case for the hundreds of Union monuments across every State in the North.

It would seem that the “Lost Cause” narrative isn’t really that insidious and that both Northerners and Southerners honestly stated what they believed to be the primary reason for the War when they built their monuments.

The entire narrative concerning “evil” Confederate monuments is built on a house of cards and what should be termed the “Righteous Cause Myth,” i.e. the War was about slavery and nothing but slavery, except white supremacy.

But the North was just as white supremacist as the South, and the racial order was not seriously challenged in either section when monuments were built.

Which is why neither Northerners nor Southerners saw the need to talk about it, and they certainly didn’t built monuments to honor such a thing.

But, there are stupid modern historians who want to project their understanding of the War on the past, and thus our current iconoclasm in the South.

I discuss this nonsense in Episode 403 of The Brion McClanahan Show.