The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

The Confederate statues that have been overlooked: Anonymous women

These allegorical representations of women helped weave white supremacy into the fabric of everyday life.

Perspective by
Rebecca Senior is a Henry Moore Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Nottingham working on allegory, monuments and violence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
July 10, 2020 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
Members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy at the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery in 1922. (Library of Congress)

Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson are just a few of the notorious Confederate leaders whose monuments have been destroyed, removed or targeted for removal as anti-racism protests have spread. Dislodged from their podiums, the statues join those of Edward Colston, Cecil Rhodes and other memorialized white supremacists as sculptural relics, while the empty pedestals are reclaimed by graffiti, placards and tributes.

It comes as little surprise that statues have been a focal point for protests against racism and state violence. In the words of historian and writer Keishia N. Blain, Confederate monuments “function as a balm for white supremacists who long to return to a period when Americans regarded black people as property.”

Confederate statues were designed to act as sculptural stand-ins for their absentee subjects, propping up “Lost Cause” ideology and serving as a painful reminder of the lynching and segregation that characterized the Jim Crow era. However, while these bronze criminals have been judged and rightfully deemed guilty in the high-profile trials of recent months, another, equally insidious sculptural tradition has largely evaded scrutiny.

Victory, The South, Justice, Liberty, Fame and Glory are some of the names given to women who appear on Confederate monuments across the United States. Unlike the statues of familiar men such as Lee, Jackson and Davis, these more anonymous figures did not stand in for historical Confederates (even though Confederate women often provided the models). Instead, these statues of women were allegorical personifications designed to actively represent abstract concepts; creating a sculptural network of Jane Does that helped monuments endorse white supremacy as the new modus operandi of the Confederacy in the decades after the Civil War.

Classical antiquity has been mined for sculptural stand-ins of “ideal” white bodies and societies by white supremacist regimes throughout history, and the Confederacy was no exception. Before and after the Civil War, civic ideology in the Southern states was modeled on the social structure of ancient Greece and Rome, and classicism infiltrated education, architecture, literature and art. Though Black classicists such as William Sanders Scarborough and Edward Wilmot Blyden, among others, were influential educators and scholars during this period, they faced a legion of Confederate supporters and descendants who used the classical tradition to promote and expand white supremacy.

To appeal to this audience, sculptors like Moses Ezekiel, Alexander Doyle and Edward Virginius Valentine drew from a classicism that was purposefully selective and racially exclusionary. Monuments were designed to camouflage the Confederacy’s military defeat and failure to protect chattel slavery with a veil of sculptural order, and while statues of historical Confederate men loudly proclaimed the “heroism” of their leaders in bronze, female allegorical figures referenced ancient Greco-Roman visual culture to establish a dominant classical tradition that authorized and promoted white nationalism as a cause dear to millions of Americans in the North and the South.

Monuments of white supremacy obscure the history of colonial crimes. That’s why they must come down.

To this end, sculptors systematized the production of female allegorical figures by repeating certain characteristics. Dressed in classical drapery with bare feet or sandals and archaic Greco-Roman hairstyles, these statues were designed to be interpreted as feminine-presenting and racially white. For example, the Arkansas Confederate soldiers monument currently is on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol and includes a giant winged embodiment of Victory. This figure is an amalgamation of sources. Developed from ancient personifications of Victoria, the goddess of victory in ancient Roman tradition and Nike, the goddess of victory in ancient Greek mythology, she was designed to evoke Confederate power and military strength.

This figure also mirrors similar ones on monuments in Victorian and Edwardian monuments in Britain, where Victory became one of the most effective artistic devices deployed to visually transform the physical violence of slavery and colonization into palatable subjects for public consumption on monuments. On the Arkansas monument, the figure’s trumpet marks the end of the Civil War and her offering of the olive wreath, traditionally used to crown the victors, rewrites history by presenting it to Confederate supporters and descendants.

Similar figures appeared on the Confederate soldiers’ and sailors’ monument in Baltimore, which was removed in the aftermath of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally in 2017, and the recently removed Confederate soldiers’ monument in Sailsbury, N.C. Widely referred to as Glory and Fame, these figures intentionally replicated the visual formula of a Victory. Both monuments have been targets for Black Lives Matter protesters and white supremacist vigilantes, yet Glory and Fame, carrying a wounded Confederate soldier in one arm and wreath of victory, have not yet been connected to other allegorical figures as visual signifiers of Confederate “heroism” across the country.

Confederate sculptors used these allegorical figures to adopt the Greco-Roman visual culture as their own. In doing so, they promoted the ancient white European lineage of the Confederacy as a way to authorize the Confederacy’s commitment to white supremacy, while sanitizing the extreme ongoing violence enacted against Black people in the post-Reconstruction era with the refined veneer of the classical tradition.

Female allegorical figures also reflected historical Confederate women back to themselves through this flattering lens of authoritative classicism. As historian Caroline Winterer has shown, upper-class Confederate women often saw themselves as natural inheritors of the classical tradition and adopted their behavior to fit classical models.

UNC-Charlotte professor and historian Karen L. Cox has also identified the insidious ambitions of these women. In “Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture,” Cox exposes how networks of these politically savvy, white upper-class women formed Ladies Memorial Associations and later the United Daughters of the Confederacy to erect monuments rewriting Confederate failures through propaganda drives, initiatives that still exist today.

Though the thinly veiled bodies of allegorical figures on Confederate monuments were far too risque to represent actual Confederate women, sculptors created another series of allegorical figures that fused visual references from Greco-Roman antiquity with contemporary attributes, so the figures more closely resembled a representation of this Confederate femininity.

An allegorical figure of The South appears twice on the infamous Arlington Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. By removing her wings and replacing the trumpet with farming tools, the sculptor Moses Ezekiel adapted the visual formula of a winged Victory to create the enormous figure at the summit of the monument. She appears again as The Old South on the monument’s base, where she is depicted as a contemporary Confederate woman being supported by the goddess Minerva.

Identical depictions of The South also appear on the Tennessee Confederate Women’s Monument in Nashville and the Monument to Women of the Confederacy in Jackson, Miss. Here the seated figure places a wreath on the head of another female figure, whose offer of an olive branch goes unnoticed by a dying Confederate soldier. On these monuments, The South still retains her title, classicizing garb and hairstyle; making her a complex array of historical and contemporary sources that appealed to and reflected the Confederate women versed in classical references who were responsible for the monument-building frenzy.

Destroying confederate monuments doesn't erase history

Confederate sculptors attempted to establish a dominant visual culture that purposefully eclipsed the contributions of Black people to society in the post-Civil War era. By promoting the notion that Confederates were descendants of ancient white European civilizations, allegorical figures suggested that white supremacy was the rightful heritage of the United States, and a substantial number of Confederate monuments were strategically erected to promote segregated neighborhoods and reinforce this message of erasure.

So why has this insidious sculptural trend remained in the shadows? One possible reason is that allegorical figures are not always specifically Confederate in design or intention. As writer and historian Maria Warner has explored, the symbolic language of Greco-Roman classicism has been used to create allegorical figures that can be found in all manner of incarnations across the United States, including the Statue of Liberty.

Much like the hundreds of “Common Soldier” Confederate monuments across the nation, the ubiquity of these figures in American visual culture has eclipsed their insidious potential, enabling them to insert Confederate white supremacy into the backdrop of everyday life. When we expose allegorical figures as another instrument of Confederate visual culture, we add to our understanding of Confederate monuments as insidious sculptures that were erected to disseminate and reinforce racism against Blacks.

Art history is just one way to understand how monuments facilitated white supremacy, and the urgent issue here is not about statues, but what they represent. Monuments offer avenues to larger and more important conversations about anti-Black racism, voter suppression, land theft and racially motivated state violence. Yet understanding this art history of Confederate monuments demonstrates how public art propels a message of Confederate power and white supremacy that has been adopted by future generations.

Attracting widespread criticism from historians, President Trump’s newly announced plans for a sculpture garden is the latest monument-building program that actively seeks to manipulate history according to the perspective of white conservatism. As speculation grows about the design of Trump’s monuments to “American Heroes,” it is fair to predict that classical sculpture will be recycled once more into another exclusionary monument movement, and, given Trump’s staid architectural predilections, that allegorical figures might be appearing on monuments again.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece incorrectly characterized the scholar Karen L. Cox’s use of the term “living monuments.”