By BERRY CRAIG
It’s time for Kentucky, which wasn’t a Confederate state, to nix its Confederate holidays: Robert E. Lee Day (Jan. 19) and Confederate Memorial Day/Jefferson Davis Day. (June 3).
State government doesn’t do much to publicize the lesser-known holidays--state offices don’t close on either of them. But by officially keeping the holidays, however obscure and ignored, Kentucky is sending the wrong message to Kentuckians and to the rest of the country, said Murray State University historian Brian Clardy. “They take us back to a dark place in our history.”
Since at least 2017, lawmakers from both parties have sponsored bills to remove the holidays, including one in this session of the legislature that Rep. Chad Aull (D-Lexington) introduced in January. None of them have gotten anywhere in the MAGA GOP supermajority House and Senate.
Aull introduced a similar bill in 2023. He said it wasn’t assigned to a committee and didn’t get a hearing.
His current bill, HB396, is languishing in the State Government Committee. “HB 396 removes state holidays honoring Confederate figures tied to slavery and racism,” Aull posted on his Facebook page.”Rep. Aull is on the right side of history with this bill,” Clardy said. “It probably won’t go anywhere, but it needs to.”
On the same day he introduced HB 396, Aull introduced HB395, a measure that would “require public middle and high school curriculum to include instruction on the history of racism.” That bill is stuck in the Primary and Secondary Education Committee.
Aull also said on Facebook that HB 395 would ensure that “Kentucky middle and high school students learn the full and honest history of racism in America — including slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement. He posted that both bills were “to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and help move Kentucky forward.”
Clardy said it’s ironic that the opposition to legislation abolishing the holidays comes from Republicans, whose party was founded on anti-slavery principles before the Civil War. Since the 1960s, “the GOP shifted its position on civil rights,” according to the professor.
Long gone is the Republican party of President Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, a Kentucky native (who also was not a favorite son of his native state when he lived). “Republican politicians, activists, and supporters have been busy transforming the party of Lincoln into the party of [Robert E.] Lee ever since the civil rights era, when the emancipatory promises of the 1860s took a step closer to fruition,” wrote Tim Galsworthy in The Journal of the Civil War Era. “One can only wonder what both Lincoln and Lee would make of the Republican Party of today.”
Anyway, Kentucky, a border slave state, refused to leave the Union, though it had a significant pro-Confederate minority. Even so, many thousands more Kentuckians donned Union blue than Confederate gray.
So what gives with Confederate holidays?
After the South lost the Civil War, Kentucky became intensely pro-Southern, leading historian E. Merton Coulter to write that the Bluegrass State “waited until after the war to secede from the Union.” (Check out Kentucky native Anne E. Marshall’s book: Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State.)
Davis, the Confederate president, was a Kentucky-born Mississippian and West Point grad who attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky. A 351-foot concrete obelisk marks his birthplace at the Jefferson Davis State Historic Site on the Christian-Todd County line in western Kentucky.
Yet in Davis’s day, most Kentucky dwellers considered him and his Confederate enterprise treasonous. The Unionist supermajority state legislature passed a law that stripped citizenship from Kentuckians who joined the Confederate army or aided the Confederacy.
Neo-Confederate “Lost Cause” fans, Republican or otherwise, insist their heroes in gray fought for “states’ rights.” By “states’ rights,” Confederate leaders meant the right of states to have slavery. But don’t take my word for it. Read some history, maybe starting with a Georgian named William Tappan Thompson. He designed the “Second National” Confederate flag.
Latter-day Johnny Rebs revere Confederate iconography, especially the battle flag, the de facto Confederate flag. They claim the banner symbolizes “heritage, not hate.”
Tappan’s flag was rectangular and white with the square battle flag in the upper left corner. “As a people, we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause,” he explained.
Georgia was the fifth state to secede; South Carolina was first. Its leaders invited the 14 other slave states, including Kentucky, “to join us, in forming a Confederacy of Slaveholding States.”
Kentucky declined. After a brief period of neutrality within the Union, the Bluegrass State came out forthrightly for the Union, much to the relief of Lincoln, who had said, “I think to lose Kentucky is nearly the same as to lose the whole game. Kentucky gone, we can not hold Missouri, nor, as I think, Maryland.”
Unionism prevailed, to one degree or another, in every region of Kentucky, except the Jackson Purchase, those seven (now eight) counties west of the Tennessee River.
While Kentucky spurned secession, leaders in each of the 11 Confederate states drafted secession ordinances outlining in no uncertain terms their reasons for disunion.
Mississippi’s was typical: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.
“That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”
Charles B. Dew’s Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War is a handy one-stop source for anybody seeking the actual words Confederates wrote and spoke about Black people.
Dew wrote that Davis praised slavery as a worthy institution by which “a superior race” had transformed “brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers.” (While Lee denounced slavery as an institution, he owned slaves and fought for “a Confederacy of Slaveholding States.”)
The author pointed out that Davis’s VP, Georgian Alexander H. Stephens, was thankful the Confederacy was based “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.” He added that the Confederate States of America was, therefore, “the first Government ever instituted upon principles in strict conformity to nature and the ordination of Providence in formulating the materials of human society.”
Stephens was a big fan of the Confederate constitution. He said the charter “has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to...the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.”
The Confederate constitution guaranteed slavery in perpetuity:
- “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” — Article I, Section 9.4
- The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several States; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States. – Article IV, Section 3
(The constitution did ban the trans-Atlantic slave trade but for economic and strategic reasons, not because of any moral qualms about slavery. The idea was to bolster the domestic slave trade and win support from Britain and France, which had abolished slavery in their colonies. Anti-slavery sentiment was strong in both countries, particularly in Britain.)
While Dew quoted from Davis, Stephens and the secession ordinances, he focused his book on a group of commissioners from Deep South states who traveled to Upper South and border slave states to argue for secession. Alabama dispatched Stephen Fowler Hale to Frankfort to talk Gov. Beriah Magoffin into leading Kentucky into the Confederacy.
Hale, from Eutaw, Ala., was a native of Crittenden County in western Kentucky who had studied law at Transy. In a letter to Magoffin, Hale, according to Dew, argued that slavery was “an institution with which is bound up not only the wealth and prosperity of the Southern people, but their very existence as a political community.”
Hale said Lincoln and the Republican Party represented “one dogma—the equality of the races, white and black.”
Hale also wrote that “the slave-holder and non-slave-holder must ultimately share the same fate; all be degraded to a position of negro equality, stand side by side with them at the polls, and fraternize in all the social relations of life, or else there will be an eternal war of races, desolating the land with blood, and utterly wasting all the resources of the country.”
He demanded to know what Southern white man “can without indignation and horror contemplate the triumph of negro equality, and see his own sons and daughters in the not distance future associating with free negroes upon terms of political and social equality?”
So “heritage, not hate?” The Confederates couldn’t have made plainer their hatred for Blacks, pronouncing them inferior to whites and fit only for slavery, which they claimed was blessed by the Almighty.
The Southern Poverty Law Center says the “heritage, not hate,” argument, which “Lost Cause” defenders apply to preserving Confederate holidays, monuments and other iconography “ignores the near-universal heritage of African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved by the millions in the South. It trivializes their pain, their history and their concerns about racism — whether it’s the racism of the past or that of today. And it conceals the true history of the Confederate States of America and the seven decades of Jim Crow segregation and oppression that followed the Reconstruction era.”
On Facebook, Aull said HB 396 “isn’t about erasing history. It’s about who we chose to officially honor as a Commonwealth. Our public holidays should reflect unity and shared values.”
Indeed they should.
The lawmaker said of HB 395, “Teaching history isn’t political. It’s educational. Understanding where we’ve been helps our kids think critically and engage civically.”
Indeed it does.
“History matters,” he also said. “Education matters.”
Indeed they do.
“It’s time to move forward, together,” Aull urged.
Indeed it is.
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