Socially Constructing Space: Comparing Urban and Rural Civil War Monuments in Maryland

On Friday, August 11, 2017 white nationalists marched on the campus of the University of Virginia. The violence escalated Saturday with the death of a student protesting against white nationalists. This was just one event in a series over the past years surrounding the removal of Confederate statues. While cities like Charlottesville and New Orleans have had violent clashes between white nationalists and anti-white nationalists, cities in Maryland have had a different response. For example, in Baltimore, four statues were removed from public spaces quietly in the middle of the night on August 14, 2017. The political, geographic, and ethnic diversity of Maryland has influenced the response to debates about Civil War monuments.

Maryland was founded by English Catholics as a slave holding state. C. Christopher Brown notes there was a large African American population living in Maryland and Maryland was home to the largest concentration of free blacks by 1861. Due to its strategic location, Maryland was officially part of the Union during the Civil War, however the white population held deep-seated racist ideas and some fought for the Confederacy. After the Civil War, Maryland refused to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and was one of the last states to permit African Americans to vote. Because of this conflicted past, space and place theory are valuable tools when looking at the arguments surrounding Civil War monuments.

Henri Lefebvre argues space and place are social constructs. Timothy Cresswell expands on Lefebvre, stating meaning is constructed through a person's experience in the location and locale. Furthermore, W. Fitzhugh Brundage explains how the control of physical space was important to maintain and uphold Confederate values.Thus, to understand the debates surrounding Civil War monuments, understanding the meaning behind these public spaces and places is important.

Dolores Hayden and Anne Denkler argue places contain invisible histories and exploring how race, gender, and class work in these places can redefine the experience, making the invisible visible. Though Hayden focuses on urban spaces, rural towns in Maryland have also erected Union and Confederate monuments. As meaning is constructed through a person’s experience, the debates surround Civil War monuments take on new meaning in urban and rural spaces.

Using archival data and oral histories, this study considers how mapping the physical locations and constructed meanings of space and place in rural and urban Civil War monuments in Maryland can show the change in a community and the change in meaning the monuments held for the community. The hope is to have communities consider how to use Civil War monuments and their spaces to tell a more complete history of Maryland.