Funding the Memory War: Economics of Civil War Monuments

Roughly 3,351 Civil War monuments dot the United States. Of those, a little under two thirds honor the Union, though the literature on Civil War monuments is skewed much more heavily to the remaining tweleve hundred or so Confederate monuments. The South’s relative poverty during much of the late 19^th and early 20^th century is often cited as the reason for the discrepancy, though multiple factors impacted when and why a monument was erected. Looking to who paid for them reveals who shaped public memory of the war. Local municipalities, the state, and federal donations account for the majority of Union monuments with known funding sources. Each of these levels of government also funded Confederate monuments, but private organizations erected more monuments for the South. Today, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) is synonymous with 20^th century Confederate monument building in the field of Civil War memory, and for good reason. Of the 1168 catalogued Confederate monuments, 395 were paid for by the UDC, and many more received funding from the UDC but fail to credit the organization on its inscription. The UDC’s appeal to the Lost Cause and white supremacy through these monuments is well documented and unsurprising. However, by the end of the 20^th century, the UDC no longer erected monuments with the same intensity. This economic trend is deeply gendered, and as white women’s need for the Lost Cause fades, so too does their desire to put their money into monuments. After a lull in Confederate memorialization following the Civil Rights movement, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) began to shape the Lost Cause for their own purposes beginning in the 1990s, erecting their memorials to suit their narrative. Again, gender in this instance is important, as the SCV created a more masculine, and eventually more alt-right, version of the Lost Cause. Simultaneously, African American monuments honoring abolitionists, Black Union soldiers, and the enslaved became increasingly popular, representing an opposing economic change in Civil War memory. These monuments are a mix of privately funded and government funded projects, representing the growing movement of making Emancipation memory public again, like white Reconciliation and Lost Cause memories. Very few Civil War monuments depict Black people, and even fewer specifically honor them. While Black memory has long opposed the moonlight and magnolia lies of the Lost Cause, until very recently any money available was considered better spent on legal fees, social aid, or education rather than monument building. Changes in who is able to afford monuments and who is willing to pay for them correlates strongly to changes in memory and social justice movements. This presentation will use charts and graphics to represent the funding data across the 20^th century into the 21^st. Other visuals, such as images of monument catalogues, will be used to further highlight how much money has been spent on Civil War memorialization.