A Time of Atrocity: An Accounting of Crimes Committed in the Great American War
"...some milder version. While Washington was still held sacrosanct north of the Ohio, other Southerners were less lucky in a remarkable campaign of iconoclasm spurred on by public and political figures looking to burnish their credentials against anything that remotely smacked of slave power. It was not just the usual suspects, either - Theodore Roosevelt, a Democratic mover-and-shaker who controlled a powerful network of newspapers through his Journal empire, in many cases led the charge, demanding that streets, buildings, schools, even entire towns be renamed. This came to be known as the "anti-Dixie crusade," a fierce groundswell of advocacy against the legacy of the United States' founding by the Virginian aristocracy as much as it was by the Sons of Liberty in Boston.
The movement hit its crescendo in the winter and spring of 1915, when thousands of placenames were changed - ironically, of particular ire was Andrew Jackson, whose worldview many educated Liberals held in particular contempt but who had firmly put his foot down regarding federal authority when his Vice President, the South Carolinian John Calhoun, had toyed with nullification and secession. Jackson's surprise emergence as the villain du jour of American public politics can in part be traced to his authoritarian streak, aggressive campaigns against both the Bank of the United States and Supreme Court, and his appointment of Roger B. Taney, [1] responsible for the Dred Scott decision, to the highest bench in the land. Indeed, the sense that Jackson and Taney were the root cause of the current war through their worldview led to an incident in Annapolis where the statue of Taney before the State House was dynamited, killing three bystanders including the bomber himself.
Most such events were not violent, however, but rather more esoteric and academic. Other than more obvious choices, how was one to determine how related to the slave power cause and Confederate chauvinism an early-republic figure really was? Henry Clay's strong efforts to solve the sectional struggle before his death largely protected him of iconoclastic ire; Calhoun's status as the intellectual godfather of secessionism did not. Jefferson's legacy and belief that slavery would die out of its own devices surely had to outweigh his position at the pinnacle of Virginia aristocracy? What of Madison, Wisconsin or Monroe, Michigan, well-established cities named after his Virginian successors who they themselves kept chattel? Once more prominent Founding Fathers came into the fray, the campaign quieted dramatically, in part because Roosevelt did not want to be the man who inadvertently called the authorship of the Constitution itself into question, but the work to reckon with and reconcile the legacy of American slavery before the War of Secession was still nowhere close to being done..."
- A Time of Atrocity: An Accounting of Crimes Committed in the Great American War
[1] Interestingly enough, I recently learned that Taney was fairly opposed to slavery personally, he just decided to set fire to his historical and contemporary reputation to preserve it anyways
The movement hit its crescendo in the winter and spring of 1915, when thousands of placenames were changed - ironically, of particular ire was Andrew Jackson, whose worldview many educated Liberals held in particular contempt but who had firmly put his foot down regarding federal authority when his Vice President, the South Carolinian John Calhoun, had toyed with nullification and secession. Jackson's surprise emergence as the villain du jour of American public politics can in part be traced to his authoritarian streak, aggressive campaigns against both the Bank of the United States and Supreme Court, and his appointment of Roger B. Taney, [1] responsible for the Dred Scott decision, to the highest bench in the land. Indeed, the sense that Jackson and Taney were the root cause of the current war through their worldview led to an incident in Annapolis where the statue of Taney before the State House was dynamited, killing three bystanders including the bomber himself.
Most such events were not violent, however, but rather more esoteric and academic. Other than more obvious choices, how was one to determine how related to the slave power cause and Confederate chauvinism an early-republic figure really was? Henry Clay's strong efforts to solve the sectional struggle before his death largely protected him of iconoclastic ire; Calhoun's status as the intellectual godfather of secessionism did not. Jefferson's legacy and belief that slavery would die out of its own devices surely had to outweigh his position at the pinnacle of Virginia aristocracy? What of Madison, Wisconsin or Monroe, Michigan, well-established cities named after his Virginian successors who they themselves kept chattel? Once more prominent Founding Fathers came into the fray, the campaign quieted dramatically, in part because Roosevelt did not want to be the man who inadvertently called the authorship of the Constitution itself into question, but the work to reckon with and reconcile the legacy of American slavery before the War of Secession was still nowhere close to being done..."
- A Time of Atrocity: An Accounting of Crimes Committed in the Great American War
[1] Interestingly enough, I recently learned that Taney was fairly opposed to slavery personally, he just decided to set fire to his historical and contemporary reputation to preserve it anyways
Last edited:
