Heritage or injustice? How you view monument may depend on how you view the Civil War
A Civil War monument that honored “the best traditions of the South” in downtown Bradenton — and was removed when a national controversy about such memorials exploded two years ago — has residents and officials alike wondering if those traditions were being honored in the right place.
Major Civil War battles didn’t occur in Manatee County, but historic records describe Union raids and Confederate takeovers. At least 65 veterans called the area home when the war ended in 1865.
Some soldiers lost limbs in battle. Others were captured and thrown in prison, but the bulk of Manatee’s enlisted soldiers returned home to lead normal lives, making a living as fishermen and farmers or helping found modern-day Bradenton.
According to a six-volume biographical roster of Florida’s Confederate and Union veterans, none of Manatee County’s soldiers died in the war, but in honor of their service, a memorial stood outside the Manatee County Historic Courthouse for nearly 100 years. The courtyard was shared with the Manatee County Judicial Center, where local trials are held today.
Following a clash of protesters and counter-protesters in downtown Bradenton, county officials temporarily removed that monument, which some found to be offensive, in August 2017.
A number of civil rights groups and activists pointed to the memorial’s inscription as proof that it glorifies slavery and oppression as key components of the Civil War.
“Calm and noble in peace. Courageous and (chivalrous) in war. True to the best traditions of the South. The Confederate soldier lives enshrined in the hearts of his grateful countrymen,” according to a message at the monument’s base.
Many of those soldiers are also enshrined in history as Manatee’s early settlers. Archives show that 59 Confederate and six Union soldiers lived in the area, using various levels of influence to create the town we know today.
Two years after it was “temporarily” moved to a new location, the question of whether Bradenton’s 22-foot-tall obelisk monument represents hatred or heritage has become a major point of contention in the debate to find the memorial a new home.
Controversy revolves around monument
County leaders reconsidered if the monument’s rightful place was outside of the courthouse after a violent 2017 protest in Charlottesville, Va., that sparked debate among officials nationwide. In Manatee, commissioners voted to cover and subsequently remove the monument while they considered a new display location.
The argument centers around the morality of celebrating a war Confederates fought to preserve the right to slavery, an economic driver for southern states.
Stephanie McCurry, a Pulitzer prize-nominated author and historian specializing in the Civil War, said her extensive research has led her to believe that Confederate monuments are linked to the championing of white supremacy.
“What they really are is monuments to segregation. That’s why they’re put up,” McCurry said. “These veterans are being used as a signal to segregation and the connection to that is white supremacy.”
Opponents have said the courthouse location wasn’t fair to minority groups who are often discriminated against in the judicial system, headquartered next door to the memorial.
“This monument is a representation of slavery and the oppression that African Americans have dealt with,” Tarnisha Cliatt, president of the Manatee NAACP chapter, said in an interview with the Bradenton Herald. “It’s a symbolic statue that represents an era where there was hatred, there was lynching and so much separation and division.”
“There’s a preconceived notion that people of color going into that courthouse with a representation of slavery will not get a fair trial,” she added.
David McCallister, a spokesman for Save Southern Heritage Florida, a group that advocates for preserving Civil War history, said he didn’t buy the argument that a person wouldn’t receive a fair trail based on the Bradenton monument’s location.
“That’s foolishness,” McCallister said. “They’re going to get the same trial no matter what’s outside, and I hope the judicial system of Manatee County would realize that.”
McCallister also refuted the Civil War’s intrinsic link to slavery and said he believes the monument simply respects veterans who laid their lives on the line for what they thought was right.
“We need to show respect for veterans. The way we treat the veterans from 150 years ago is the way veterans will be respected 150 years from now,” he said. “Quite frankly, the monument needs to be where it was. Without public monuments, where’s the recognition, respect and remembrance?”
McCurry argued that a tribute to Civil War rebels from the South isn’t something that should be on prominent public display.
“It’s the private business of ancestral Confederates to mourn their ancestors, but the public recognition was for a political purpose,” she said. “They tried to create a pro-slavery country and failed. Why would we honor that?”
Sympathy to the Confederate cause
Historians generally agree that the Civil War, while prompted by a number of factors, was caused by the South’s effort to maintain slavery. At the outset of the war, CSA Vice President Alexander H. Stephens stated as much.
“(The CSA’s) foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, 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 normal condition,” Stephens said in a March 1861 speech.
Many of the nation’s tributes to the Civil War were erected during the Jim Crow era, mostly between 1900 and 1920, according to a February 2019 study published by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
McCurry doesn’t think that trend was a coincidence.
“By putting that up in the 1920s, they’re saying they still feel a sympathy to that cause — and that cause was slavery,” McCurry said. “There’s no way to separate the Civil War from slavery.”
The Judah P. Benjamin Chapter of the United Daughters of Confederacy held a public fundraiser to erect the Bradenton monument in 1924. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the $2,000 it cost to commission the monument would equate to more than $30,000 today, when adjusting for inflation.
At the time, the chapter said the granite obelisk paid “eternal tribute” to Confederate soldiers, according to the Evening Herald’s archived coverage of the unveiling ceremony.
“On behalf of the chapter, I thank our friends for helping us to place this monument here. We feel that we honor ourselves, and our generation of Americans by thus memorializing the valor of the men who fought under Lee, Jackson, Forest, Longstreet and others,” Denise Shields, former president of the local UDC chapter, said at the 1924 unveiling.
Former Bradenton Mayor Whitney Curry also addressed the audience at the monument’s unveiling, pointing to the brotherhood fostered by the Civil War, the Evening Herald reported.
“The bitterness engendered in that great fratricidal conflict between the men of the blue and the men of the gray has passed away and, in its place, there has sprung up a closer union and a stronger affection between the people of the North and the South,” Curry said.
A Confederate flag, as well as the names of top Confederate officials Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, are etched into the sides of the memorial. The monument itself, however, does not make any reference to the Union or the nation’s healing process immediately following the war.
That’s part of the reason why critics argue that the monument represents racial inequality, not history.
“That monument was put there to intimidate people from challenging the system. Now that those people have the power to say, ‘We won’t accept it,’ that tells us something about the moment we’re in,” McCurry said. “These people can’t just say they stand for the cause. They have to say what cause they stand for.”
Representatives from the UDC did not respond to the Bradenton Herald’s repeated requests for comment.
During a recent discussion on finding the monument a new home, Manatee County Commissioner Reggie Bellamy — the only black member currently on the commission — said the effect on the African American community has been “devastating.”
But some fellow commissioners argue that “erasing history” isn’t the answer and believe the monument should be placed back outside the courthouse, where, they claim, it stood for nearly a century without causing trouble.
Notable Civil War veterans from Manatee
Though Manatee County once stretched from the Gulf of Mexico all the way to the western shore of Lake Okeechobee and down to Cape Coral, many of the wartime personnel were active within today’s county lines.
At least two Manatee sheriffs, the county’s first clerk of the court and a handful of early county commissioners were among those who took up arms for the Confederate cause. Only one of the six Union soldiers who lived in Manatee after the war was a native of the area.
Ezekiel Glazier, who represented Manatee County at the Florida Secession Convention in 1861 and voted in favor of leaving the Union, participated in the war. Another notable name is Josiah Gates Jr., whose father was an early Manatee County settler. Glazier-Gates Park in Bradenton is named after both prominent families.
Benjamin, the Confederate States of America’s secretary of state, used the Gamble Mansion for three days to hide from the Union Army that had placed a $40,000 bounty on his head, according to Florida State Park Ranger Ted Unger.
“Benjamin actually traveled with Jefferson Davis for a while, but Davis wanted to go out West and Benjamin said he’d had enough,” Unger said, explaining the Confederate official’s connection to the Gamble Plantation. “He stayed here until he could find safe passage to the Bahamas.”
Capt. John Curry, another well-known name in the area, was one of the many people involved in securing Benjamin’s escape. Curry also sold some of his ships to the Confederate Army for use as blockade runners, records say.
His assistance may have been retaliation for Union Army’s raid of the Village of Manatee (now known as Bradenton) and destruction of his saw and grist mill. For several weeks, Union troops occupied the village, using one of Curry’s houses as officers’ quarters.
As the war raged on, county officials provided resources for those affected, according to archived Board of County Commissioners meeting minutes from March 1864, when officials voted to appoint someone for the “general distribution of all moneys and other supplies for the relief of soldier’s families.”
In Ellenton, Confederate soldiers took over the Gamble Plantation and used the fields to provide food and supplies for their troops until the war ended in 1865.
At least one of Manatee’s CSA veterans was a slave owner before the war, according to census records. James Gignilliat Cooper, who reportedly served as major general, held 13 slaves.
The county reported a total population of 854 residents in 1860, including 253 slaves. If there were any free African-Americans, they did not respond to the Census count.
What will happen to Bradenton’s monument?
Moving forward, county officials agreed to host a series of public hearings and outreach meetings to figure out where Manatee County residents would like to see the monument erected again. First, the monument, which broke during a transport attempt, will need to be repaired for about $40,000.
Commissioners say they’re wary of choosing to put it back outside the Historic Courthouse, and have narrowed the options down to either Rye Preserve in Parrish or Church Street, which is located on the west side of the Gamble Plantation.
Whichever spot they eventually settle on will see beautification and site improvements, according to county staff. One of the largest obstacles in relocating the monument was finding county-owned land with historical significance. Attempts to collaborate with an outside party were turned down.
Fogartyville Cemetery turned down a request for consideration. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which oversees the Gamble Plantation site, said it would not consider accepting the memorial before it is set to revise its park management plan again in 2025.
Instead of setting it back up as a freestanding monument in a local park, the NAACP’s Cliatt suggested housing it, along with appropriate historical context, in a museum.
“If they’re going to put it somewhere, a museum should be the place to display the Confederate statue,” she said, adding that better explanations in history books could also play a role in better educating the public.
“I think there is a way to remember the Civil War because we had so many people that fought in that,” said Cliatt. “By earmarking the time and by providing it in history books, it allows people to revisit through education. A statue alone does not state that at all.”
County Commissioner Misty Servia agreed that education around the monument is a necessary component and indicated that the history of both sides should be equally displayed.
“I envision an equal size plaque for each side and equal representation, with both historic accounts written by a historian,” Servia said in an interview with the Bradenton Herald. “It’s important that it’s factual and presented equally.”
The county has not announced when the first citizen input hearings and meetings will take place.
This story was originally published August 1, 2019 at 4:59 AM.
