Lansing’s most prominent monument says slavery was the cause of the Civil War. Why is that so unusual?

From the front, the statue of Austin Blair that stands outside Michigan’s state Capitol looks like a conventional memorial according to Kirk Savage, professor of history of art and architecture at the University of Pittsburgh and the author of “Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves” about Civil War monuments. Blair, who served as Michigan’s governor during the Civil War, is depicted in bronze standing with his left hand resting on a Civil War battle flag. But walk around the back of the monument dedicated in 1898, read one of three quotes from Blair, and you’ll see something that makes the monument almost one of a kind.

The quote reads: “All the blood and carnage of this terrible war, all the heart-rending casualties of battle and the sad bereavements occasioned by them, have the same cause — slavery. The greatest, vilest criminal of the world; it must perish....Message 1863.”

To determine how rare this quote is, Savage suggested I consult the online Smithsonian Art Museum Art Inventories Catalogue that catalogues public monuments and Contemporary Monuments to the Slave Past, a website documenting monuments related to slavery founded by Reneé Ater, associate professor emerita of American Art at the University of Maryland. After searching for the term “slavery” and reviewing detailed descriptions of 150 monuments in these databases and consulting other online sources, I found that the Blair monument is one of only about 50 in the country that include the word “slavery.” Of these, 10 recognize ending slavery as one of the major accomplishments of the Civil War. But only two identify slavery as the cause of the war: the Blair Monument and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., dedicated in 1922. “All knew that this interest [slavery] was somehow the cause of the war,” reads a portion of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address engraved in the memorial’s north chamber.

“It is a really unusual inscription,” Savage said of Blair’s quote about slavery. “And it is really unusual for that period of time. It stands out for sure.”

I noticed the quote on Blair’s statue because I moved to Lansing last year, and I was coming to terms with Confederate monuments in my hometown of Arlington County, Virginia. My preschool, for example, was — and still is — located in a county-operated building named Lee Center, opened as the Robert E. Lee school in 1925. The name honors Lee, who led the Confederate army during the Civil War. The Confederates were fighting to preserve slavery in the South and to extend it to additional states so that they could continue to buy, sell and own as property people of African descent and exploit their labor under threat of violence. Other schools and roads in the county also honored Lee and other Confederates, including the high school where I played sports, Washington-Lee. In 2020, the Southern Poverty Law Center estimated that there were still almost 1,800 monuments for Confederates, including buildings and roads named after them, mostly in the South, even after more than 100 had been removed.

By portraying Confederates as heroic, the monuments disassociated them from fighting for something so horrific. I’m sorry to say that for decades neither I nor anyone I knew questioned these monuments even as I worked to uncover the forgotten history of school integration in Arlington. I finally opened my eyes after the racist violence at Charlottesville in 2017 that was prompted by an effort to remove a statue of Lee. I learned that names like Lee Center were consistent with a movement by white Southerners to reassert white supremacy following the post-Civil War Reconstruction era (1865-1877), during which Black Americans in the South temporarily gained rights and opportunities long denied including voting and the ability to hold public office.

Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia University who is a leading historian of Reconstruction, wrote in 2017 in The New York Times that “the great waves of Confederate monument building took place in the 1890s, as the Confederacy was coming to be idealized as the so-called Lost Cause and the Jim Crow system was being fastened upon the South, and in the 1920s, the height of black disenfranchisement, segregation and lynching.”

Therefore, while Southerners were falsely rebranding the Confederacy as a glorious military campaign (the Lost Cause) and imposing segregation, Michiganders were unveiling a monument to Blair that spoke a truth still so unusual that my jaw dropped when I first saw it.

“Slavery is in many ways the last great unmentionable in American discourse,” the Smithsonian’s secretary and founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Lonnie G. Bunch III, told The New York Times this April. So how exactly were Michiganders able to mention this word prominently in 1898 and why is it so difficult to speak the same word today, particularly naming it as the cause of the Civil War?

Though Matt VanAcker, director of the State Capitol’s Tour, Education and Information Service, said there was no record of debate over the inscriptions on Blair’s monument, other historic records from the 1800s shed light on both questions.

“A vast sea of people filled the grounds east of the capitol and stretched away on Michigan and Capitol avenues to witness the unveiling” of Blair’s statue on Oct. 12, 1898, according to the Lansing State Republican. An estimated 25,000 people had arrived, many by train, to honor Blair, who had died in 1894. “The eventful arrival of the day,” the State Republican reported, “was …Major-General William R. Shafter, the hero of Santiago [a Michigander and Civil War veteran]….” Santiago referred to the city in Cuba, where Shafter had won a battle in the Spanish-American War that had been fought earlier that year.

The keynote speaker, former U.S. Sen. John Patton, a Republican, established that building a monument to Blair without mentioning slavery would have been virtually unimaginable, a position shared today by the state Capitol’s VanAcker.

Patton recounted how Blair was born in New York, in 1818. “Coincident with his birth was precipitated the debate on slavery which raged until its final abolition,” Patton said.

He explained that the delicate political balance between the North, where slavery was outlawed, and the South, where it was central to the economy, was maintained through a hotly debated practice in which new states joined the Union alternately “as representing either slavery or freedom,” that is, states where slavery was permitted and states where it was prohibited.

Patton said that during his early years, Blair was influenced by the anti-slavery sentiment in New York. He imagined that Blair might have learned about an exchange between two members of the U.S. House of Representatives:

“‘Who,’ said Josiah Quincy [Mass.] to John Randolph [Va.] ...‘was the most eloquent orator you ever heard?’  ‘The most eloquent orator I ever heard,’ replied Randolph, ‘was a woman, a slave, a mother, and her rostrum was the auction block’”....“This orator appealed straight to the liberty-loving heart of Austin Blair,” Patton continued. 

Patton told the crowd that in 1845, after moving to Michigan and becoming a member of the state Legislature, Blair, a lawyer, had tried to remove the word “white” from the state Constitution so that Black Michigan men could vote. “Remember, he did this against the advice and pleadings of his timid friends who said it would defeat him at the next election, as it did,” Patton recalled.

But Blair made a political comeback. In 1854 in Jackson (Blair’s hometown), Patton said, Blair helped found the Republican party, which opposed expansion of slavery into additional states. Though this platform stopped short of calling for abolishing slavery in the South, it was anathema to white Southerners.

The party’s founding was a key event in U.S. history because it led to Abraham Lincoln’s election as president in 1860. Lincoln ran on an updated Republican platform that included the party’s original call for a prohibition on slavery in new states. Lincoln’s election was the final act that led the Southern states to leave the Union, form the Confederacy and go to war in 1861.

Finally, Patton recounted that Blair gave everything to the war, a view echoed in a book about early Lansing history, “Pioneers, Reformers, & Millionaires,” by Elizabeth A. Homer, former curator of the Michigan Women’s Historical Center and Hall of Fame and Turner-Dodge House. “When Blair left office in 1864,” Homer wrote, “he was almost destitute, having expended much of his personal wealth in support of the war effort.” Blair helped organize troops, supported laws to care for the families of soldiers who remained on the home front and visited soldiers in hospitals, Patton said. “He earned the title of ‘Soldiers Friend,’ he added, “and no letter ever came from the humblest private which remained unanswered.”

Patton’s audience, among them “gray haired veterans,” would likely have agreed with the inclusion of the anti-slavery quote on Blair’s monument. Thanks in large part to Blair’s leadership, 90,000 Michiganders, 44 percent of Michigan’s adult male population between the ages of 15 and 49, served in the Civil War, including Black and Native American Michiganders, according to “Michigan’s War: The Civil War in Documents,” edited by Shippensburg University history Professor John W. Quist. Almost all of them were volunteers as opposed to draftees. As the book further explains, “many of Michigan’s Civil War soldiers, like their counterparts from other Northern states, initially opposed emancipation, but most changed their minds after viewing slavery themselves, usually for the first time [4 million people were enslaved in 1860]. Believing that slavery was the cause behind a war that they were eager to finish, Michigan soldiers often attributed the differences they observed in the South to slavery and became even more convinced regarding the rightness of their cause.”

Yet simultaneous political movements reflected in Patton’s closing remarks would ensure that Blair’s quote would remain almost unique on public monuments.

The first, as detailed by Flint native and Yale University history Professor David W. Blight in his 2001 book “Race and Reunion.” was a movement to emphasize reconciliation between North and South. To accomplish this goal, proponents sought to avoid the issue of slavery. An example was the then-influential magazine The Century, which beginning in 1883 published a series of reminiscences of the Civil War featuring firsthand accounts of key battles. One of the two supervising editors said that the magazine’s goal was to “soften controversy” by “exclusion of political questions.” The editors saw their mission as attempting to heal the nation, Blight wrote, but “the issues of slavery and race were resoundingly silent.”

Simultaneously, white Southerners were advancing a white supremacist recollection of the Civil War, the Lost Cause, that intertwined with the reconciliationist view. Savage has written that white Southerners knew that “the South had to be reconstructed, but not along the lines contemplated by the Northern victors. In this process of reconstruction, slavery disappeared but, in a peculiar way, remained central.”

The effort began almost immediately after the war, Blight recounts, with publication of Edward Pollard’s book “The Lost Cause” in 1866. Pollard argued that the South should continue the fight it had lost on the battlefield with a “war of ideas.” Pollard followed up in 1868 with “The Lost Cause Regained,” in which he advocated reconciliation with conservative Northerners on Southern terms. “To the extent of securing the supremacy of the white man,” Pollard wrote, “and the traditional liberties of the country…she [the South] really triumphs in the true cause of the war.”

The Confederacy’s war president, Jefferson Davis, “set the tone” for Lost Cause mythology in his memoir published in 1881, Blight writes. “In language that became almost omnipresent in Lost Cause rhetoric, Davis insisted that slavery ‘was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.’” Davis argued that the South was merely trying to defend itself against the “unlimited, despotic power” of the federal government. He also contended that the enslaved had been “trained in the gentle arts of peace and order and civilization … ,” and that “the tempter [the North] came…and decoyed them with the magic word of ‘freedom’. He put arms in their hands” 200,000 Black Americans served in the Union Army — “and trained their humble but emotional natures to deeds of violence and bloodshed.”

Blight adds that in 1878, Davis presented the Southern triumph over Reconstruction “as an explicit element of Lost Cause ideology.” This “great victory” resulted after Southern whites violently overturned legal rights and protections for the newly freed Black Americans and persuaded the North to withdraw troops sent to protect them. In perpetuating these ideas, Blight writes, diehard Lost Cause advocates, many of them high-ranking officers and political leaders of the Confederacy, forged one of the most highly orchestrated grassroots partisan histories ever conceived.” This disinformation campaign included books, magazines, lectures, monuments, organizations such as the United Daughters of the Confederacy and eventually, movies, most famously “The Birth of a Nation.”

In 1935, historian W.E.B. Dubois wrote in “Black Reconstruction in America”: “In propaganda against the Negro since emancipation in this land, we face one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life and religion.”

Central to these efforts was elevating Lee, rather than Davis, as the true leader of the Confederacy. “With Lee as the major historical actor,” Savage writes, “the story of the Lost Cause became a glorious military record rather than a political struggle to secure a slaveholding nation.” The key moment in this transition came in 1890, five months after Davis died: the unveiling in Richmond of a 60-foot-tall statue of Lee astride his horse, witnessed by as many as 150,000 people.

This event resonated across the nation, including in Michigan. The Detroit Free Press published a long, glowing account of the monument’s dedication on its front page. Included in the coverage were lengthy excerpts of remarks by the keynote speaker, Colonel Archer Anderson, who began by placing Lee in the pantheon of American heroes. “[T]o-day in every part of America the character and fame of Robert Edward Lee are trusted as ‘possession for all time,’” Archer said. Archer spoke of Lee’s “personal honor,” “knightly valor,” “military genius,” and “heroic constancy.” He presented South and North as moral equals when he recounted Lee’s surrender to Union General Ulysses S. Grant as showing “the magnanimity of the conqueror, not less than the fortitude of the vanquished.”

The coverage was more balanced in the Benton Harbor Daily Palladium. That paper quoted Archer as saying “millions of our countrymen…will this day confirm our solemn declaration that the monument to George Washington has found its fitting complement and companion in the monument to Robert E. Lee.” Then the newspaper provided a different perspective. “In striking contrast to that extraordinary claim [comparing Lee to Washington] is the voice of the colored men of New York city who on that same day issued an address…in which they said ‘you cannot cheer at the same time for Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee.’” (There is no record of coverage of the Lee monument’s unveiling in the Lansing State Republican.)

But dissenting views were drowned out by white America’s desire to reconcile North and South and by the Lost Cause. The Spanish American War, fought just prior to the unveiling of Blair’s monument, accelerated this process.

“Southern support for the war and [territorial] expansion became an overwhelming force by which reunion trumped appeals for racial justice, no matter how eloquently made,” Blight writes. Some Black Americans saw what was happening, he noted. The Black newspaper, the Norfolk Reporter, wrote in 1898, that “the closer the North and South get together by this war,” the harder Black Americans would “have to fight to maintain a footing.”

Against this historic backdrop, Patton concluded his speech much like Archer’s address at the Lee Monument’s dedication. He portrayed those who had fought to preserve slavery — including Lee, himself — as heroes equivalent to all other American soldiers. Patton’s remarks suggest, too, that Blair, despite a lifelong commitment to racial equality as documented by Homer, had come to embrace reconciliation on Southern terms.

Blair “was great in war, and like the greatest, he was magnanimous in peace,” Patton said. “…we have witnessed the fulfillment of his prophecy made in an address in 1871 when he said: ‘The soldiers of the Union will shake hands with those of the Confederacy under the flag of a country that is free enough and great enough for all. They are all descendants of the men who fought side by side in ‘76 and 1812.’”

“Thank God,” Patton continued, “we may now write the names of Lee and Wheeler [Confederate generals] and Hobson [Union general] by the side of Dewey and Shafter and Schley [U.S. military leaders in the Spanish-American war] and we are again one country, under but one flag, with one destiny.”

Almost 125 years later, the anti-slavery statement on Blair’s monument is a testament not only to slavery’s evil and Blair’s courage but also to the forces that make the statement so rare. The Lost Cause and the desire to reconcile the nation are among these influences. But there are others.

The University of Maryland’s Ater wrote in 2010 in the journal American Art that, “we find it difficult as a nation to place slavery into our national story of freedom … . The anguish of this past encourages us to forget it, and, yet, it is deeply woven into the fabric of who we are as a nation.”

Savage said in a telephone interview last year that “dealing with slavery openly is like opening Pandora’s box and dealing with all these other issues,” such as the failure to provide reparations for formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, violence and racial segregation that followed, and discriminatory lending practices and ongoing inequality, “which is probably the key reason you don’t see this word on public monuments for nearly a century.”

An important step forward is understanding that the culture of avoidance around slavery is rooted in our past. “Black and white people have an opportunity to talk about slavery in a nonconfrontational way if only they would learn the history,” City Pulse columnist Dedria Humphries Barker said in an interview this spring. Perhaps part of this learning could include understanding the history of Austin Blair and his generation of Michiganders — both their heroic fight for freedom and the pernicious influence of the Lost Cause that is still with us today.

(The author, a recent transplant to Lansing, consults on climate change and other health and environmental issues. He wishes to thank Matt VanAcker and the Capital Area District Library for research assistance.)