A version of this originally appeared in The Virginian-Pilot on June 26, 2015.
Earlier this week, Portsmouth City Councilman Mark Whitaker called for the removal of his city's 35-foot tall Confederate monument. The Pilot reported that Mayor Kenny Wright agreed with him.
The offending obelisk, its pedestal emblazoned with "To Our Confederate Dead," stands at the corner of High and Court streets. Whitaker said that a cause that supported slavery should not be honored on public property.
Portsmouth is a city plagued by monumental problems. A 122-year-old Confederate marker is the least of them.
Need I remind Whitaker that Portsmouth is in deep financial trouble? It has the highest tax rate in the region and some of the poorest performing schools.
According to the state Department of Education, only 65.93 percent of Portsmouth's students could pass the reading portion of the SOLs in 2014. Among black students, the pass rate was only 58.86 percent.
After firing its city manager and city attorney this spring, City Council passed a budget that slashed $1 million from the sheriff's department and left courtroom security in jeopardy. It instituted a hiring freeze that is expected to hurt public safety. There is a grassroots movement under way to recall the mayor.
Yet city leaders in that mess of a metropolis are wasting time talking about a monument?
That chunk of granite isn't an endorsement of the Southern cause. It's a memorial to those who died in that bloody war.
These memorials to the Civil War dead dot the South. They were erected by people who didn't want their sons, husbands, brothers and fathers to be forgotten.
Confederate soldiers didn't uniformly support slavery. And not all Union fighters were abolitionists. Many on both sides were young men who went off to war, doing what they believed was their duty.
According to papers filed with the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1996 that nominated the marker for a place on the National Register of Historic Places, Portsmouth's monument is made of North Carolina granite and was dedicated on June 15, 1893.
Four branches of the Confederate military are depicted by statues along its base. William Henry Buchanan, a Confederate veteran and the grand-nephew of President James Buchanan, may have posed for the image of the sailor.
"The sailors' statue is particularly significant," the papers explained. "It is one of three statues in the South honoring the Confederate sailor. The statue faces east toward the Elizabeth River, the route taken by the CSS Virginia in her engagement with the USS Monitor on March 8-9, 1862, during the Battle of Hampton Roads."
A narrative in the papers explains that memorials to the war dead were quickly erected in the North by state governments and the Grand Army of the Republic, "while in the South, including Portsmouth, Virginia, monuments rose more slowly in a defeated land and memorialized heroes of a lost cause."
Portsmouth sent 1,242 men off to fight in the Civil War and 199 never returned, the papers note. The monument was erected in their memory by the fundraising efforts of the Ladies Memorial Aid Association.
It's handy to say the war was all about slavery, but, as former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb attempted to explain this week, it was far more "complicated" than that.
Webb's refusal to join a frenzied mob of politicians eager to destroy all vestiges of the Confederacy no doubt doomed his already slim chances of becoming president.
His was a voice of reason in this Confederate cacophony.
Another thoughtful voice is that of Civil War buff and local radio host Tony Macrini, who told me Thursday that he sees a stark difference between the Confederate battle flag that flew near South Carolina's Capitol - and should be removed - and the somber memorials to the dead.
"That flag was put there... to terrorize people," he said of South Carolina's banner. "Monuments were erected soon after the war by broken-hearted people who'd lost their sons."
Southerners at the time of the Civil War were folks who didn't travel as we do today, he added. As a result, their world was smaller than ours. Their state was - to them - a sovereign place.
"All they knew was that someone from someplace else was coming in and telling them what to do. Most of them were honorable. They were people of their time."
These grim monuments, erected by grieving people of a different time, contain lessons for all of us. Tear them down and we'll lose far more than granite.
