Robert B. Simpson: Of soldiers and statues

I'm sure I saw him the first time I ever visited the county seat, 6 miles of country road from home. I know I looked at him every time I was ever in town during the rest of my growing up years. There he was, neat, trim, gazing solemnly into the distance, uniform immaculate, musket at order arms. He stood, and still does, an ancient, weathered gray presence, atop a pedestal in front of the court house. Someone must have told me at some point that I was looking at a statue of a Confederate soldier, but that meant little to me then.

The recent drive to get rid of the infamous Confederate battle flag, long overdue in my opinion, was followed by the beginnings of a movement to get rid of Confederate statues like the ones that stand in so many counties across the South. The one in my home county, Anson, in N.C., was modeled on a native son from a town just a few miles away, a sergeant in the Confederate States Army.

Wounded at Sharpsburg and again at Gettysburg, he was later captured, then paroled, and finally returned home one month before the war ended. His likeness is formed of bronze, mounted on a shaft of granite.

If my ancestors had been held in bondage, no doubt my outlook would be vastly different. But the Civil War is a historical fact. We can't erase it, and to wipe out every vestige of that sad four years is, in my opinion, a distortion of history. Once I came to understand more about the war, I looked at the statue as a reminder that we once fought each other in the bloodiest war of our history for the worst possible reasons. Maybe those reasons, awful as they were, dictate removing all signs of the disaster. I don't agree with that solution, but that will probably be decided at some future time, and not by me.

Soldiers don't choose their wars, and this was especially true of the Civil War. As was true in the South of the 1860s and is still too true today, political leaders and the wealthy tend to drive the train. The vast majority is then expected to lay the track and shovel the coal, swallowing the lies they're told because they have only limited resources with which to search out the truth, and little means of changing direction even if the truth is uncovered. So the wealthy slave-holders of the South pushed for secession, apparently believing they could somehow scare the more powerful North into backing down and letting the "peculiar institution" not just continue, but expand. But tactical skill and determined leaders could not overcome the combination of logistical superiority and the leadership of a Lincoln, who practically single-handedly pushed the North to win. Especially when the rank and file of the South got its fill of the horror of a bloody war fought for the benefit of someone else, and the Confederate Army began to come apart at the seams.

That many of the ordinary citizens of the South had no hatred for the Union and no particular desire to leave it seems obvious from the way they picked up the pieces after the war and mostly considered themselves citizens of their original country. The angry resentment of the time appears mostly to, again, have been the province of the former slave-holders, whose lives had been changed irrevocably. Many former Confederates, regardless of the pain of wounds and defeat, rejoined the U.S. Army, as did their own descendants. Two of my great-grandfathers were wounded while fighting as Confederates, but my own father served willingly in the U.S. Army in World War I, as did 9 first cousins in World War II, my brother in the Korean War, and I for three decades that included the Vietnam War. While the battle-flag wavers like to portray rage and an ignorant devotion to something of which they understand little, most in the South seemed to want to just get on with living a decent life in the United States, considering the Civil War years an aberration. The book recording the history of my home county refers to things that happened during that time with the dainty phrase, "during the Confederate period," like "during the time when we were sick with fever."

I see the Confederate statue in front of the courthouse as representing men whose leaders used them as pawns in a mad gamble to keep their own positions secure at all cost, and who soldiered on as best they could against all odds, dying needlessly and for no gain, but honorably. As population changes, I suspect the old statue will some day come down. I wish it wouldn't.

Robert B. Simpson, a 28-year Infantry veteran who retired as a colonel at Fort Benning, is the author of "Through the Dark Waters: Searching for Hope and Courage."

This story was originally published September 20, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Robert B. Simpson: Of soldiers and statues ."