REUNION AND DISILLUSION: CONFEDERATE MEMORIALS IN MIDDLE TENNESSEE

Abstract

In the summer of 2017, the city of Charlottesville, Virginia became a bloody battleground between those who wanted to take down a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee and those who thought the statue was a sacrosanct piece of history. Some thought that tearing it down would be tearing down history. Over 150 years after the Civil War, the battle over its memory is still fought. This senior thesis examines two Confederate war memorials in Middle Tennessee, one of Sam Davis, the Boy Hero of the Confederacy, and one of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, as a way to track the historical memory of the Civil War. In this investigation of historical memory, I examine why the memorials were built and controversies that surrounded them before. This thesis asks the questions of what groups want to remember what parts of the Civil War? What is chosen to be remembered? Who chooses? I also look at the contemporary protest as I try to elucidate why people want the statues to come down and examine why others want to keep the memorials standing. This thesis argues that memorials are static and frozen in time, but the communities that build them are not.