My letter to the
Star-Democrat in response to
an ongoing controversy about a civil war statue they are all crazy about taking down:
To the Editor:
The purpose of art is to uplift and inspire. If the Talbot
Boys statue in front of the court house is causing angst among the citizens of
Talbot County, then it needs to go. It is not worth such anguish. I never noticed
the statue until people started writing the paper about it. I was always
captivated by the magnificent statue of the great orator, author, and diplomat
Frederick Douglass. When I finally did notice the Talbot Boys I
would never have known that it honored Confederate veterans except for the
controversy.
What did strike me, when I finally decided to see the statue up
close, is that the soldier boy is holding a furled banner in surrender, as if
he is surrendering to Frederick Douglass. My initial impression was that the Talbot Boys statue symbolizes Southern humiliation and defeat;
there is nothing triumphant about it. In fact, it gives context to the statue
of the true hero, Frederick Douglass, for it symbolizes what Mr. Douglass was
up against. On that spot men, women and children were sold at auction, as in
that court house, bills of sale for human beings were recorded. Mr. Douglass
not only overcame incredible obstacles but he acquired the prestige that few
people, of any color, ever received. He was honored at the White House; he
lectured around the world. He is the pride of Talbot County. The Talbot Boys
statue is a nonentity in comparison.
When the Talbot Boys was originally erected,
why did they not also put up a statue to those who fought for the Union? Surely
there were men from Talbot County who fought for the Union? I come from
Frederick County, where we had brother fight against brother. I know that many
of the boys who fought for the Confederacy did not have enslaved persons at
their homes and in fact had nothing to do with slavery. They saw their state as
their country; it was being invaded, as they saw it. Similarly, of the men who fought for the Union, some of them had
enslaved persons at home. We forget that in Washington City a huge slave market
operated in front of the White House during the first year of the Civil War.
Furthermore, in the North, Irish children were forced to work in factories and
coal mines, forced to work or starve. But I would not blame young Union
soldiers for those injustices; they fought to preserve the Union, making great
sacrifices to do so.
Why did the Talbot Boys statue not come down during the
Civil Rights movement? I guess it was because Congress had passed a law that
all veterans were to be honored, no matter what side they had fought for, in
order to bring healing. But if the wounds are opening again, then perhaps a
certain general was right when he said that there should be no Confederate
monuments, at all. The money was better spent on education. Perhaps the
attention given to a statue should instead be focused on ending the modern
slavery of human trafficking, which is going on in our own state. It is a
situation which we have the power to fix, now. We can't fix the broken past.
But we can end the varieties of human exploitation that are destroying lives
all around us.
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