Starting in 2015, in the wake of the shooting of ten members of the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC by white supremacist Dylann Roof, a movement grew to dismantle the icons of the Confederacy throughout the South. Shortly after the shooting, Bree Newsome climbed up a flagpole on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse and pulled down the Confederate flag, which had been flying there since the centenary of the Civil War in 1961. Over the next five years, Confederate flags and monuments celebrating Confederate military leaders were taken (or pulled) down, first in Memphis, TN, then in New Orleans. The slow but gradual removal of Confederate monuments became a tsunami after the police murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Perhaps the most prominent set of Confederate memorials on Richmond’s Monument Avenue were removed and melted down.
It was in the context of this massive shift in consensus about the iconography of the Confederacy that I was finishing work on my book Disability, The Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The book deals with a small but important group of white intellectuals who had worked closely with Black activists to abolish slavery and shared a deep commitment to full Black citizenship and Black male voting rights, all of which were ultimately ratified by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. And all of them found a vocabulary to discuss the world they wanted to build from the ruins of the Civil War, a vocabulary organized around both the reality and the metaphor of amputation.
It’s not surprising that these writers and activists turned to amputation as a way to understand what had happened to America, and the kind of country it should become. Tens of thousands of men North and South underwent some kind of amputation as a result of injury and/or infection, becoming what I call an amputation nation. And many white Union veterans as well as Northern civilians imagined amputation as part of an economy of reparation and redemption – the lost body part payment for the sins of slavery, and a reminder of what had to be excised from the nation in the wake of the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. In this imaginary, amputation served as a catalyst for Reconstruction.
This narrative of amputation as both a reminder of the losses occasioned by slavery and a kind of promissory note for Black emancipation was produced by a specific kind of writer, politician, minister, and/or philosopher: white former radical abolitionists who were on their way to becoming radical Reconstructionists. They held the veteran amputee up as an avatar of a nation from whom the disease of slavery had been cut away, and who faced a new way of living in and understanding his altered body. Along with this physical change came an ethical understanding of the necessity for a rethinking of the racial hierarchies on which the US had been founded.
Their primary political commitment was to racial equality and, in the years after the war, a variety of stances including reparations, gender equality, and Black citizenship. My book, then, is about those few white radicals who resisted the ongoing rescripting of the meanings of the Civil War and Reconstruction. They argued against the growing desire to forgive and forget not just the war but also the history of slavery itself. Rather than reunite the body politic as though its violent division had never happened, they insisted that the national corpus should not be remade in its pre-war image – that the country should remember its sins, the price it had paid for them, and the new shape it had to take in the post-war years.
But as the Civil War receded further into the historical and imaginative distance, white Americans moved decisively in the other direction. More and more they valued reconciliation and a strategic forgetting of the causes for the war, preferring the comfort of a stable American identity to the hard work of remaking a society – and economy – structured around enslavement into a racially equitable nation. This had several results: first, a gauzy nostalgia for the antebellum period that reached its apex in films like Gone with the Wind coupled with an embrace of Lost Cause historiography; second, a redefinition of the Civil War as a conflict between equally heroic Americans for reasons that no one could quite remember; third, the total abandonment of African Americans and their claims to the rights and privileges of citizenship, accompanied by a network of Jim Crow legislation; and, finally, solid reminders of white supremacy throughout the South in the form of monuments heroizing Confederate military men from regular infantry men to Robert E. Lee. Through sheer force of will and a willingness to abandon the formerly enslaved people who had been a primary motivation for the war, white Americans managed to effect a reattaching of what had been split apart: a nation defined by and governed through white supremacy.
Given my interest (or obsession?) with amputation and its metaphorical relevance for Black equality, my ears pricked up when in 2017 I saw then-President Donald Trump lament the removal of Confederate monuments, tweeting “Sad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart with the removal of our beautiful statues and monuments… the beauty that is being taken out of our cities, towns and parks will be greatly missed and never able to be comparably replaced!” In many ways, Trump was more correct than he knew. While the country was not being ripped apart, something was being excised, amputated, that could not be replaced, at least not in the same way. By saying the quiet part out loud, Trump – and other white nationalists – actually got close to the heart of what is at stake in amputating Confederate statuary from the shared landscape: not the extermination of (white) American history, but a step towards the destruction of whiteness as it now exists, a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Confederate monuments aimed not just to threaten black autonomy – although that was certainly part of the plan – but to normalize white domination and the rewriting of history.
The fantasy of uninterrupted wholeness that Reconstruction radicals countered, and that became ascendant after 1880, the fantasy that nothing had changed from the past nor need change in the future, was undeniably disrupted by the movement to bring down Confederate memorials. We can see Bree Newsome’s physical removal of the Confederate flag from its perch in front of the South Carolina capitol building as a symbolic amputation of the normalization of white supremacist imagery, and the sight of the empty flagpole as itself telling a story of resistance to anti-Black racism. As with the trope of the amputee, absence has radical resonances, insisting on loss as the first step in the process of political reparation towards Black Americans in general and Black Southerners in particular.
The backlash to Black Lives Matter has been swift, and in many states even teaching about the past that brought these statues into being is prohibited. Despite – or, more likely, because of – the earlier successes of BLM, several states now forbid teaching any material that might make a student “feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex,” as though any negative feeling about the white supremacy that has characterized the United States since its inception trumps the pedagogical value of learning a full and complicated history of the nation.
I would hope that we can avoid the depredations of the post-Reconstruction romance of the Lost Cause and regroup to fight back against the seemingly evergreen fantasy of national wholeness that always comes at the cost of Black lives. A more perfect union is not one that is free of fracturing or loss, after all. It is one that recognizes the generative power that emerges out of the excision of the infection of white supremacy, a nation that maintains an expansive view of past, present, and future: an amputation nation.
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