Ironically, the first casualty of Brown's raid was Heyward Shepherd, a free black man shot by one of Brown's raiders. On October 10, 1931, the dedication of a monument to Shepherd took place, part of an enduring attraction among white southerners to build monuments to so-called "faithful slaves." While Shepherd was not a slave, the United Daughters of the Confederacy adjusted the memorial message to incorporate Shepherd into the pantheon of faithful blacks who refused to join abolitionist forces. They had remained faithful to, it was supposed, those whites who knew them best and loved them. In addition to memorializing the faithfulness of such blacks, whites blessed slavery retrospectively as a system infused with civilizing, Christianizing principles, and the value of such principles was revealed in those blacks who refused to betray "their" whites.
The dedication was a remarkable event. Following speeches extolling the virtues of slavery and the wholesome world of the black "mammy," Pearl Tatten, the black music director at Storer College in Harpers Ferry arose and said "I am the daughter of a Connecticut volunteer, who wore the blue, who fought for the freedom of my people, for which John Brown struck the first blow. Today we are looking toward the future, forgetting those things of the past. We are pushing forward to a larger freedom, not in the spirit of the black mammy but in the spirit of new freedom and rising youth." No official notice was taken of her remarks, but she did receive a note from a United Daughters of the Confederacy member characterizing her comments as "untimely," and "out of place." Likewise, the Shepherdstown Register of October 15, 1931 reported that "her lack of propriety was severely criticized, though no reply was made to her statement nor any open notice taken of it."
There was outrage in the black community around the nation after the dedication. W.E.B. Dubois called the dedication a "proslavery dedication," and in 1932, the NAACP's Walter White asked if they might place a counter tablet on the John Brown fort--which then stood on the Storer College grounds--which would read, "here John Brown aimed at human slavery a blow that woke a guilty nation. With him fought seven slaves and sons of slaves. Over his crucified corpse marched 200,000 black soldiers and 4 million freemen singing ‘John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave but his soul goes marching on.'" The president of Storer College, fearing white displeasure, refused this request.
The monument stood relatively ignored until the National Park Service put it in storage in 1971 during major restoration work in the historic area of Harpers Ferry. The service gave assurances to the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans that it would be restored to public view when restoration work was completed. Indeed, a decade later, in 1981, the monument was restored, but the park superintendent heard rumors that it would be vandalized. He also heard dissatisfaction in the black community about the monument's renewed visibility. Consequently, he decided to put a crate around the monument. There the matter simmered until 1991, when a number of evaluative reports about NPS interpretation at Harpers Ferry suggested uncrating the monument. It was suggested that "this monument be re-dedicated and plaques installed beside the original recognizing the role and the cause of the black freedom-fighters who accompanied John Brown on his raid." In 1995, the monument was uncrated with a new interpretive plaque nearby that talked about the monument's interesting history.
The Park Service was attacked from all sides. Local representatives of the NAACP said the monument should be thrown into the Potomac--here we have the Stalinist resolution of monument problems, destroy them. Many outraged neo-Confederates accused the Park Service of "political correctness," caving in to "special interests," meaning the alleged "racism" of blacks who wanted to reinterpret the monument. For example, one critic wrote to the National Park Service superintendent, "since any monument can be considered controversial, I was wondering; is the NPS prepared to pay for a new interpretive plaque for every monument in the country that is erected on an NPS site? Is the NPS prepared to pay for the replacement of interpretive plaques as each generation reinterprets the past? Or does the concept of interpretive plaques only apply to monuments concerning black Americans? If so, does this mean that the NPS considers black Americans...to be incapable of reading historic texts, considering who wrote them and when, and then making their own judgements accordingly?"
In this letter, as in many others, there is an assertion that the monument speaks for itself; secondly, the strong reaction engendered by a very modest Park Service interpretive plaque placed near a monument which dwarfs the plaque in size is revealing. Is the objection, I wonder, to any interpretive plaque, or only one that brings into public view the vexing history of this monument, a history that complicates not only the motivation for the monument and its message, but raises important issues about the causes of the Civil War? The interpretive plaque also calls into question the very reason for erecting a monument: the desire to put in place a message that is enduring, unchangeable. An interpretive plaque declares, whatever its message, that history is not a frozen set of facts, but resembles, declared the eminent historian Carl Becker in 1935, "an unstable pattern of remembered things."\
My response to this particular critical letter would point out that it is in fact the case that the Park Service is always in the process of changing interpretive programs, and often changing plaques and putting up new wayside exhibits. The service alters the contents of recorded historical messages at sites or even puts up new monuments that profoundly enrich the historic landscape, such as the Indian Memorial at the Little Bighorn. And it is clearly the case that the biography of this monument briefly noted on the interpretive plaque--that is most revealing. The monument alone that commemorates Heyward Shepherd hides the tumultuous history of the monument's genesis, dedication, and existence, a history that reveals so much about the uses and abuses of national memory. It is also the case that those monuments that are most controversial are most in need of interpretive attention.
As with monuments, so too with battle sites. A Heritagepac e:mail alert responded to renewed interest in interpretation of slavery at Civil War battlefields by stating "battlefield interpretation should be about battles and not about subjective judgements on socio-cultural trends which happen to be politically-correct at this point in time." There is no question that many people go to battlefields to learn about the battles, and I always recall Robert Utley's caution that site interpretation must grow out of the events at the site. Given the academic world's regrettable lack of interest in military history, I understand some of the fears of those who see Civil War battlefields as among the few places where one can go and learn about, revel in, and imagine to one's heart's content the activities of individuals and armies. I can't imagine that this will ever be at risk. It is problematic, to say the least, to characterize as "trendy" the altogether defensible conviction that battles should be interpreted in the larger context of the Civil War, and situated in the larger context of what brought about the war.
I cannot see how even a cursory reading of nineteenth century evidence: political rhetoric, newspaper editorials, diaries, letters, songs, art, schoolbooks, sermons, not to mention Ordinances of Secession and the Confederate Constitution, for example, could lead to any other conclusion than that the arguments over the future of slavery was at the heart of the matter. And yet what is so self-evident to so many is read differently by others. What is central to this abiding controversy is not a disagreement over available evidence, but the difference between the sensibilities of history and heritage. "To understand something historically," Peter Novick reminds us, "is to be aware of its complexity, to have sufficient detachment to see it from multiple perspectives, to accept the ambiguities, including moral ambiguities, of protagonists' motives and behavior." Heritage, on the other hand, observes David Lowenthal, is a "felt truth," the past as we would like it to be." And, observes Lowenthal, "heroic dead are essential to the collective heritage."
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By Mary Johnson
Updated: 09/13/2013