Get Big Pivots

Musings on Confederate statues, episodes of Colorado history, and what we choose to remember

by Allen Best

What will Bob Dylan do with the Sand Creek Massacre?

The attack on Cheyenne and Arapaho who were peacefully assembled in southeastern Colorado in 1864 has been on Dylan’s mind, as was revealed by the historian Douglas Brinkley in the  New York Times.

Brinkley conducted two interviews, the first two years ago in New York and, most recently, by telephone upon the release of Dylan’s first album since 2012. They talked about much, including the social activism reflected in Dylan’s songs. Brinkley says at one point Dylan went to his tour bus to gather a sheaf of papers about Sand Creek.

Even in 1865, just months after the massacre, the evidence collected by a Congressional committee was condemning. John Chivington commanded the Colorado militia that savaged the encampment of mostly children, women, and older males. The attack violated specific promises extended the tribes, and served no useful purpose—except, perhaps, the congressional ambitions of Chivington. The hearings revealed Chivington for the scoundrel that he was.

This is not to make the Cheyenne and Arapaho into people they were not. Raiding and killing of rival tribes, the Pawnee and Comanche, was common. They were warring with the Utes in South Park in 1844 when John Charles Fremont passed by in 1844. Some among them had also raided and murdered Anglo immigrants and settlers in the months prior to the brutal attack of Black Kettle’s people at dawn on that morning in November 1864.

See also: Remember Sand Creek’s Men of Peace.

History is messy. So are people and their intentions.

We have no statues to honor Chivington, even if we do have a place name near the massacre that remembers him.  Last time I was there I saw a farm operation, but also decaying and falling apart buildings. A not-infrequent “town” on  Great Plains.

But why did we continue to honor Robert E. Lee and other confederate war generals? The Confederacy was created to defend the right to continue and expand slavery. The latter is crucial to understanding the Civil War. Southern states wanted to extend slavery to the western territories, most definitely including New Mexico but also including Colorado. A Confederate force was blocked in 1862 by the militia from Colorado in a battle just north of Santa Fe at La Glorieta Pass. John Chivington played a role in the Confederate defeat, in legend a large one.

Motivations in northern states were rarely pure. If most opposed expansion of slavery, some wanted slaves returned to Africa. Some northern industrialists, especially in New York City, actually favored the status quo. One riot targeted freed African-Americans. Abraham Lincoln, a staunch foe of slavery, nonetheless said he would rather tolerate slavery than see the Union dissolved.

The plot thickens. Why exactly were these statues to the confederate generals erected?  After the Civil War, there was an immediate effort to create a new social order. African-Americans were elected to Congress from southern states. Some weak efforts were made to integrate African-Americans into the economy as others had been allowed.

Elites of the South were not going to give up their privileges. Jim Crow laws were enacted to create a feudal order that approximated the slave-holding plantations of old. In this reinvention of history came the statues, many in the early 20th century. The Ku Klux Klan, created by former Confederate officers, was the terrorist, enforcement branch of this new order.

Lee was perhaps the best general of them all. He had been superintendent of West Point. Northern states wanted his talents on their side. He instead cast his lot with the right to continue and, if possible, extend slavery. The lesser generals look far worse, as Paul Krugman makes clear when writing about President Trump’s defense of retaining the names Fort Bragg and Fort Hood. “These bases honor men who stood for slavery, the opposite of freedom; and as it happens, two of the biggest bases are named for generals famed not for victories but for defeats,” he says in the New York Times.

Can’t the South do better? Were there people who achieved with less ambiguous achievements? Lee himself said soon after the war ended that he opposed such monuments, as they only would fester wounds.

Edmund Pettus Bridge, Selma

Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, an icon of civil rights history, was named for a Confederate brigadier general, U.:S. senator — and Ku Klux Klan grand dragon. Photo/Allen Best

Change is hard, though. Here in Colorado come plans to rename Denver’s Stapleton neighborhood. The name comes from the former airport and hence a long-ago mayor who had ties to the Ku Klux Klan.

How far do we go in cleansing our geography and public squares of impure history? Mt. Evans, a 14,000-foot peak that presides over Denver in often glistening white profile, was named after John Evans, a doer-of-many-good-deeds and territorial governor at the time of the Sand Creek Massacre. A 2014 task force of historians appointed by Northwestern University—one of two colleges he helped create—found no evidence that Evans did not help plan the massacre and likely would have opposed the attack. Still, the historians found Evans guilty of “moral failure” both in his duties as Indian agent while serving as territorial governor and in his unwillingness to fess up in later years to the mistake.

Or, to continue the massacre theme, what about Pitkin County, named after one of the state’s first governors, Frederick Pitkin, who  campaigned on the theme  “Utes must go.” This was shortly before the affair remembered as the Meeker Massacre.

Or for that matter, Teller Ammons, a governor and namesake for Colorado State University’s Ammons Hall. His weakness as governor led to the Ludlow Massacre in 1914, the America emblematic of industrial feudalism.

Even good people are imperfect, and we tend to be captive to our own times. But the thought comes back to what Wynton Marsalis said at an Aspen Ideas Festival in 2015. Walter Isaacson, a historian, brought up the issue of the Confederate flag, the statues of Robert E. Lee and Andrew Jackson.

“Symbols are powerful,” counseled Marsalis, “so choose them wisely.”

See also:

Symbols in the aftermath of Charleston

Kit Carson, hero or villain in Taos?

Allen Best
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