Legacy of Dissent: The Civil War’s Contested Meaning in the Midwest

Over two sweltering mid-August days in 2017, several hundred avowed white nationalists descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, the normally quiet home of a public university judged among the nation’s best, to hold a “Unite the Right” rally. Their choice of venue was not circumstantial. They came to protest the city’s decision to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee, erected in 1924 following the semicentennial of the Civil War, from the former Lee Square recently renamed Emancipation Park. Bearing both Confederate and Nazi flags and including prominent graduates of the University of Virginia, predominantly young white men presented local residents with a torchlight procession reminiscent of 1930s-era Nazi stormtroopers (and, longer ago, black-caped “Wide-Awakes,” Republican supporters of Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 election bid). Chanting “White lives matter!” and “You will not replace us,” only the most recent iterations of nationalist language, they vowed to “take our country back,” then marched through the dark campus and encircled the equestrian sculpture of Lee. The next day, with some now armed and roaring “Our blood, our soil!” the protesters were met by many hundreds of sign-carrying counterprotesters, Virginia State Police, and National Guard. Violence ensued, forcing Charlottesville’s police chief to declare the rally an unlawful assembly, and protesters and counterprotesters soon moved to the downtown streets. More violence followed, resulting in the vehicular murder of counterprotester Heather Heyer and the death of two state policemen when their helicopter crashed near Charlottesville. In perhaps the ordeal’s most shocking twist, the perpetrator of the homicide was an Ohio resident recently relocated from northern Kentucky. License plates on vehicles tied to white nationalists suggest that many or most of the Charlottesville protesters hailed from outside the Old Confederacy, most heavily from the Midwest.

But for senseless deaths in an otherwise staid setting, the latest casualty of Civil War violence was perhaps not so shocking. Over a half century after the centennial of the war and a quarter century since Ken Burns’s documentary cemented in Americans’ minds a nationalized war narrative of shared sacrifice, reunion, and reconciliation, cities in former slave states like Virginia have been struggling with the war’s legacy. A tragic mass murder of African American churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 (one of the Charlottesville nationalists yelled “Dylann Roof was a hero!,” a reference to the killer), and police shootings and mobilized protests in Baltimore, Ferguson, and Charlotte, led to local governments removing carved-stone and bronze monuments dedicated to Confederate leaders in New Orleans, Baltimore, and St. Louis, and citizens defacing such monuments in other cities such as Chapel Hill and Durham, North Carolina. These actions spurred many conservatives and southerners to protest against such “political correctness” and “historical vandalism,” responses echoed by the president, Donald Trump.¹

With few battlegrounds, whether Confederate monuments or civil rights sites, residents of states north of the Ohio—the modern Midwest—generally breathe easy about the complicated legacy of that war. Safe in the knowledge that former resident Abraham Lincoln ended slavery and with the painful struggle for civil rights largely understood as a “southern” history and burden, they see their region by traditional, sectionalized binary understandings learned as schoolchildren: the South, fighting for slavery, lost to the North, fighting to end it. By distinctive cultures, ideologies, and geographies, and uncontested Civil War outcomes, their region is a virtual extension of the Mason-Dixon Line.

That is, until Ohioans like James Alex Fields, Jr.—his act of violence at Charlottesville preceded by wide protests in the bypassed town of Franklin, Ohio, over the overnight removal of a forgotten ninety-year-old plaque venerating Robert E. Lee from its overgrown roadway spot, and even more curiously, in Chicago where vandals burned and defaced a 1926 bust of Lincoln himself—became national news, complicating that comforting story. Surely, the Civil War’s central figure, widely celebrated as the nation’s moral compass for his leadership and sacrifice in ending slavery by dint of war, confirms the Midwest’s place in the broader war narrative. Not so. In fact, Lincoln...