history

The Fourth of July & Confederate Statues

/ Neil Alan Willard

Photo of Alamance County Courthouse in Graham, North Carolina, by Bob Karp

It’s not uncommon to hear people whose skin color looks similar to mine say that if your family history was deeply rooted for many generations in a small Southern town, you’d understand what the Confederate monument in front of the courthouse for that county represents. Two of my grandparents are buried in Alamance County, North Carolina, as many other relatives have been through the years. I even have a fourth-generation slaveholding cousin who was named in the 1914 dedicatory speech for the Confederate statue that stands in front of the Alamance County Courthouse in the center of the Town of Graham. He led a company of Confederate soldiers from that county, where he is also buried. So I know what it represents.

Black Americans whose ancestors were only emancipated from slavery after the defeat of the Confederacy know too. And that is why I believe, as an American and as a Christian, there’s a moral imperative to move it.

The atmosphere in which that dedication took place is well illustrated by the front page of the Greensboro Patriot newspaper from May 11, 1914. One article describes a district meeting of the United Daughters of the Confederacy that had recently been held in Guilford County. The chapter from Graham reported that a monument to the Confederate soldiers of Alamance County had been completed and would be unveiled the following weekend. The article trumpets these words like a fanfare:

Nearly every month sees a new Confederate monument erected. A most important undertaking of the various chapters relates to the preservation of the true history of the Confederacy. This feature is to be stressed even more in the future than it has been in the past . . .[1]

The column beside those words has a report about a proposed movie theater that an association of Black churches wanted to establish on property owned by a well-known Black citizen in the City of Greensboro. According to that newspaper article, “a storm of protest arose from the white residents of the community.” They signed a petition opposing the proposal, showed up at a public forum with their “fighting clothes on, figuratively speaking,” and were represented by two attorneys. For example, the article describes at length one public comment, stating that:

. . . one of the good ladies who addressed the commissioners asserted that the common run of negroes care nothing for a moving picture show, anyway, and asked why should they go to see pictures of people cutting and shooting folks when they could engage in this pastime in reality.[2]

That is a very embarrassing but real testimony from the racist world in which the Confederate monument in neighboring Alamance County would be celebrated by a cheering crowd of white citizens five days after those words were printed on the front page of a newspaper. The guest speaker on that occasion was Henry A. London from nearby Pittsboro. A week after the Wilmington “Race Riot” of 1898, in which an armed white mob took control of the City of Wilmington and expelled Black elected leaders, London published these words in the Chatham Record:

Wilmington is once more ruled by respectable white men and all her citizens are now safe and secure in their lives, liberty and property.[3]

In his speech sixteen years later in front of the county courthouse in Graham, London went out of his way to note that the soldiers of the Union army included “186,097 negroes” and that some of the Confederate veterans listening to him in the audience who had been prisoners of war:

. . . may, (I am telling the truth about it), have been guarded by negro soldiers who would shoot your comrades down without any excuse.[4]

In contrast to that, London was standing there in Graham, as the local Ku Klux Klan founder and leader who introduced him put it, to praise “the achievements of . . . our own race and blood,” something “in which we all have a common interest.”[5]

That was a rallying cry for white supremacy.

There’s an irony which should not be overlooked in London’s soaring rhetoric following the introduction of him as he described the “brave and gallant men” who marched off to war in rebellion and “the dangers and the hardships” they endured, which “the young people of to-day . . . cannot imagine.” It turns out that London wasn’t engaging in false modesty entirely when he said at the beginning:

I do not deserve to have been selected to address you on this occasion.[6]

Although described in the newspaper as a major, that rank had been bestowed upon him not by an army but by a veterans’ organization. London had been a private, serving only for the last several months of the war after he was forced to do so. Before that he had been a college student at the University of North Carolina and made this honest confession in a letter which he wrote to his sister in early 1864:

I would not care much if they did [conscript me], as I hate the idea of skulking, as it were, out of the army, when my Country needs my services so much, but yet when an exemption is proffered a man, he can scarcely be blamed for taking it.[7]

This crowd saw an exaggerated man, who sounded like a preacher as he thundered:

. . . and oh! what soldiers they were; men of Alamance, women of Alamance, children of Alamance, remember through all your lives to honor the living Confederate soldiers as well as the memory of the dead ones. Oh! it is a beautiful thing, eminently fit and proper to erect a monument in front of every court house throughout our Southland in memory of the Confederate soldiers.[8]

Those statues would be painful reminders to Black Americans passing by that they would not be treated equally under the law inside those buildings, which were supposed to be symbols of justice for the entire community.

Seventy years before those front-page articles were printed in the Greensboro Patriot, that same newspaper published the names of Whig candidates standing for election in various counties throughout North Carolina.[9] One of them was my great-great-great-grandfather Daniel Hackney, Jr., who was a candidate in 1844 to represent Chatham County, where London lived, in the North Carolina House of Commons. Hackney was a slaveholder in Chatham County, as was his father and grandfather. To the immediate right of his name in that list was this public notice:

To those who are citizens of Alamance County or places like it, please think about what you want your courthouse to say about your community. What, for example, will future generations read in archived news reports that are recording how we think about these things today? Is it a “self-evident” truth for you on this national holiday “that all [human beings] are created equal,” including Black lives?[10]

If you proudly display an American flag, Old Glory, outside your home on Independence Day, what does that symbol mean to you as you consider the wellbeing of your neighbors, including the American descendants of those whose Black bodies were once sold on courthouse steps? Many of their families, like my own, are “from here,” wherever that might be throughout the South. And they have just as much right to be included in “our” history as people who look like me. Of that I am certain. So take down these statues, and if you decide to move them somewhere else, tell the whole story.

1 BACK TO POST “Daughters of Confederacy: District Meeting Held in This City Showed Good Work Accomplished,” The Greensboro Patriot, May 14, 1914.

2 BACK TO POST “Negro Moving Picture Show: White Folks Wouldn’t Stand for Its Location in Their Vicinity,” The Greensboro Patriot, May 14, 1914.

3 BACK TO POST Henry A. London, editorial, The Chatham Record, November 17, 1898.

4 BACK TO POST Henry A. London, quoted in “Maj. London’s Address: Presentation of Confederate Monument to County and Acceptance,” The Alamance Gleaner, May 28, 1914.

5 BACK TO POST Jacob A. Long, quoted in “Maj. London’s Address: Presentation of Confederate Monument to County and Acceptance,” The Alamance Gleaner, May 28, 1914.

6 BACK TO POST Henry A. London, quoted in “Maj. London’s Address: Presentation of Confederate Monument to County and Acceptance,” The Alamance Gleaner, May 28, 1914.

7 BACK TO POST Henry A. London, quoted by Adam H. Domby, The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 2020) 48.

8 BACK TO POST Henry A. London, quoted in “Maj. London’s Address: Presentation of Confederate Monument to County and Acceptance,” The Alamance Gleaner, May 28, 1914.

9 BACK TO POST “Whig Candidates,” The Greensboro Patriot, June 15, 1844.

10 BACK TO POST The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776. The preamble includes these words that are familiar to many Americans:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Bright Star and a Family Tree Secret

/ Neil Alan Willard / 2 Comments

When my wife and I purchased our tickets for the musical Bright Star, which was written and composed by Steve Martin and Edie Brickell, we were both excited to hear the music but had no idea what the storyline would be. After we settled into our seats at Houston’s Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it’s partly set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina during the post-war 1940s with flashbacks to 1923. I grew up in the Old North State within a short drive of those mountains, and we had our honeymoon in Asheville, where the musical also took us after some family drama in the plot that was inspired by a true event. Amazingly, I had seen a shadow of that story in my own family tree.

In the musical, sixteen-year-old Alice Murphy, who sings “If You Knew My Story” as an adult, meets young Jimmy Ray Dobbs in her hometown of Zebulon. The town, by the way, is a real place named for the Confederate Governor of North Carolina, Zebulon B. Vance. Jimmy Ray’s father, Josiah Dobbs, who represents the Old South, is the mayor and a successful businessman. He believes Jimmy Ray needs to marry someone with a higher social status and that college would be a waste of time when he should really be helping with the family business in order to run it one day.

Things get complicated when Alice becomes pregnant. Josiah arranges for that fact to remain a secret, forces Alice to give up her child for adoption, and promises to take his own grandchild to the adoption agency. On the train ride, however, he does something terrible to ensure that all of the problems he envisions for his son will go away forever. But his plan doesn’t work, and the child grows up, loved by others. There’s more to the story in the musical, but this context is sufficient for my story.

As I heard the words “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” being sung, I wondered if my great-great-great-grandmother Cornelia Dunevant would have heard the voice of “Royal George” Williamson running through her mind. Cornelia was a complete mystery to me as I researched my family history. She never got married, but did give birth to at least three daughters, including my great-great-grandmother Telula Dunevant in 1855. Cornelia would have been about 17 years old at the time. Telula later married William Cook at 19 years of age, and the best clue to the identity of her father appears on her marriage certificate. She listed her mother as Cornelia and her father as Weldon Williamson, who was a wealthy planter’s son.

But that’s not the only clue, which is important to note since Telula’s death certificate lists her father as someone else and her maiden name as “Don’t Know.” Telula had a son and a grandson who both had Weldon as a middle name and who were each listed on the 1930 United States Federal Census as Weldon Cook. In other words, both of them went by the name Weldon.

There are also genetic clues. One of the reasons that I had earlier decided to take the AncestryDNA test through Ancestry.com is because I hoped it might offer a bridge to confirm a few things in my family tree that were probably true but not proven to be true. Over time, as more close family members, together with more people in general, take the same test, my DNA matches are mapped in a way that illustrates how they might be related to me through a common ancestor. Those DNA matches reveal connections to more than one child of Weldon Edwards Williamson other than Telula. They also reveal connections to more than one of Weldon’s siblings, more than one of his mother’s siblings, and at least one of his father’s siblings.

Weldon’s father had quite a nickname, “Royal George,” and enslaved 142 Africans in Caswell County, North Carolina, according to the 1850 United States Federal Census. When Telula was born, Royal George would have been about 67 years old, and his son Weldon would have been about 23 years old. Royal George died about a year later. There’s neither a passing reference to God nor a stated desire for a decent Christian burial in his will. It’s all business, including instructions about what to do if his four children by his second wife object to how he wants to divide their inheritance.

From the bottom of the first page of Royal George Williamson’s will: “If this rule of division is objected to on the part of my children by my second wife then I direct that the value of their property obtained as aforesaid shall be ascertained [and they shall receive an equal share of my estate less that value].”

And there was a lot to divide. The account documents for his estate include more than 30 pages, partly because so many people owed him money. At the time of the next United States Federal Census in 1860, Weldon is listed on the slave schedules as enslaving 27 Africans. Many if not most of them presumably represent part of the “property” that Weldon inherited from his father. Weldon also inherited Royal George’s family home called Melrose.

Weldon had, not surprisingly, put his relationship with Cornelia behind him and married another woman, Nancy Johnston, about a year after the birth of Telula. “A man’s gotta do what man’s gotta do” to succeed, according to the fictional grandfather in Bright Star. “A man must protect his family and preserve his good name,” he sings, though he’s only preserving an illusion.

Yet just as the rain falls on both the just and the unjust, so too does personal tragedy. Nancy died less than a year after she and Weldon were married. After her death, Weldon sold Melrose to one of his brothers. 68 days after the death of his first wife, Weldon married his second wife Mary Bethel. By 1880, he was a widower again and had moved with his children to Danville in Southern Virginia. He married his third wife Elizabeth Hammond in 1881, and by the turn of the century he and his family were living in Asheville. Weldon died there in the beauty of the Blue Ridge Mountains in 1901.

Traditionally, Christians have called the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible the Preacher.  At the very end of that book, the Preacher implies that a light will be shined on “every deed . . . including every secret thing.” For the Preacher, that is God’s judgement. Or maybe it’s just the reality that truth dispels the shadows that haunt us through the years and sets us free. Perhaps all of that is the same thing, allowing us to loosen a little our tight grip on the memories of the past that burden our hearts.

I don’t know how that worked itself out in the hearts of Cornelia, Weldon, or Royal George. What I do know is that Telula lived her life, loved by her children, who put these words on the headstone of the grave where she is buried beside her husband:

FAREWELL, DEAR MOTHER AND FATHER SWEET
THY REST. GOD TAKES THE LIVES HE GAVE.

For some Christians, the family that finally embraces them and accepts them is the community of the church that embodies the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross. I hope Telula and her mother and, yes, even her absent father experienced that, too, on this earth. And I hope Royal George will experience that in the life to come, reconciled with his children, his grandchildren, including Telula, and the men, women, and children he enslaved, whose lives were just as important in the eyes of God as his own.

All of them, and all of us, need to know that love remains, mysteriously, in spite of the wrongs we have done to others and after the wrongs others have done to us. I don’t know how God will do that, weaving a tapestry of justice for all of the victims of human cruelty, while having taken away the sins of the whole world, including our own. But its loveliness, when finally complete, will bring forth tears of joy because God is love. This I believe.

Click here for a series of reflections on a different slaveholding ancestor.