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| Don Lee Kincaid by his great, great uncle’s burial place in the Owingsville Cemetery. On the ground in front of Don is a Confederate marker. T.L. (Thomas) was the brother of Isaac, who was the father of Jefferson Lee Darnell, Don’s grandfather. The names Jefferson and Lee point to what were at one time the family’s Confederate sympathies. In the South, we learn to make peace with our heritage, and that is not always an easy thing to do. |
This week, William Burl Kincaid, III (Bill) makes his blogging debut, sharing his thoughts on the Confederate markers in the Owingsville Cemetery:
A few steps east of where our parents are buried in the Owingsville Cemetery stands a statue of a Confederate soldier, six feet tall on a seven-foot base and, of course, facing northward. I sometimes wonder if he ever makes eye contact with the Union soldier facing southward that stands atop a massive war memorial in downtown Indianapolis, where my family and I have lived for the last six years.
The Owingsville monument has stood sentinel since 1907 and I have looked at it dozens of times. Others have too, I know. It’s on the National Register of Historic Places, so it’s probably garnered a good bit of attention over the years.
Imagine a bright, warm afternoon in the early part of the twentieth century. A parade forms. School lets out early so girls and boys can join the festivities and, in some cases, participate in them by singing songs and reading essays written for the occasion. The parade stops at the center of town for the unveiling and dedication of the monument.
As we know from Owingsville, sometimes the monument landed elsewhere, like a cemetery. Or, in the case of Kentucky’s largest Confederate memorial, it stands at what is now one of the primary entrances to the University of Louisville campus.
I don’t know if a parade or other public events accompanied the dedication of the Confederate soldier in Owingsville, but what I have described occurred in towns and cities across the South when the well funded and extremely well organized Daughters of the Confederacy unveiled their monuments.
Until a couple of years ago, my impression of the Daughters of the Confederacy was that of a genteel group of tea-sipping, hat-wearing Southern belles who gathered occasionally to enjoy each other’s company and to tell stories of another era.
The Daughters were interested in telling stories alright, but with a particular angle. (I should say “are interested.” Numerous chapters exist today, including several in northern and western states.) And I’m sure they exuded remarkable grace and charm, but make no mistake about it, they were a force to be reckoned with.
The Daughters believed that their ancestors’ defeat in the Civil War represented a terrible disgrace. Worse, in their view, was that those same ancestors and most people in the South had been completely discredited and even demeaned in the years subsequent to, as the Daughters would have termed it, the War of Northern Aggression. The Daughters made it their mission to revive and preserve Confederate culture. More so than the men in many cases, the Daughters crafted and promoted the Lost Cause myth through an extensive organization and with various efforts.
The monuments are probably the best known of those efforts today, but the Daughters also distributed Confederate flags, developed curriculum that promoted Southern values for white children in public schools, provided portraits of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee to be hung in those schools, built hospitals and nursing homes, and offered scholarships to college-bound Confederate descendants.
My reading about the Daughters has been both fascinating and troubling, especially as the Daughters attempted to preserve racial discrimination and exclusion even as many people in the country were working tirelessly to improve race relations. In her book Dixie’s Daughters, Karen Cox contends that the Daughters’ efforts set back the acceptance and inclusion of African-Americans in this country by several decades, even to the point of undermining the work of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, a full century after the close of the Civil War.
When I read that I thought of the African-Americans with whom I went to school, grew up and played ball. I also think of the many African-Americans with whom I now work. And even though I find the Owingsville Cemetery one of the dearest and most peaceful places in the world, it now holds a different kind of sadness than it did before.
~Bill Kincaid
~Bill Kincaid
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| Thomas Darnell’s marker is just one of many markers placed by the Daughters of the Confederacy in the Owingsville Cemetery. We’ll post pictures of the rest of the markers in the future. |
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| He stands facing north – on eternal lookout for Yankees. |
From the Journals of William Burl Kincaid, Jr. 