A county panel has made the appropriate decision regarding a Confederate monument in the area. But that should not mark the end of the discussion.
On Tuesday, six members of the Clark County Historic Preservation Committee voted unanimously to remove the Jefferson Davis Highway Marker from the Clark County Heritage Register. Because the marker sits on private land near Ridgefield, commission members cannot remove the monument, which honors the first and only president of the Confederate States of America, but they can ensure that it is not promoted by the county.
Deciding to remove the monument from the official registry was an obvious call. Davis had little connection to Washington and Clark County, although supporters point out that as U.S. Secretary of War during the 1850s he authorized the construction of roads in the Northwest. A monument with his name on it fails to reflect the history of the region, and its presence on the list alongside the Venersborg School, Hidden House, Covington House, and other locally significant sites was incongruous.
Despite Davis’ limited local connection, the United Daughters of the Confederacy worked to designate Jefferson Davis Highway 99, and in 1939 markers were placed in Vancouver and Blaine — the southern and northern ends of the state. The Vancouver marker was removed in 1998 and ended up at Jefferson Davis Park near Ridgefield, an area maintained by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The United States flag and Confederate flags are flown at the site, within view of Interstate 5.
The decision regarding the listing of Jefferson Davis Park represents Clark County’s entry into a national discussion about Confederate monuments. In Charlottesville, Va., a plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee was the impetus for a rally that resulted in marchers shouting Nazi slogans and anti-Semitic epithets. In New Orleans, the removal of four Confederate statues led to protests and a stirring speech in favor of the removal from Mayor Mitch Landrieu. As Landrieu said, “There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it.”
That strikes at the heart of the issue. When defenders of Confederate monuments insist that removal of such remembrances is an attempt to rewrite history, they ignore the history those monuments represent. They ignore the facts that the Confederacy was fighting to preserve slavery, and that monuments typically were erected decades after the Civil War in an effort to sanitize the stain that was the South’s secession from the United States.
Revisionist history had led far too many people to regard the Confederacy as a noble defender of state’s rights when, in fact, secession declarations leave no doubt that the Civil War was about slavery. Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, said that nation’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.”
More than 150 years later, it remains essential to reject such thinking, to recognize that Confederate monuments echo that sentiment, and to hold this nation to the ideals it professes to possess. Monuments to those who fought against the United States — and lost — should be relegated to history books and museums, not left to stand proudly in the public square.
By removing Jefferson Davis Park from its historical register, Clark County has taken a small step toward rectifying attempts to rewrite history. But discussion about that history should continue.
