Here we are, almost four years to the date of George Floyd’s murder, and the Vance Monument is just now finally erased from downtown Asheville.
Or at least I hope it is. The lawyer and the preservation group behind the lost cause of keeping the monument downtown will likely continue the fight, but for now the monument’s base has been deconstructed into a pile of bricks and rubble in Pack Square.
The four granite slabs reading “Vance” were chiseled off this month and the base broken down after the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled in February in favor of Asheville’s decision to remove the monument. The 75-foot obelisk had already come down, but the court actions kept the city from demolishing the base.
All that remained Thursday when I drove by was the pile of bricks, which reminded me of old black and white photos of the rubble that remained in Richmond, Virginia, after the Confederacy fell and the city burned in 1865.
I’m hopeful that this will be the final dustbin of history, if you will, for the monument to Zebulon Baird Vance, a Buncombe County native, U.S. congressman, Confederate officer and Civil War governor of North Carolina, as well as a U.S. senator after the war. An advocate of public education and supporter of Jewish citizens, he also was virulently anti-Black and a fierce proponent of keeping Blacks in servitude.
His times were pre- and post-Civil War America, when an entire race was held in bondage, denied basic human rights, and pushed to the lowest rung of economic survival.
Vance owned slaves and once wrote that a “putrid stream of barbarism” runs through the veins of Black people, which I would presume included the very slaves that made meals and did laundry for his family in Reems Creek. (His birthplace there is a state historic site.)
A lawyer by training, Vance had a flair for oratory, and in a March 16, 1860, speech, said:
“What, then, is best and right to be done with our slaves? Plainly and unequivocally, common sense says keep the slave where he is now — in servitude. The interest of the slave himself imperatively demands it. The interest of the master, of the United States, of the world, nay, of humanity itself, says, keep the slave in his bondage…”
That’s according to his official biography on the North Carolina Historic Sites webpage. Vance also believed, according to the webpage, that “the general welfare and prosperity of our country, the very foundation of our society, of our fortunes, and, to a greater or lesser extent, the personal safety of our people, combine to make us defend [slavery] to the last extremity.”
It’s important to remember exactly who we venerated with a 75-foot granite obelisk in the center of downtown for more than a century. As much as the lawyers for the Vance cause want to keep fighting in an effort to “preserve history,” it’s equally important to remember exactly what these figures said and stood for.
I know some folks said to keep the obelisk and “contextualize it.” How so? By adding the quotes above to nearby placards? Don’t you think folks might wonder why in the world any city in its right mind would opt to honor such abhorrent thoughts?
But it’s easy to forget, to backslide. Just four years after Floyd’s death crystallized four centuries of Black suffering, we’re already backsliding a bit as a nation. A Virginia school district voted recently to reinstate Confederate names at two of its schools — names that were changed after Floyd’s murder under the knee of a heartless Minneapolis cop.
I suspect more such efforts may be forthcoming, especially if Donald Trump wins the November election.
So it’s important to remain vigilant in our desire to move forward. To move on. To remember and learn, but not exalt those whose cause was unjust.
Clearly, the Society for the Historical Preservation of the 26th North Carolina Troops and its attorney, Edward Phillips, are not going gently into that good night. They’ve fought the city’s removal of the Vance Monument in Buncombe County Superior Court, the North Carolina Court of Appeals and the state Supreme Court, and again last week in Buncombe County Superior Court after Phillips filed a new complaint trying once again to stop the removal and force the rebuilding of the monument downtown.
The judge dismissed the case last week, dealing another blow to their cause.
I understand why the historic preservation group sued. In 2015, it paid nearly $140,000 to repair the monument, and it has maintained it had a contract with the city to preserve the monument as it was. The group also clearly holds North Carolina’s Civil War soldiers in high regard and wants to preserve their honor and memory.
The city has maintained the allegation of a contract is “categorically without merit,” as City Attorney Brad Branham told me previously. “State law further provides specific authority for local governments to remove these structures under certain circ*mstances, and the city has followed that process.”
City assures the monument won’t be reassembled elsewhere
Last week I asked Branham if the city ever offered to reimburse the 26th for renovation costs, and he said no, as the funds were “fully expended years ago on the restoration efforts.” Also, the preservation group never requested reimbursem*nt, he added.
“It seems apparent to me that the object of their legal actions has always been solely focused on seeing the monument preserved rather than monetary reimbursem*nt,” Branham said via email. “I don’t believe there would have been any appetite to resolve these issues monetarily, and the series of court decisions which have consistently ruled in the city’s favor only bolster our position that no such settlement would be appropriate.”
The city wanted the monument removed and was also “determined to prevent its restoration in some form at another location,” Branham noted.
“Therefore, we have taken steps in the demolition contracting process to ensure that the monument could not be reassembled,” Branham said. “This is not only in accordance with the will of the Vance Monument commission and the City Council, but also in compliance with North Carolina law, which places a great deal of restrictions when relocating a moment rather than simply removing it.”
The commission, composed of a cross section of Asheville citizens, recommended removing the monument in 2021. Oralene Simmons, co-chair of that task force, told me last year that rebuilding the monument would be “just as offensive today as it has been when it was up.”
I talked to Phillips again last week, and he said he could not comment on the record. But I suspect another appeal is likely in this most recent filing, simply because I know Phillips and his client believe they’re right, that North Carolina law says you can’t remove these monuments.
Yet, they keep losing in court.
This case, like most, is complicated. The Citizen Times distilled it down pretty well last week, noting the “state Supreme Court reversed an N.C. Court of Appeals ruling that said the society did not have standing. The Supreme Court “said the society was in fact harmed and that the city could repair the harm. But the society failed to make arguments about its original breach of contract claim to the Supreme Court,” or in other words “abandoned” that argument.
So this latest suit tries to revive the argument of a breach of contract. It’s starting to get a distinct “grasping at straws” feel to it, in my opinion.
My point to Phillips is this: It’s time to let it go, man. You’ve fought zealously for your client, and your clients have fought just as fervently for their memory of their ancestors.
But they, and you, are on the wrong side of history.
It was time for this monument and others like it, which glorified men who fought and worked to subjugate an entire race, to go. The monument brought pain and heartache to Asheville’s Black community, and it should have done the same for everyone else.
Vance — and Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, et al — were men of their times, yes. But they fought for the wrong cause, a cause that remains a stain on the nation’s history. We should always remember, and teach, our history, but we don’t need to honor the people whose ideas were abhorrent with statues and obelisks.
‘Wiser not to keep open the sores of war…’
As I’ve mentioned before, I grew up in and outside of Richmond and went to Stonewall Jackson Junior High and Lee-Davis High School, home of the Rebels and the Confederates, respectively. Lee-Davis is located in Mechanicsville, a battle site, and we all got a healthy dose of sanitized Lost Cause history growing up.
Certainly, some of these men had strong morals, and yes, many in the South were fighting for their families, their farms, their way of life. But it was all centered on the real lost cause: preserving slavery, the economic engine of the South.
And while we have to remember these facts, and these men, we don’t need to revere their cause. My former schools have new names now, as they should.
Even Lee, the Confederate commander, understood the danger inherent in idolizing the Confederate cause. PBS NewsHour wrote about this after the Charlottesville riot in 2017 over removing his statue, noting that in 1869, when a Gettybsurg memorial was proposed, Lee wrote:
“I think it wiser not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
When I talked to Phillips last year about the court cases, we had a good conversation about the complexity of all this history, and the notion of presentism — assigning today’s values to yesteryear’s historical figures.
Phillips said then, “How long are we going to relitigate a war that has been over for almost 160 years? How long are we going to say there’s no getting along until everything is done one way and not another way?”
That’s up to you and your client. Let it go, if you can.
Asheville Watchdog is a nonprofit news team producing stories that matter to Asheville and Buncombe County. John Boyle has been covering Asheville and surrounding communities since the 20th century. You can reach him at (828) 337-0941, or via email at jboyle@avlwatchdog.org. The Watchdog’s reporting is made possible by donations from the community. To show your support for this vital public service please visitavlwatchdog.org/donate.
