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To some, Hot Springs has the good fortune to possess a rare and valuable bronze statue of President Abraham Lincoln, one of the nation’s pivotal leaders.
Hot Springs Civic and Convention Center officials are putting the finishing touches on a display for the bronze statue, cast from the model used for the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C. It was dusted off after 40 years of obscurity in the Spa City.
Others who honor the Confederacy, however, want no part of an exhibit that would venerate the president who presided over the Union during the Civil War, sometimes called the War of Northern Aggression in the South.
The local chapter, or camp, of the Sons of Confederate Veterans already is planning protests. Camp commander Loy Mauch, a Bismarck resident, says any tribute to Lincoln simply insults their values. "Having an exhibition anywhere in Dixie of this depraved thug is the equivalent of having a statue of Adolph Hitler in Israel," Loy Mauch wrote in a recent letter published in The Sentinel-Record. Mauch and his camp, which he says has about 100 members, are fighting to preserve and protect the legacy of the Confederacy, just as they have with other disputes over the use of Confederate symbols found in public displays such as state flags.
Before they protest, however, the Sons of Confederate Veterans wants to speak with convention center officials and give them a chance to remove the statue, Mauch said.
Convention Center officials say they don’t want to debate Lincoln’s role in U.S. history. They also don’t want to remove the statue. "If you look at the polls, he’s one of our most admired presidents," said Steve Arrison, executive director of the Hot Springs Advertising and Promotion Commission, which oversees the convention center. "Ninety-nine percent of the earth admires President Lincoln. He’s not going anywhere."
The Sons of Confederate Veterans is dedicated to preserving the memory of those who fought for the Confederacy so future generations can understand the motives that animated the Southern Cause." "The memory and reputation of the Confederate soldier, as well as the motives for his suffering and sacrifice, are being consciously distorted by some in an attempt to alter history," according to the organization’s Web site. "Unless the descendants of Southern soldiers resist those efforts, a unique part of our nation’s cultural heritage will cease to exist." Groups like Sons of Confederate Veterans cling to elements of the Old South, where a plantation aristocracy ruled over both blacks and poor whites, said Fred A. Bailey, chairman of the history department at Abilene Christian University in Texas.
"They are a distinct but very vocal minority,"Bailey said."They don’t like what’s happened to the South. White society has lost its entitlement, and [the Old South] heritage is being destroyed."
Seeing memorials to Lincoln, the leader of the military force that brought down the confederacy, only exasperates that frustration, Bailey said.
Earlier this year another tribute to Lincoln sparked protests. Confederate sympathizers waged a letter and e-mail campaign against a Lincoln statue donated to the Richmond Battlefield Park in Richmond, Va., the capital of the Confederacy.
The superintendent of the National Park Service park, Cynthia MacLeod, estimated she received about 1,000 letters or emails, the majority opposing the statue.
" I wasn’t surprised at the amount but the tone, "said MacLeod Thursday, acknowledging they were hateful and vitriolic. "It was different from what I expected."
The statue in Richmond was donated by the U.S. Historical Society and is part of the park’s master plan to place the battles in larger historical context, MacLeod said, adding that the statue is not commemorative but interpretive.
"We think it’s a way to tell a story," she said.
When the statue was dedicated in April, about 100 Sons of Confederate Veterans gathered at the grave of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, to protest the Lincoln statue.
MacLeod didn’t see the protesters, but she did see an aircraft towing a banner over the dedication ceremony. The banner read, "Sic Semper Tyrannis,"Latin for" Thus Always to Tyrants, "the Commonwealth of Virginia’s motto. It’s said John Wilkes Booth uttered those words just before he assassinated Lincoln. The Sons of Confederate Veterans disavowed any involvement in the banner.
A tourist’s gift
When Union forces advanced to within 40 miles north of Little Rock in 1862, Gov. Henry Rector" panicked, packed up the state archives, and headed west, eventually ending up in Hot Springs, "according to the Rugged and Sublime, a history of the Civil War in Arkansas edited by Mark K. Christ. That moment was Hot Springs’ mark in Civil War lore.
But 138 years after Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Va., the Arkansas resort city of 35,750 can now boast the state’s largest local chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
Civil War historians like Carl Moneyhon of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock can’t imagine the Hot Springs statue will spark the same furor that was seen in Richmond.
"It’s not like Hot Springs is hallowed ground,"said Moneyhon, who is teaching a class this fall on modern society’s fascination with the Civil War.
Until recently the Lincoln statue in Hot Springs had gone mostly ignored. The statue came to the Spa City, courtesy of a wealthy Chicago businessman, Benjamin Kulp, who spent his summers in Hot Springs. It’s believed to be one of fewer than a dozen scale replicas cast from the working model of the larger Daniel Chester French statue that is the centerpiece of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.
That Lincoln, sitting and draped with an American flag, stands 19 feet tall and 19 feet wide. It’s carved from 28 blocks of white Georgia marble.
The one in Hot Springs is 3 feet high.
More than four years ago, Arrison noticed the Lincoln statue among items from the old convention auditorium being prepared for auction. It had been in the lobby of the auditorium for years.
The statue eventually found its way to a break room and a spot between men’s and women’s restrooms before it was authenticated and reached its current resting place in the convention center.
Now the statue sits on a 65-inch wooden pedestal in a second-floor hall of the convention center lined with framed images of American presidents, including John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, who grew up in Hot Springs.
At that point, the Sons of Confederate Veterans took notice."They ought to send it back to Chicago,"Mauch said.
Instead, convention officials have almost finished the display. All that is needed now is an American flag and a plaque denoting the statue’s significance, Arrison said.
"He’s always been here,"he said."He’s been here since [1962]. But no one realized what they had. It’s an individual art treasure."
(Noel E. Oman in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, September 5, 2003)
http://www.ardemgaz.com/