The Faithful Slaves Monument: A Lost Cause Memorial

The stone monument here was dedicated in the mid eighteen nineties, about thirty years after the Civil War ended, and it carries an inscription that tells you a great deal about how white Southerners were rewriting that war's history at the time. It was dedicated, in the words carved here, to the faithful slaves who, loyal to a sacred trust, toiled for the support of the army with matchless devotion and sterling fidelity, and guarded homes, women, and children during the struggle for the principles of the Confederacy.

Historians call this kind of monument part of the Lost Cause movement, a deliberate effort beginning in the eighteen seventies and accelerating through the early twentieth century to recast the Confederacy as a noble cause and to portray enslaved people as willing participants in their own bondage. The monument erases the documented reality: enslaved people resisted, fled to Union lines whenever possible, and ultimately served in the Union Army in enormous numbers. The marker stands as a primary historical document of how memory was manufactured, and contested, in the decades after the war.