Inscribed on the statue’s base honoring General Edmund Kirby Smith, it says, “TO HER MOST DISTINGUISHED SOLDIER.” There are 24 recipients of the Medal of Honor from Florida that might take exception. They all served after General Smith, though several of them served before Smith’s statue was sent to the National Statuary Hall Collection in 1922, 57 years after Smith surrendered his troops in Galveston, TX. His family ensured he was always known as “Kirby Smith” to distinguish him from the other seven General Smiths in the Confederate army and a couple of dozen Union Army General Smiths.
There were no critical Civil War battles fought in Florida. There was the exceptionally bloody Battle of Olustee, which should be best known for war crimes and the slaughter of captured Black Union infantry troops. That battle was fought near Lake City, FL, not Lake County, which will come into play later. General Kirby Smith wasn’t present anyway, having done all his fighting outside of Florida; he was at least born in Saint Augustine, FL.
One could question if Smith was even a good General, having been associated with more losses than victories. Smith was wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run; he unsuccessfully attempted to relieve the Siege of Vicksburg. On June 2, 1865, Smith surrendered his army at Galveston, Texas, the last general with a major field force. That could be what distinguishes him; he was the last general to give up. Kirby Smith fled to Mexico, where he stayed until his wife negotiated his return along with amnesty for agreeing to pledge loyalty to the United States.
In the early 1920s, when the statue was commissioned and completed. Florida was making news for The Ocoee Massacre in 1920 and was making a name for itself as having the highest number of lynchings per capita of any state in the nation. It was only natural Florida would dedicate one of its two allotted statues in the National Statuary Hall to a Confederate General who was perhaps better as a botanist.
His statue remained in the National Statuary Hall until 2021, when Florida replaced his statue with Bethune-Cookman University’s founder, Mary McLeod Bethune. The National Statuary Hall wanted to return the figure to Florida, where it needed help finding a home.
Somehow, Lake County, north of Orlando, decided it should be the home of the Confederate statue. County Commissioners voted in 2019 to accept the figure without discussing the move with any Black leaders. Lake County is known for the Groveland Four when four Black young men were falsely accused of rape. One was shot over 400 times when found asleep under a tree. Another was murdered by the Lake County Sheriff while being transported to his second trial. Sheriff Willis V. McCall shot another man multiple times, but he somehow survived to testify against McCall. An all-white jury acquitted him, and he served as Sheriff for an additional 21 years. Lake County does seem a natural home for a Confederate statue.
After years of protests, Lake County decided to refuse the statute, but new legislation passed by the state tried to force them to accept it. Lake County has agreed to a $40,000 settlement for its secret meetings to acquire the statue in violation of Florida’s Sunshine Law. The state legislature introduced a bill allowing the governor (Ron DeSantis) to remove elected leaders who “directs, permits, facilitates, or votes to remove or destroy a monument or memorial.” The bill promised to provide the statue for free to the historian involved in the secret meetings with Lake County Commissioners, provided he found a public space in Lake County with “protection from the weather.”
The statue has yet to find a home and is currently in storage at the Florida Museum of History in Tallahassee. My question is, why do we need this statue of a lackluster Confederate general in the first place? The answer can be found in the language of the resolution from the Confederate States Congress read at its unveiling. The Confederacy praised Kirby Smith’s “justice, his firmness and moderation, his integrity and conscientious regard for law, his unaffected kindness to the people, the protection of their rights and the redress of their wrongs, and has thus won the confidence of the Confederate Congress.” Being a good Confederate doesn’t sound like reason enough for the rest of us to honor him.
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This post was previously published on Cultured.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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Photo credit: The Architect of the Capitol, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons