Dealing with the legacy of history at the Capitol in Texas

Crossing Congress Avenue, the main thoroughfare in Austin, the Texas Capitol building dominates the skyline.

There are plenty of modern tall, glass buildings around the city with more to come. However, there are local laws and regulations to ensure the Capitol remains visible from certain locations.

The Capitol itself is an impressive sight. Slightly taller – by about 4.5 metres – than the Capitol in Washington, it accommodates the Houses of Congress and is surrounded by grounds dotted with statues and monuments.

Walking past one of the entrances there is a large monument with a grey granite base with four military figures in bronze and above them a man with a long coat. On the base there is an inscription which says: “Died for state rights guaranteed under the Constitution.”

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“The people of the South animated by the spirit of 1776, to preserve their rights, withdrew from the federal compact in 1861. The North resorted to coercion. The South, against overwhelming numbers and resources, fought until exhausted,” the inscription continues.

The monument, which dates back to 1903, is a memorial to those who died fighting for the confederacy in the American civil war.

The military figures represent Confederate infantry, cavalry, artillery and navy. The man in the long coat is Jefferson Davis, who was president of the Confederate States of America.

The monument includes a list of civil war battles between 1861 and 1865 and the names of the 13 states that withdrew from the Union, 11 of whom joined the Confederate States of America.

There is no reference to slavery.

The confederate soldiers’ monument is not the only one on the Capitol’s grounds dedicated to those who fought for the south in the civil war.

A short distance away there stands a striking sculpture of a figure with a rifle on a horse. It portrays a member of Terry's Texas Rangers, a cavalry unit that fought as part of the Confederate army.

The grounds of the Capitol also have memorials that are not linked to the civil war.

One, erected in 2016, honours the contributions of African-Americans to the history of Texas. At its centre it depicts Juneteenth in Texas: June 19th, 1865, when African-Americans were freed from slavery.

There is also the Tejanos monument, which commemorates the Spanish and Mexican explorers and pioneers who began to settle Texas after the Spanish arrival in the 1500s.

However, it is the civil war memorials that have attracted much controversy over recent years. Just as elsewhere, particularly following the far right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 and the killing of George Floyd in 2020, there have been calls in Texas for monuments to figures associated with the confederacy or slavery to be removed.

Trump On the other hand there are strong voices urging that such memorials should be preserved. Former president Donald Trump criticised the taking down of monuments to confederate figures as “sad”

and suggested it could lead to the removal of monuments to the US's founding fathers. "Robert E Lee, Stonewall Jackson – who's next, Washington, Jefferson? So foolish!"

In summer 2020 Trump also said he would “not even consider” renaming US military bases that are named after Confederate military leaders.

At the University of Texas department of government in Austin, the director of the Texas Politics Project, Jim Henson, told The Irish Times that the confederate monument issue surfaced from time to time in the state.

In July 2020 a group of Democratic legislators in Texas wrote to the administration committees of the House and Senate calling for the removal of seven Confederate memorials from the Capitol grounds.

Earlier, in January 2019, with the State Preservation Board in Texas, the body charged with administering and maintaining the Capitol and its grounds, had mandated the removal of a plaque memorialising “the children of the confederacy creed” from the building.

Studies carried out by Dr Henson and his colleagues found that attitudes in Texas on the issue of the confederate monuments had shifted between 2017 and 2020. In the latter year a majority of Texans – 52 per cent – believed Confederate statues should be removed from public property, compared with only 38 per cent in polling in 2017.

Between 2017-2020, many groups, mainly associated with Democratic party identification, became more open to removing Confederate statues from public property, with the biggest increase among younger Texans.

The study found 74 per cent of Republicans favoured leaving the statues as they are, but a slightly larger share of those Republicans would prefer to see the addition of historical context, as opposed to leaving the statues in place unaltered.

However, among supporters of Donald Trump 84 per cent preferred that the statues remain where they were – 39 per cent backing the addition of historical context and 45 per cent saying the statues should be left in place unchanged.