The Raleigh Monument to the North Carolina Presidents

 The state capitol in Raleigh is covered with monuments -- five, I think, to the era of Confederacy -- though none to the enslaved people of North Carolina, so far as I know.  (Tennessee, you may recall, has a monument to enslaved people.)  We also have a monument to the three North Carolinians who have gone on to be president of the United States.  An image of it is at right.  Here's what interests me about it.  It has one sentence for each president -- Polk "enlarged our national boundaries" (i.e., fought the Mexican American War); Jackson "revitalized American democracy" (i.e., was a Democratic party partisan); and Andrew Johnson "defended the Constitution."  The later deserves some serious comment, not the snippy and biased parentheticals I gave to Polk and Jackson  -- because Johnson invoked the Constitution as a way of opposing Reconstruction.  The monument's makers put into granite a very political interpretation of our nineteenth century history.  This happens frequently with monuments, of course -- but what I noticed about this monument is that the history is quite, well, noticeable.

Close readers of the faculty lounge may also recall that Polk was a graduate of UNC -- and that he attended John Mason's literary address on the campus in 1845.  My story on the antebellum UNC literary addresses is here.

I also have at left a picture of what I think are Civil War-era mortars in front of the presidents' monument.  I didn't see any plaque describing them, so my guess about them may be mistaken.

Comments

[NC Lawyer]

Interestingly, Polk and Jackson (whose presidencies were seperated by only 8 years) were born less than 20 miles apart in the backcountry on the border of North and South Carolina in the land of the Catawba and Waxhaw tribes (Polk is undeniably a North Carolinian, Jackson's birthplace is disputed). All three of NC's presidents moved to Tennessee and were prominent Tennesseeans when they were elected President -- in fact they are the only "Tennesseeans" to become president.

[BS Starkey]

Could the inscription pertain to the Tenure of Office Act rather than his opposition to Reconstruction?

[Alfred Brophy]

That seems unlikely to me. To sum up Andrew Johnson's accomplishments based on his veto of a single, pretty obscure, act doesn't seem like the most reasonable explanation.