On a recent trip I went out to Amelia County Courthouse. I wanted a picture of the Confederate monument there. (The courthouse was built in 1924, so it's too recent to be of serious interest to me for photography.)
But that led to a more interesting question, "What is that Confederate mortar doing on the lawn of the Amelia County Courthouse?" Long-time readers of the facutly lounge will recall that I'm interested in the use of ordnance as a monument to war, mostly of how weapons we captured are monuments to our success. Lunenburg County, Virginia, has a German cannon on its courthouse lawn, too. (There are two cannon at the statehouse in Raleigh that were, as I understand it, donated by the US Navy to the state of North Carolina. They were used in the defense of the North Carolina coast and then captured by the US Navy and donated by the War Department in 1902 -- and they're now part of the Confederate Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Raleigh. There's probably an interesting story about this as a part of the reconciliation around the turn of the twentieth century.)
The Amelia County mortar is, perhaps, similar to the cannon on the North Carolina statehouse grounds. It's mounted on a boulder and has a plaque that reads as follows:
Lamkin's Battery. This mortar belonged to the battery commanded by Captain J.N. Lamkin. On July 30, 1864, at the "Crater," the battery helped check the Union advance until Mahone came up. Four mortars were captured near Flat Creek in Lee's retreat, April 2, 1865. One of them blew up in saluting the remains of Jefferson Davis when brought through Amelia Court House. Placed by the Amelia Chapter of the U.D.C. 1940.
When the plaque refers to captured I guess it means that the mortars were captured by the United States government.
Well, I'm certainly no fan of monument removal. At this point the mortar has been there so long that it's a part of the landscape; its value as history is more important than its value as a memorial to the era of slavery I suspect (though perhaps Stephen Clowney could convince me otherwise). Nevertheless, I must admit that I find this more jarring than the usual monument. And odder given that there is a very specific use associated with the weapon, that it was part of (or likely part of) the slaughter at The Crater. What's not clear to me is how the mortar changed hands from that of the US government to the UDC or Amelia County (or even if it did). And I suppose I have to say that I'm not wildly enthusiastic about weapons used against the United States being part of a monument on US soil -- particularly when they were donated by the US government.
Update: I have deleted a comment that had nothing to do with this post and now closed comments.
Comments