I'm delighted to bring you a guest episode from History Daily. November 19, 1863. In the midst of a bloody Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln delivers one of the most famous speeches in American History.

Jenna’s petition stalls. Blue Lives Matter outpaces Black Lives Matter. But in 2023 a new surge of activism reignites the controversy. What will happen to Jessamine County’s Confederate statue? And what does the statue’s fate reveal about the soul of the divided southern community?

Resources

Engage

Timestamps

00:00      David describes the courthouse lawn.

01:51      Locals say what they think should happen.

16:25      David talks with Judge West in their first—and only—sit-down interview.

19:53      A new surge of activism begins at the 2023 MLK Day observances.

31:04      Activists confront the county magistrates at a public hearing.   

37:20      David finds an archival gem and reflects on the meaning of “reconciliation” during the Spanish-American War—and again in our times.

44:36      David walks from the statue to First Baptist Church for a final conversation with Pastor Moses.

47:08      Pastor Moses reflects on his disappointments and hope that change is going to come.

Transcript: Visit www.rebelonmain.com/episode7.

Production team

Thanks for listening!

Bob doesn’t care at all about the statue—until he does. A Canadian transplant to Jessamine, his ancestry traces back to abolitionist New England. But as the 2020 election approaches, Bob sees a political opening. For months prior to the election, he spends three hours a night working through a list of 13,500 Democrats conducting a telephone survey.

The work is arduous and often dispiriting. It takes fifteen phone dials to get one person to talk, and sometimes that person just hangs up or refuses to answer Bob’s questions. Nevertheless, he is able to convince many pro-statue Democrats to switch parties. Confederate controversies cement the Republican takeover of Jessamine.

Timestamps

01:38      David walks two doors down from his house to interview Bob

15:22      Bob describes his telephone survey and how he’s using it to defeat Democratic candidate Carolyn Dupont.

20:45      Pastor Moses responds.

25:03      Carolyn Dupont responds.

31:54      Blue Lives Matter rally at the courthouse

39:00      November 2020

43:52      David reflects on local politics and his relationship with Bob.

Transcript: Visit www.rebelonmain.com/episode6.

Engage

Resources

Production team

Next episode: In Episode 7—Change Is Gonna Come—find out what happens after a final push to remove Jessamine County’s Confederate statue.

Archaeologist Stephen McBride wants to emancipate Jessamine from the Lost Cause. He zeroes in on Camp Nelson, which has nearly disappeared from the county’s memory. Farmers have leveled the earthworks, and developers are eyeing the site. Camp Nelson’s significance has also been buried by racial hostility. Many in the local Black community have been driven off by lynchings, KKK rallies, and backlash to the civil rights movement.

As construction workers begin to widen a state highway that cuts through the site, Jessamine’s best emancipationist memory is under threat of being permanently erased. But this disastrous development becomes the site’s salvation. The state historical commission steps in and gives McBride a year to recover what he can before the bulldozers return. To nearly everyone’s delight, the archaeologist unearths a long-buried narrative that once again tells hard stories about racial violence and inspirational stories about Black freedom. Camp Nelson begins to duel with the statue over the county’s Civil War memory.

 Resources

Engage

Timestamps

00:00      As activists wait for Judge West to act on Jenna’s petition, Camp Nelson rises from the ground.

02:57      Archaeologist Stephen McBride describes his digs at Camp Nelson.

30:09      Calvonia Radford discusses the preservation of Black history.

32:51      Rev. Gates explains why he is suspicious of my interest in Black history. He tells stories of his descendants at Camp Nelson.

46:40      Judge West discusses the significance of Black history and the story of Camp Nelson becoming a national monument.

53:05      A luminaria in lament of the 1864 expulsion is the first event held at Camp Nelson National Monument.

Transcript: Visit www.rebelonmain.com/episode5.

Production team

Next episode: In Episode 6—A Confederate from Canada—a political activist uses the Confederate statue to win the 2020 election.

Two weeks into the Black Lives Matter campaign, homeschooler Jenna Sparks gets mad. This sixteen-year-old descendant of a Confederate ancestor, whose name was Jeptha Jefferson Davis Sparks, has a Black cousin, and seeing so many people in Jessamine who fly the Confederate battle flag angers her. So does walking by the Confederate statue, located just two blocks from her house.

So Jenna writes a petition to “remove and destroy” the statue. Hundreds of locals immediately sign, and her campaign makes the news. An interracial group of ministers led by Pastor Moses of First Baptist Church circulates Jenna’s petition. Then they write and submit their own to the judge. Jessamine County seems poised to reckon with its sordid record on race and Civil War memory.

Timestamps

00:00      Sitting on her front porch, Jenna explains why she wants to destroy the statue.

07:58      Pastor Moses starts an interracial ministerial committee.

14:00      Pastor Max Vanderpool describes racial conditions in Jessamine County.

18:25      The ministerial committee ramps up.

30:48      A “Black Lives Matter” rally in Wilmore

38:08      Resistance emerges.

47:09      Antistatue activists resolve to continue their campaign.

Transcript: Visit www.rebelonmain.com/episode4/transcript.

Engage

Resources

Production team

Next episode: In Episode 5—Rival Monument—a very different narrative of the Civil War emerges from the ground.

Built with slave labor, Jessamine County, Kentucky, has a history that includes over a dozen lynchings, Jim Crow codes, and continuing racial inequities—all overseen by a Confederate statue on the courthouse lawn.

Like Confederate defender Brandon, Rev. Robert Gates cares very much about history. But the Confederate statue doesn’t speak for him. From his pulpit at the Historic Camp Nelson Baptist Church, he tells uncomfortable stories about Jessamine’s past that white residents don’t want to hear, violent stories not reflected by the statue on the courthouse lawn.

Gates’s history in Jessamine County goes way back. His grandfather, whose living memory dates back to the 1890s, lived here when the Confederate statue went up. He was here when a young Black man named Tom Brown was lynched. And then he passed on those memories to his son, Gates’s father. To this day, the extended Gates family refuses to walk by the statue. When they need to do business in the courthouse, they enter through the back to avoid the statue and the site of the lynching. It’s as if Jim Crow never ended.

Engage

Timestamps

00:00      Reflections on hospitality in Jessamine County

05:56      Maren shows David a graveyard in her backyard

14:00      Pastor Moses calls for some “real history” on the courthouse yard

18:45      At the local historical society, David watches a VCR tape of a 1987 outdoor drama of Jessamine County history

25:31      Maren shows David how to research slavery in the county clerk’s office              

34:16      David speaks with historian Carolyn Dupont about racial violence and the Lost Cause

39:21      Back at the historical society, David watches a video of the Confederate statue’s 1995 rededication.

41:35      David heads to the public library to read old copies of the Jessamine Journal on microfilm.

45:36      Standing on site, David describes the lynching of Tom Brown

49:27      A local pastor reads Black poetry about racial violence

50:42      David speaks with Rev. Gates in the Camp Nelson church house

55:25      David travels to Frankfort, the state capitol, to hold a “lynching spoon”

Transcript: Visit www.rebelonmain.com/episode3.

Resources

Production team

Next episode: In Episode 4—Jenna’s Petition—David talks with a local homeschooler who wants to destroy the statue.

On a warm Monday morning, a week after protests broke out in front of the courthouse, a man with short-cropped hair stands beside the statue. Legs astride with an enormous handgun in a holster on his left side, Brandon is guarding “history.” When I approach him, he explains that the statue is not a monument to slavery. Referencing the inscription on the statue’s foundation, he says that it honors “soldiers who have fought and died in this country.”

The second episode of Rebel on Main investigates Brandon’s claim by recounting the bizarre origins of Jessamine’s statue. Initially ordered, but not paid for, by a different town that wanted a Union statue, the unclaimed monument was purchased at a 90 percent discount by the county fathers and then regalvanized into a Confederate identity. Before a raucous crowd of 3,000 supporters shrieking rebel yells, the statue is unveiled. The Lost Cause has won Jessamine County.

A century later, conditions have changed. Brandon still believes in the Lost Cause, but critics are denouncing it as heresy. He feels embattled by gay activists, Black Lives Matter, and woke historians who want to “erase history.” Frustrated and angry that his Civil War narrative is being threatened, he stands vigil, guarding the statue from protesters who want to destroy memories of Confederate courage.

Engage

Timestamps

00:00      David talks with Brandon, armed defender of the statue

05:56      Story of Bennett Young, the model/architect of Jessamine’s statue

09:00      Sam Flora of the Sons of Confederate Veterans tells the story of St. Albans Raid.

25:35      Story of how the statue was conceived, built, and dedicated

39:29      David wrestles with Brandon’s political opinions

40:32      Robert P. Jones analyzes the “end of white Christian America”

42:42      David analyzes the social context of the statue in the 1890s and how it mirrors conditions in the 2020s

51:51      David wrestles with whether his historical analysis is condescending to Brandon—and the architects of the statue

53:30      David, Brandon, and Judge West have a conversation

Transcript: Visit http://www.rebelonmain.com/episode2.

Resources

Production team

Next episode: In Episode 3—Ghosts of Jessamine—David tells excruciating stories of lynchings, rapes, and violence.

In June 2020 a Black Lives Matter protest erupts in Jessamine County, Kentucky. It soon transforms into a campaign to destroy the Confederate statue that looms behind them on Main Street.

As historian and local resident David Swartz covers this effort, he also investigates the history of this beautiful corner of the Bluegrass. He finds lots of hidden stories, including a disastrous expulsion of formerly enslaved refugees from a Union Army camp in 1864. Over 100 women and children die of exposure in a snowstorm. The incident implicates not just enslavers, but also the nation.

150 years later, Americans are still reckoning with violence against Black citizens. As protesters in Jessamine County chant, “Say her name! Breonna was asleep!” big trucks circle the courthouse, revving their engines in protest against the protest. A fierce backlash emerges.

Why, just months after the killing of Breonna Taylor in nearby Louisville, do so many resist the removal of a monument to men who fought to enslave Black people? Why, a full fifty years after the civil rights movement, are so many still so reluctant to say that “Black lives matter”? Why, 150 years after the Civil War, do so many want to maintain a statue honoring the Confederacy?

Engage

Timestamps

00:00      Pastor Moses Radford denounces the statue as sign of hatred, bigotry, and racism

03:24      Physical description of the statue

06:00      David covers Black Lives Matter protests at the courthouse

13:30      Historian Amy Murrell Taylor tells the history of Camp Nelson, a Union supply depot and emancipation center.

27:05      Tracy K. Smith, Emeritus Poet Laureate of the United States, recites her poem about the expulsion.

28:50      Taylor describes the heartbreaking expulsion of refugee women and children.

36:57      Protests turn toward the Confederate statue

44:45      David interviews Judge David West

Transcript: Visit https://www.rebelonmain.com/episode1.

Resources

Production team

Next episode: In Episode 2—Defending History—David recounts the bizarre origins of the Confederate statue—and interviews a man who guards the statue from BLM protests with a big gun on his hip.

It’s a Civil War statue unlike any other—one with a rebel belt and a Union hat. Join historian David Swartz on a podcast investigation of his hometown Confederate statue that stands on Main Street in Jessamine County, Kentucky.