Tomblin says no changes planned for W.Va.’s Confederate monuments

Charleston Gazette

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The statue is of Stonewall Jackson, a general in the Confederate army who fought against Lincoln and the United States in a war to preserve slavery.

In the wake of last week’s shootings in Charleston, South Carolina, as states across the South begin the process of taking down Confederate battle flags from their capitols, several are also pushing to move or remove monuments to the Confederacy.

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In West Virginia, there have been no such calls, and Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin doesn’t foresee any changes.

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The Jackson statue, which dates to 1910, has stood on the grounds of three different West Virginia capitols and has been in its current location since 1976.

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A major general in the Confederate army, Jackson was born in Clarksburg, part of what was then Virginia. He moved to Lexington, Virginia, where he owned six slaves. He was, perhaps, compassionate for a slaveholder of his time in that he ran a Sunday school for slaves and allowed them to learn to read.

But he was firmly committed to the cause of the Confederacy, predicting, if they lost the war, “a dissolution of the bonds of society” and “the prelude to anarchy, infidelity and the ultimate loss of free responsible government on this continent.”

In addition to the statue, West Virginia also has a state park in Lewis County, a hospital in Weston and a middle school in Charleston named after Stonewall Jackson.

It’s location gives a hint at West Virginia’s troubled history with race, http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20140630/GZ01/140639991 as a state that joined the Union in the midst of the Civil War, but with more than 18,000 slaves http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/00165897ch14.pdf who were exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation. Directly across the street from the school lies Glenwood Estate, now a historical house, but once the center of a sprawling 366-acre plantation, one of five that took up much of the West Side and held captive more than 70 slaves. http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201311020055

“How did we put a school and name it Stonewall Jackson on the West Side of Charleston, long after the Civil War has ended?” asked Rev. Matthew Watts, a community leader on the West Side. “That in itself is an interesting question.”

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