The Language of Confederate Memorialization and its Impact on the Memory of Slavery in North Carolina (2023)

Undergraduate: Lucas Siegel

Faculty Advisor: Fitzhugh Brundage
Department: Computer Science, History

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Today, Confederate memorialization is more controversial than ever. In the last decade alone, over 150 Confederate monuments have been removed from prominent locations in town squares, courthouses, and cemeteries across the United States. Five years ago, students and activists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill toppled the "Silent Sam" statue, a fixture on the campus since 1913. Some participants and observers of the controversy surrounding Confederate memorials claim that these statues explicitly honor slavery and the defense of it by the Confederacy, others believe them to be an integral part of their Southern cultural identity and heritage. But Confederate memorialization is not so straightforward as it may appear. In fact, it evolved over generations from a means of gathering and burying the dead to a celebration of the Confederate cause and legacy. This evolution can be traced in the language used in the monuments' inscriptions and in the dedication speeches delivered at the unveiling of the memorials. To analyze the general trends in language over time, I used a personalized word count program written in Python that takes a block of text as input and lists the words used and how often they were used as a dictionary in descending order as output. The results from this program include the inscriptions from 116 Confederate common soldier monuments erected in North Carolina.

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