Nathen Bedford Forrest and the Trees

On Tuesday, the Memphis City Council unanimously approved a resolution to move the remains of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife from Health Sciences Park. They want to dig up the graves and move the bodies.

Gen. Forrest was a brilliant Confederate cavalry leader, brave and innovative. When asked about the effort to bring peace to the western states, the Union's Secretary of War Stanton said, “There will never be peace in Tennessee until Forrest is dead.” After the Civil War, he served as the first leader or “grand wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan when it formed in 1866. 

State officials across the country have been calling for the eradication of Confederate symbols, icons, and monuments from key sites in recent weeks. Yet if the council’s plan goes through, it would be the first attempt to disinter the corpse of a Confederate leader as a symbolic gesture to denounce the South's history.
Contrary to current hysteria, Forrest was a complex guy and might be seen as an example of the improving, reconstructed South. Here is his obituary in the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0713.html

But while symbolism can be tortured and recondite, it is usually not complex. Symbolic periods are always difficult times because individuals are held responsible for notions. Christian antipathy for the Jews in the Middle Ages was that contemporary Jews were held responsible symbolically for the actions of Jews at the time of transition from the Old to the New Testament over a millennium earlier. Hitler held Jews in the 1930s responsible for the perceived war-undermining behavior of Jewish industrialist and leaders in Germany during WWI. Contemporary America is judged symbolically because the nation's founders seem in retrospect to have acquiesced to slavery in order to form the confederation; they thought the revolution more important than the slavery question.

Symbolically attacking the past has a long and treasured history. The beautiful Basilica San Giovanni Laterano in Rome was a site where symbolism was made very physical. Pope Stephen VI, less than a year into his papacy, gave the order to dig up Pope Formosus and force his corpse to stand trial for crimes Pope John VIII had excommunicated him for years before: seeking the papacy and ruling over more than one place a time as bishop. So the corpse of Formosus was dragged out, dressed in papal robes, and propped up in a chair at San Giovanni Laterano.

 

It gets a lot worse but you get the idea.