American History in Full

Early on one frosty morning in February I found myself driving down a country road in east central North Carolina, looking for the other half of American history.

It had rained the night before and snowed hard a few days before that. As I pulled into a gravel parking lot the trees all around stood out sharp against the clear, cold sky. A crisp wind pulled at two flags on opposite sides of a plot of land: the Stars and Stripes and the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. My shoes sunk an inch into the red clay mud as I walked to a statue of a Confederate soldier in the field beyond the parking lot.

After a long slog from Japan via Texas I had finally made it to Valor Memorial Park (https://valormemorialpark.com/), where American history gets put back together again one Confederate monument at a time.

For the past ten years or so–for the past sixteen decades to be more precise–woke Americans have waged a pitiless battle against their own history. Human life is messy and the public affairs of men are often even worse. When things come to a head states invoke violence. Into that maelstrom march long strings of soldiers whose bodies and minds pay for the reckoning that wars are always promised to bring. Their sacrifices, and the social and political and economic and cultural impasses that precipitate battlefield slaughter, get rolled into one infinitely complex story called “history.” For some reason–pride, immaturity, quasi-religious belief in human perfectibility, ideological necessity, or maybe just plain old stupidity–some people can’t stomach the real past and prefer an imitation. Much of what passes for “American history” these days, and especially since 1865, has been just that, a strangely pruned, poor approximation of what really happened long and not so long ago.

The revolt against lived reality got real bad during the first Trump administration. Hooligans both in and out of city councils nationwide were tearing statues down with abandon. Politicians and the chattering class egged them on. Professors joined in. Antifa was also happy to help out. The statue of a great American, General Robert E. Lee (1807-1870), which once graced the eponymous Lee Circle in my hometown of New Orleans, got yanked (no pun intended) in 2017. Then came Minneapolis in 2020. The George Floyd St. Vitus Dance drove the anti-historical left in America out of whatever was left of their right minds. Monuments to Confederate soldiers and sailors, Confederate statesmen, Confederate ladies, and even Abraham Lincoln found themselves spraypainted, toppled, hammered, dented, melted for scrap, and generally clothed in shame.

But truth always wins in the end. A while back I was heartened to read, in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/us/north-carolina-confederate-statues-park.html) of all places, about Valor Memorial Park, a place in North Carolina where statues, and histories, that have been wrongly disgraced can find honor again.

“We’re the only ones doing this in the whole South,” Toni London says. “We’re the only ones who have created a public park for unwanted Confederate monuments. We have two Wilmington monuments, a Pitt County monument, and I am working right now on getting others. We will also have a Spanish-American War monument in the near future.”

Ms. London, one of the driving forces behind Valor Memorial, has come out to meet me and show me around the grounds. She was a member of United Daughters of the Confederacy #324, which owned a monument to Confederate war dead from Davidson County that the city of Lexington, North Carolina wanted to be rid of when the George Floyd riots hit home in 2020. Ms. London and other local people organized dinners to raise money to rescue the statues from woke vandalism and political cowardice. Eventually a nonprofit, Commemorating Honor, Inc., was formed so people could donate funds to help the cause. The jilted Confederate memorial that the UDC chapter had but no one wanted to display went back up in Valor Memorial Park.

That first monument stood solitary for a year and a half until, London says, the UDC chapter in Chatham County contacted Valor Memorial Park about restoring honor to a monument in storage there. The Valor Memorial people readily agreed.

“After that, Winston-Salem people contacted us about their monument. It’s just been like that,” London tells me.

“We’re working now on getting those additional twelve acres surveyed so we can obtain the deed,” she adds, gesturing to a field to the north of the park grounds. “Once we have that we’ll create a walking trail with monuments throughout. A bridge will lead over the creek from the park to the annex. People will be able to sit on benches. There’s a pond over there, which will have a fountain. It will be a little community park.”

I ask if the usual people have come out to cause trouble. London replies that some people have come to the park who aren’t supporters of the work Valor Memorial is doing, but that vandalism has been extremely rare, limited to a stray graffito or two on a wooden railing along the parking lot perimeter.

I then ask if there has been support from the community.

“Oh, yes,” London says. “The community has been wonderful. The support has been unbelievable. Nothing would have happened without the people in this community coming together and pitching in.”

The majority of the donations to Valor Memorial Park have been made in sweat equity. Joe’s Towing (https://www.facebook.com/people/Joes-Towing-and-Wrecker-Service/100057496928095/), a business in Mocksville, brought the first recovered Confederate monument to a parcel of land donated by James and Hilda Goins, local supporters. Everyone for miles around pitched in.

“I don’t get anything negative from the community,” London says. “The local fire department stored one of the monuments for us while we worked to ready the park to accommodate it. When we have to get permits from the county zoning office the people there help us in any way they can.

“We’ve even had people from up north come. Every state you can think of. Democrats, some of them. We’ve had black people visit the park. Everyone who comes here knows it was wrong what was done to the statues. They like what we’ve done here. We had a black man, Vernon Robinson, speak at our Veteran’s Day event last year. Mr. Robinson was a city council member in Winston-Salem. He was against the monument there coming down and he’s glad it’s back up at Valor Memorial Park, and not sitting somewhere in storage.”

It’s like this everywhere I go. Everyone knows that it’s wrong to tear down statues. Everyone knows that attacking history is pretense for hating people, splitting them into groups and pitting them against one another. The irony is rich. The history of the War between the States draws us together, but militant lying about the war drives wedges into society that end up tearing the country apart.

In the midst of all this hard-edged confabulation, many people have been cowed into acquiescing in the evisceration of American history. But all it takes is one or two people, like Toni London, to stand up, and the local community rallies. People want to do what’s right, they just often don’t know when or how to fight back.

“I call our volunteers ‘Valor Raiders,’ after Quantrill’s Raiders, or ‘Valor Rangers,’ after Mosby’s Rangers,” London tells me. “Like the men who fought under Colonel John S. Mosby or Captain William Clarke Quantrill, the volunteers have to be willing to cross enemy lines in service of something greater than self.”

There is one quarter from which support has been, shockingly, not forthcoming. The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of the Confederacy are largely against what Valor Memorial Park is doing, London says.

“The UDC calls Valor Memorial Park a ‘memorial graveyard’,” London tells me as my eyes widen in disbelief.

Apparently if the monuments can’t go back up where they once stood then some folks want nothing to do with them. It’s a shame. Restoring honor to the South is like the War of Northern Aggression in many ways. Southerners have to fight where they have the advantage. When one route is blocked we have to figure out a new way forward.

“Some people have also asked us why we fly that flag,” London continues, nodding up at the big Stars and Bars snapping in the winter breeze. “We have been told that that flag is racist. That flag is not racist. That’s the flag that Confederate soldiers looked for on the battlefield.

“The Cross family that lived here during the war,” London says, “and the Clodfelters that lived over there, and the Danielses that lived over there, they had no phones or televisions. When the state of North Carolina came through here and said, ‘We need soldiers,’ they signed up. And they were probably honored to do that because their grandfathers fought in the Revolutionary War. Most of these people down here were just poor farmers. They didn’t have a bunch of slaves.”

At the brick wall at Valor Memorial honoring veterans of all of America’s wars, I spotted a few 1775s and 1776s. Having ancestors who fought the British Empire is not an abstraction in North Carolina. It’s a matter of blood and honor.

Not for everyone, unfortunately.

“A black history museum has acquired the last three Confederate monuments in Richmond, Virginia,” London says. “I called the museum, but they wouldn’t even talk to me. They will melt the statues down, cut them up, turn them into abstract art.”

“It seems there are two stories about America,” I suggest. “There’s the Lincoln story, where America is an abstract idea. And then there’s the Southern story, where this is our home, and if people come here and start shooting at us we’re going to defend it.”

“Yes,” London agrees. “And that’s what they did. I’ve studied the census records of this area for 1870 and 1880. There were black people here who probably were slaves before the war. But they stayed. This was their home.”

America is their, and our, home. Valor Memorial Park is about nothing else but America, period.

“In honor of America 250 I ordered a big Betsy Ross flag to fly at the park!” London says, breaking into a smile.

Valor Memorial Park is a love song to America, all of it, to the boys who went off to die when America needed help.

London herself exemplifies the way that American history, in its intricacy, comes together in the fullness of time. When I ask if she’s originally from North Carolina she says no, West Virginia.

“Southern West Virginia, up in the hollers of Appalachia,” she goes on. “I’ve studied up on my own family. Some of them fought for the North, some for the South. They were Union Home Guards or Confederate Home Guards. They stayed right there and fought each other.

“My fourth great-grandfather, a Union soldier, was killed by his sister’s son fighting for the Confederacy. And then that fourth great-grandfather’s brother avenged his death by killing his nephew, the one who had killed my great-grandfather. But I’ve got seven sets of grandparents buried in a cemetery up there in that holler, and they’re all buried there together, whether they wore blue or gray.”

That’s what the South has always been. The family is unbreakable. For slaves especially, for family was all they had. All of that is American history. And it all deserves to be remembered.

People who are tired of denying the past are coming together it seems. The Valor Memorial Park model is spreading, London tells me. Some places in South Carolina are apparently rescuing insulted statues and memorials, setting them up again in places of honor so that the Confederate dead will not be shamed.

May this good work continue. The war is over, but the commemoration of the sacrifices people made then, like American history in general, ought to go on forever.

The views expressed at AbbevilleInstitute.org are not necessarily those of the Abbeville Institute.

Jason Morgan

Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Chiba, Japan.

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