Academic

Confederate Memorial Hall

By Alfred Brophy

Finally.  I have a couple of decent pictures of Vanderbilt University's Confederate Memorial Hall.  They aren't easy to find--especially ones where you can actually read the "Confederate" part.  Also, because of trees out front of the building, it's hard to get a good picture of it.  But thanks to Spencer Crew's kind invitation to speak to his history graduate class at MTSU (on memorials of sites of conscience), I had the chance to drive out to Nashville this summer, where I had a great time and a great opportunity to visit some important monuments.

First, the story about one "Confederate Memorial Hall."  In the depths of the depression, the United Daughters of the Confederacy promised to raise $100,000 to fund the building of a dormitory on the campus of Peabody College.  Preliminary negotiations between the UDC and Peabody College called for Peabody to house young women descended from Confederate soldiers for free there, as well as to name the dormitory "Confederate Memorial Hall."  (Though there is no formal contract to be found in either the Peabody archives or the UDC's, it appears as though that was the agreement.  The UDC raised the money and Confederate Memorial Hall was built in the 1930s.)  It's a beautiful building, by the way.

In the 1970s, Peabody College was acquired by Vanderbilt and Vanderbilt stopped the free housing.  No one at the time complained, so far as we can determine.  But it continued using the  name, though at various times afterwards the name raised some debate on the university's campus.

Now cut to 2002. Vanderbilt's Chancellor Gordon Gee decided that it was time for a name change: the building would no longer be called "Confederate Memorial Hall," but simply "Memorial Hall." A few steps ahead of the sand blasters arrived a complaint from the United Daughters of the Confederacy, seeking to enjoin the removal of the name "Confederate" from the building.  The chancellor found for Vanderbilt on a cy pres theory, but on appeal the Tennessee Court of Appeals made some strange moves and overturned the chancellor. Lots of inside baseball here, but let me telegraph some things that I found strange. First, the court implied a contract on the basis of a course of dealings (even though there was no writing that could be found). Second, it found the contract was still in operation (even though Vanderbilt stopped housing women in the late 1970s); third, it found that the damages were the present value of the entire $100,000 given in the early 1930s, rather than some portion of that. In essence, the housing women for free wasn't given any credit in the award of damages.  I would have thought that opinion was vulnerable in all sorts of ways on appeal, but I suspect that Vanderbilt University just said, "ah, what the heck--this isn't worth pursuing further."  They made their point and the court of appeals decision was a good stopping point.

One other thing, though, that I find absolutely riveting: a concurring opinion quoted extensively from the memoirs of United States General Joshua Chamberlain (who was a professor of moral philosophy at Bowdoin before the Civil War)!  Chamberlain's memoirs, published in 1910, were a key point of reconciliation between the north and south--an attempt to rewrite the history of the war.  What I find particularly interesting is that in 2005 a judge was advocating for a controversial position: that the memory of the Confederacy should be that of people fighting honorably for a cause they believed just (not fighting for slavery).  This is an important example of a controversial cultural idea being promulgated through a judicial opinion.

The picture above and to the right is a plaque placed on the building in 1989 when the building was renovated.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on December 16, 2009 (boomark / email).