Confederate Monument at Forest Hill Cemetery

Confederate General Sterling Price led a repeatedly disappointing, though particularly destructive, campaign through Missouri from late August to early December in 1864. Known as Price’s Missouri Expedition, it eventually resulted in his Confederate forces being scattered and their presence in Missouri severely damaged, effectively ending the war on the Western border. By the time Price managed to flee to the southern half of Arkansas, innumerable casualties had accrued on both sides of the war, mostly coming from Price’s blunder at the Battle of Westport. Years after the war had ended, locals of the area wanted to give the Confederate dead, who had not been buried appropriately due to cost and time restraints at the time, the opportunity to be laid to rest in a cemetery. In the end, the bodies of over 70 Confederates were moved into Forest Hill Cemetery due to the growing infrastructure of the city and its streets. Starting in 1896 and finishing in 1902, the Daughters of the Confederacy constructed a monument to the troops with a white pillar of granite boasting a metal statue of a Confederate soldier standing vigilant with a rifle in hand. It remains standing and, like many Confederate monuments, is a source of controversy.

The year was 1864 and the Confederate Army had been losing momentum for some time. With the Union election period coming quickly, Confederate authorities were desperate to secure a victory and sway the tide of war in their favor. Missouri, as a border state, held incredible importance, and if they could take it, they would deal severe damage to the North’s military might and the people’s morale. Hoping to shake the northern politicians’ confidence in Lincoln, an invasion of Missouri was approved to be led by Confederate General Sterling Price. He was assisted by Brigadier General J. Shelby, Maj. General James F. Fagan, and Maj. General John S. Marmaduke. Price was forced to work with the scraps that the Confederacy could muster, a motley group of bare-footed and low-rationed troops (Missouri Department of Natural Resources, 2009); a quarter of whom were deserters who had been returned to service. Most of these returned deserters, in fact, were Missourians who had only ever left their posts so they could defend their homes. A crucial part of Price’s plan was to collect even more men as he moved through the predominantly pro-slavery regions of Missouri, picking up guerrilla fighters and other men to join his ranks. Despite the weathered and exhausted condition of the majority of his troops and the numerous setbacks he faced, General Price managed to accumulate over 12,000 soldiers (Davis, 2004) in his “Army of Missouri”, and he marched to Kansas City after two failed invasion attempts at St. Louis and Jefferson City. In the multi-day battle that ensued with Price’s attempts to take Kansas City, Price eventually found his troops overwhelmed and outflanked. This marks the day, October 23rd, 1864, known as “Shelby’s Last Stand” as Brigadier General J. Shelby held out just long enough to allow Confederate forces led by Price, Fagan, and Marmaduke to escape the hopeless battle they had chosen to start. “Shelby withdrew to a line of stone fences to the south of the Wornall House and held the position until Marmaduke and Fagan’s Divisions retreated past Little Santa Fe. Shelby had saved the day for the Army of Missouri.” (Davis, 2004) Despite Shelby and his troops’ impressive feat, General Price’s Army of Missouri had more or less disintegrated and the nail had been put in the coffin of Price’s Missouri Expedition. There were a number of Price’s forces left as he fled southward and out of the state, but those that remained only existed due to the efforts of General Shelby’s calvary.

In 1866, only two years after Price’s forces fled Missouri, a local man named George W. Briant (Euston, 2019) told others in his community that he’d have the bodies of Confederate troops properly buried if they could identify the locations of graves and gather the bodies. Briant didn’t seem to have particularly political intentions, though he was a known Confederate sympathizer. Either as an act of kindness or as a political action or both, he went on to separate a piece of his land and donate it to this very cause. In several years there were over 70 bodies interred in the small plot of land he had donated. Just down and across the street from Briant’s donated plot of land, a new cemetery was established in 1888 called Forest Hill Cemetery. Sid Hare was the first acting superintendent and George Kessler, renowned for his work across the city, was the landscape architect (Forest Hill & Calvary Cemetery). Growing city infrastructure and ever-widening streets endangered the unmarked graves of the Confederate troops. So, between 1893 and 1894, the bodies were exhumed and reburied, finally laid to rest in the newly renamed Forest Hill & Calvary Cemetery. Little detail is known as to why the proprietors of the cemetery chose to rename it after the re-interment of the Confederate dead. For years following, the Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) hosted dinners, balls and various events to gather the needed funds to construct a monument in honor of those fallen soldiers. 

The UDC revealed the monument on Memorial Day, 1902 to an audience of hundreds of people wishing to pay respects to the long-passed soldiers. The people in attendance weren’t just civilians, either. According to a 1902 article by the Kansas City Star published just one day after the unveiling ceremony, there were many Confederate and Union veterans who had traveled from across the country to be in attendance. (Kansas City Star, 1902) The event began with the president of the local chapter of the UDC, Mrs. Hugh Miller, giving a speech discussing the efforts made to erect this monument. Shortly after she finished speaking, to the rhythm of bands playing well-known southern songs, thirteen young girls, all of whom were children of members of the UDC, pulled the veil loose from the marble shaft. Revealed at its summit was a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier, clad in uniform and with a rifle in hand. The article continues on, describing how several notable speakers took the stage during the ceremony, but perhaps none so well known at the time as Judge James B. Gantt of the Missouri Supreme Court. In time, following the monument’s construction, twenty five more Confederate veterans who died long after the war's end were buried with their fellow soldiers beneath the monument. The UDC would later pay for dozens of small, flat slabs of stone with the names of any known Confederate dead buried at the site engraved upon them, including General Jo Shelby’s grave. All of the grave sites and the monument are located on the privately owned plot of land within the cemetery that the UDC chapter had purchased. Many years after any new bodies were interred at this location, UDC members erected a marker dedicated to describing “Shelby’s Last Stand”. The marker is just on your left as you enter the cemetery. 

The Confederate Monument still stands as of November 2023, and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The piece is situated on a private lot, thus, neither the city nor the cemetery has the right to take it down, though the cemetery has been quoted saying that they have wanted to do so in the past. This legal issue has not stopped Kansas Citians in relatively recent attempts to deface and vandalize the monument, regarding it as a symbol of racism and hatred. In 2020, several labels such as “racist” and “bigot” and others not appropriate for this essay were spray painted on the base of the monument (Toyoshiba, 2020). Clearly, despite having stood in that spot for over 120 years, the feelings it provokes due to what it represents still hold significant impact in this day and age. There is extensive research about the purpose behind the construction of Confederate monuments across the United States. Several hundred Confederate monuments were erected across the country between the years 1880 and 1950. Scholars who have taken the time to research this phenomenon have begun questioning the true intentions and motives behind the expansive effort to erect so many of these “historic” sites. 

In his book Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves, the Professor of History of Art Architecture Kirk Savage defines the erection of any monuments as more of an old world ideal, “Public monuments are the most conservative of commemorative forms precisely because they are meant to last, unchanged, forever. While other things come and go, are lost and forgotten, the monument is supposed to remain a fixed point, stabilizing both the physical and the cognitive landscape.” (Savage, 1997) Savage continues to describe that the use of monuments, specifically those of the Confederacy, is to hold the areas they’re built in culturally stagnant, helping to maintain an oppressive and segregated culture in the minds and upbringings of the people around them. Again questioning the intentions and purpose behind so many of these constructions, Savage poses the reader with the current interest of many historians researching in this field, “The irony is that now, [...], we must work so hard to recover that voice once thought to be eternal. If many monuments from the past seem mute to us, they do still have stories to tell. But those stories are not necessarily what those monuments were intended to tell us.” The Confederate monument at Forest Hill & Calvary Cemetery reminds us of this question and doubtful light shone on the monument's intentions. Beginning in the 1870s, Jim Crow laws, which were unfair laws meant to target and segregate the black populations in southern states, ran rampant in the country. Racial violence in this period of “reconstruction” rose to brutal heights with lynchings and unfair distributions of punishment through legal systems. The United States remained a legally racially segregated country until 1964 , a decade after the end of the most prominent period of monument construction in the United States. 

Did George W. Briant mean for his donation of land and services to be a kind act meant to honor the dead, or did he have ulterior motives pushing his “selfless” deed? Had the Daughters of the Confederacy for the Kansas City Chapter, or any of the other chapters, ever cared about honoring the dead, or was the intention to instead stagnate public perception and thought, preventing it from growing past previous beliefs or ideologies? Forest Hill’s monument remains valuable not for what it honors, but instead as an example of the ongoing debate over the purpose of such stone and metal creations. If you want to visit the cemetery to learn of “Shelby’s Last Stand” or to see the marble pillar and bronze statue for yourself, you’ll find the entrance to the cemetery just off 69th and Troost in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. No more than a 5 or 6 minute walk into the grounds and you’ll find yourself standing at the base of a nearly 122 year old monument to the long-dead soldiers of America’s bloodiest war. 

Written and researched by Lawrence W. M. Cohen.

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