File #21: "Confederate Memorial Hall, Howard Memorial Library's Annex"

This artifact’s depiction of the memorial hall revealed how the building itself and its location affirmed the post-Reconstruction Lost Cause narrative New Orleans’ economic elite espoused. The hall was built in response to the Louisiana Historical Association’s need for a repository for all the Confederate-era artifacts they collected from the grassroots, and thus initially served as an annex of the Howard Memorial Library [1]. At its dedication on January 8, 1891, the Battle of New Orleans’ 76th anniversary, speeches from Association members like Joseph A. Chalaron expounded the hall’s significance as a “guard” for the “sacred and inspiring objects [that] require our love and protection” [2]. The local newspaper corroborated his sentiment with their insistence that “[t]he Gods may be on the side of the conquering Greeks, but human sympathy will always be with the heroic Hector and his unfortunate but never dishonored cause” [3]. Union General Benjamin F. Butler’s occupation of New Orleans during the Civil War, and Reconstruction itself strongly influenced such statements of “conquering Greeks” and a consequent need for the hall as a protector and propagator of New Orleans’ autonomy. As said autonomy became wedded to the Lost Cause, the site itself was on Camp Street, which historian Lawrence N. Powell argued was a “cross-­street, just behind Magazine, [that] probably got its name from the campo de negros...a slave camp” [4]. Thus, this hall’s location directly anchored its creators’ post-Reconstruction Gilded Age Lost Cause intentions to the city’s Colonial and Antebellum-era slave-trading past.

1. Giacomo Bagarella, “To Whom Does One Pray At the Battle Abbey of the South?” in “The Envoy,” in Medium (Sept. 3, 2017); Reiko Hillyer, “Relics of Reconciliation: The Confederate Memory and Civil War Memory in the New South,” in The Public Historian 33, no. 4 (Nov. 2011): 39-40; G. Howard Hunter, “Late to the Dance: New Orleans and the Emergence of a Confederate City,” in Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 57, no. 3 (Summer 2016): 299 and 319; Samuel Wilson Jr. “The Howard Memorial Library and Memorial Hall,” in Louisiana History 28, no. 3 (Summer 1987): 238-40.
2. Wilson Jr., “The Howard Memorial Library,” in Louisiana History, 240; Bardes, “Defend with True Hearts unto Death,” in Southern Cultures, 32 and 38.
3. Hunter, “Late to the Dance,” in Louisiana History, 319.
4. Lawrence N. Powell, The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 349.

Reference

• “Confederate Memorial Hall.” In the National Register Digital Assets.