John J. McRae, Governor of Mississippi

Concord, NC

Erected in memory of the Confederate dead of Cabarrus County, this monument marks the years 1861–1865 with the solemn language of granite, marble, and the cypress branch, an old emblem of mourning. Like hundreds of courthouse-square monuments across the South, it was raised by a community determined to honor its war dead and to shape how the Civil War would be remembered. It stands today as both a memorial and a document of that memory.

Concord, NC

On the night of April 18, 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America, stopped in Concord during his flight south after the fall of Richmond. The house where he stayed once stood on this spot, a waypoint in the collapse of the Confederacy in the war's final days.

Charlotte, NC

Opened in 1859 with future Confederate general Daniel Harvey Hill as its first superintendent, this Charlotte military academy trained young men in the tense years before the Civil War. When war came, the campus was pressed into service as a Confederate hospital, and after the conflict the building served as a public school from 1883 to 1950. It stood near this spot.

Fort Mill, SC

Erected in the 1890s in Fort Mill's Confederate Park, this is one of the earliest and most striking monuments in the South to commemorate enslaved African Americans — though it does so through the lens of the 'Lost Cause,' framing the enslaved as loyal servants of the Confederate war effort. In reality, the roughly four million people held in bondage experienced slavery as coerced labor, family separation, and violence, and many thousands escaped to Union lines or took up arms for their own freedom. The monument's language of 'faithful' devotion reflects the memory its white patrons wished to preserve in the decades after Reconstruction, not the lived experience of the people it claims to honor.