A War Against History

Hans Christian Heg, an immigrant from Norway, believed that black lives matter.

For this reason he became a leader of Wisconsin’s Wide Awakes, an anti-slave catcher militia. He sheltered Sherman Booth, who was made a federal fugitive after inciting a mob to rescue an escaped slave. He joined the Free Soil Party, which opposed the expansion of slavery into the western states. 

When the Free Soil Party merged into the new Republican Party, which also opposed the expansion of slavery, Heg became a Republican. When the Republican candidate became president and the slave-holding states of the South seceded, he went to work raising an army unit from his fellow Norwegians. His “thousand Norsemen” were mustered into service as the 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the only all-Scandinavian regiment in the Union Army, with Heg at their head as colonel. 

Colonel Hans Christian Heg, in bronze, by Paul Fjelde. Public Domain.

He led the 15th in battle at Perrysville, Kentucky, and Stones River, Tennessee. In September 1863, at Chickamauga, Georgia, he “was shot through the bowels and died the next day.” Heg’s body was returned to Wisconsin and buried in the Norwegian Lutheran cemetery near Wind Lake.

In 1925, in conjunction with the centennial of Norwegian immigration to America, a bronze statue of Heg was installed at the state capitol in Madison. The bronze colonel has stood in silent witness to Norwegian-Americans’ contributions to freedom ever since.

Statue Toppled

But a few nights ago—June 23, 2020—a mob of citizens toppled Heg’s statue, dismembered it, and threw the pieces in Lake Monona. They had begun by protesting the disorderly-conduct arrest of a black man named Devonere Johnson and ended by destroying the statue of Colonel Hans Christian Heg.

Many have pointed out the apparent incongruity of Black Lives Matter protesters destroying the statue of a leading abolitionist and Civil War hero. “These people must not know history,” they have said.

But surely the point here is that in the current uproar, historical judgments are irrelevant. History itself is the enemy. The bond between past and present sometimes becomes more visceral than philosophical. At such times, the strident present ransacks the mute past, seeking out victims. Ask any Bosnian.

There can be no distinction between a Hans Christian Heg and a Nathan Bedford Forrest when a noisy claque regards the whole past as merely a bogus excuse for a deplorable status quo.

Taking Revenge on the Dead

As the descendant of a Norwegian who died as a Union soldier in the Civil War, I have more than a casual interest in the fate of Colonel Hans Christian Heg.

It is bad enough they killed him at Chickamauga. Killing him all over again, by effigy,  assasinates his memory. It cannot injure Hans Christian Heg beyond the grave. But it is dispiriting to those of us who would like to suppose that Americans express themselves in rational ways. Obviously, that is not always so. 

The people destroying things now for racial harmony, like those destroying things fifty years ago for peace, may think they are igniting The Revolution. Their Marxist utopia did not come into being in those days. But our nation’s troubling racial divide is a more fertile ground for deep-seated conflict.

It’s unlikely there will be a revolution, but it’s easy to believe we are in for a long, hard time. It would be nice if some good came out of it all, but I don’t have that kind of faith.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

9 thoughts on “A War Against History

  1. Thank you, Larry. Right on!

  2. Thanks, Bob.

  3. I agree wholeheartedly with you. Get the whole story before you go around destroying things that are part of our history. There are many statues that can help us with teachable moments. Let’s use them, not abuse them.

  4. What an interesting story about Colonel Heg. And what a sad thing to have his memory be tarnished in this way. Clearly those who trashed his statue had no idea who he was, other than a white man in a uniform. Your story highlights the need for not just better history taught in schools, but better local history taught in local communities. Maybe you can find a way to do that because you have such a gift for storytelling, which is so sorely needed. This is, as we teachers would always remind ourselves when disheartened, “a teachable moment.”

    • That is pretty much what my blog is about, Trish, and I plan to follow up with a fuller examination of Col. Heg and the importance of his story next Tuesday.

      • Wonderful! If school ever opens again, maybe see if you can partner with someone so that students would be exposed? Im not sure how that would work and now with coronavirus it is even more complicated, but reaching the next generation is so so important. Just a thought.

  5. As I get older, though age paradoxically seems to confer a greater level of patience, I get more and more eager to “debrief” myself of historical knowledge, while I still can.

  6. Pingback: Heg’s Message for 2020 – Reflections

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