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Asheville: |
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The Pack Square obelisk reaches for much more than the sky
From a feature in Mountain Xpress News by Steve Rasmussen
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Zebulon B. Vance spoke movingly and influentially against what he called the wickedness and the folly of intolerance.
Rising skyward from the busy downtown crossroads of Asheville is an elegant spire of rough-hewn granite: the Vance monument. It is more than just a shrine to a Civil War-era governor. Ever since the winter solstice day in 1897 when its cornerstone was laid—in a public Masonic ritual—to honor the Confederate Christian who stood up for the Jews, the monument has symbolized that most controversial of First Amendment rights: freedom of religion.
For more than a century—even in the dark days of Ku Klux Klan ascendancy—the Asheville chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy has conducted a joint ceremony with the local chapter of B’nai B’rith each year at the foot of the Vance monument. What brings together such constituencies as a Southern-heritage organization and a Jewish-advocacy group is the birthday of a Buncombe County native who probably did more than any other American statesman to prevent prejudice from closing the nation’s doors of immigration to a persecuted people.
Zebulon Vance might seem an unlikely champion of religious tolerance. Like so many other offspring of these mountains, however, the independent-minded Vance could not be confined to a narrow stereotype.
Vance’s toughest fight as his state’s wartime governor was not against the depredations of northern raiders but the draconian wartime dictates of his own government. When the Confederate congress authorized President Jefferson Davis to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and indefinitely imprison southern citizens suspected of “disloyalty” without trial, Vance declared that if North Carolinians were deprived of this constitutional right, he would issue a proclamation recalling the North Carolina soldiers from Virginia and call out the state’s militia to protect the liberties of its citizens. (Vance alone took this stand—and he won.)
The humanitarian governor also worked hard to improve harsh conditions in which enemy prisoners of war were being held, and when it became clear to everyone except southern leaders that the war could not be won, Vance pressed for peace with the north.
But it wasn’t until the end of the war when a Jewish hatmaker rescued the captured Confederate governor from what was the most degrading moment of his life, that a profound respect for the Jews took root in Vance’s heart.
Union cavalry tried to force the disabled Vance to walk or ride a horse, in full public view, 35 miles from Statesville to Salisbury and then by train to prison in Washington. Sam Wittkowsky, a Polish immigrant who admired Vance, intervened and persuaded the officer to let him drive the governor in his carriage.
The two became lifelong friends. Vance spent ten years with Wittkowsky in Charlotte practicing law until the political climate in Washington cleared.
Vance got to know and respect other members of that city’s prospering community of recent escapees from old world ghettos and pogroms. He founded Excelsior 261 lodge in which half the early members were Jewish and his friend Sam its first master.
Then he wrote The Scattered Nation, a speech he gave hundreds of times to sold-out crowds in lyceums and lecture halls all across America, including his 20 years as a US senator. The talk makes a powerful case against what it calls “the wickedness and the folly of intolerance.”
Vance compared the Jewish people to the Gulf Stream—a river of people moving through a sea of nations yet never mingling with it. He traced such modern ideals as representative democracy and property rights to the ancient Hebrew tribal confederation, praising the freedom from crime, intelligence and strong family values he had personally seen among their modern descendants.
Vance reminded his listeners that Jews were the source of his audiences’ Christian faith. “All Christian churches are but offshoots from or grafts upon the old Jewish stock. Strike out all of Judaism from the Christian church and there remains nothing by an unmeaning superstition.”
And just as the rising sun—which Vance said he’d seen from “the summit of the very monarch of our great southern Alleghenies—disperses the night fogs that fill the mountain valleys, so may the real spirit of Christ yet be so triumphantly infused amongst those who profess to obey his teachings, that with one voice and one hand they will stay the persecutions and hush the sorrows of these, their wondrous kinsmen.”
Two years after Vance’s death in 1894, George W. Pack donated $2,000 to help pay for a monument to Vance. By 1898 it was complete.
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Produced by the public relations committee of the Grand Lodge AF&AM of Masons in North Carolina,
2921 Glenwood Avenue, Raleigh, NC 27628 MMVIII
Author/editor: Walter J. Klein wklein(at)carolina.rr.com
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