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Meet Annie Hanna Darracott, founder of the Lakeland chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). That’s her above, standing with a bunch of little girls in front of the Confederate monument in Munn Park some time after its 1910 dedication.
You can read all about her on the helpful website of Lakeland’s Annie H. Darracott UDC chapter.
Here how the UDC describes Annie in its own words:
April 1861 marked the beginning of the War Between the States. One month later, Annie Hanna was born to John and Athalinda Hanna. John enlisted in the Confederate States Army in November 1861 and served as Private in Co. B, 4th Alabama Infantry.
He was present at many battles in Virginia and served as litter-bearer. Athalinda sewed coats for Confederate soldiers and served as Chief Nurse at the hospital in Madison, Georgia.
John and Athalinda are buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Jasper, Florida.
Annie married Thomas Jefferson Darracott and the family moved to Lakeland, Polk Co., Florida in 1895. Annie became a civic and patriotic leader going on to become the founder of the Lakeland Chapter of United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1904, National Society Daughters of the American Revolution and The National Society Colonial Dames XVII Century. She proposed and spearheaded the effort to erect a Confederate monument in Lakelandʼs Munn Park in 1910 where a figure of a gallant Confederate Soldier now stands as a memorial to all who served the Confederacy.
What’s missing there? Here’s a hint. It’s the same thing missing on the Munn Park monument itself. Let’s look at that language:
In memory of that noble band, who have crossed the mystic stream, and are resting in that happy land, where peace and pleasure reign supreme. The heroic deeds will never fade, from memory’s brightest page, and their brave defense of country and home, is left as a glorious heritage.
This monument was directed by the Lakeland chapter, United Daughters of the Confederacy in memory of the noble sons of the South. A D 1910
There is no specific reference to any specific soldier or group of soldiers from anywhere — much less Lakeland or Polk County. No names. That, of course, makes sense. Lakeland didn’t exist during the Civil War. To my knowledge, no significant battles or even minor skirmishes were fought here and certainly not in Munn Park. The stone sentry honors the “noble sons of the South,” not the “noble sons of Lakeland.”
This history of the monument was missing from yesterday’s City Commission meeting discussion of it. And that’s a shame. Barry Friedman’s “Lakeland Now” gave an excellent account if you want to read it.
In any event, this is a monument to generalized Confederate patriotism and nationalism, erected at the heart of an American town. It says so, right there in the stone. That’s why they carved “CSA” into the top of it. It’s a monument to a “glorious heritage” of systemic violence, labor theft, and chronic rape. What was the core of the wealth that built that “glorious heritage” that Annie Darracott never saw? What was the “cornerstone” of the CSA?
Now, in fairness, I feel certain that Annie Darracott was not thinking about systemic violence, labor theft, and chronic rape when she conceived this monument. Loving the Confederate myth didn’t make her a bad person. It made her typical.
But this particular monument does not exist today because of the valor of some Lakelander who fought to preserve the institution of slavery and all that was required to sustain it. It exists because Annie Darracott wrongly imagined that valor as both beautiful and completely detached from the ugliness of the cause; and she happened to move here. This monument exists because she loved her daddy and his whitewashed stories of the Confederacy. She made her fantasies about both into a vanity project. And she was not alone.
I devoted an entire 25-30 page chapter in my book Age of Barbarity: The Forgotten Fight for the Soul of Florida to the psychology of the Daughters of the Confederacy and their monuments. Here’s a tiny excerpt about the Putnam County monument, the women who built it in 1924, and the power of Confederate myth to crush expressions of Americanism:
Today, the life-sized bronze Johnny Reb statue, built atop a stone pedestal, towers over the center of the courthouse grounds. It completely overshadows the memorials to the dead of other more recent wars. A poem carved into its stone honors “the heroism, fortitude, and glory of the men who wore the gray in the sixties” and “their love of country, devotion to principle, and fidelity to the cause they believed was right.”
Back in the late 90s, as a rookie reporter for the Palatka Daily News, I sat in my little newspaper cubicle thinking up stories with which to meet my daily quota. At one point, I debated with myself whether to make a stink over the monument and its implications.
I decided not to. After all, the Confederate monument was there first. Of course the people of the day would want to honor their dead in a powerful way. Why try to revise history? Why dredge up old animosities?
Had I bothered to actually look closely at the monument, or research it even a touch, I might have learned how distorted my own narrative was. I might have pointed out to the public that Putnam’s monument rose six decades after the fall of the Confederacy and three years after the much smaller and less prominent Great War monument. I might have learned that my aunt Susie Lee Walton likely wrote the poem carved into the granite.Today, the Confederate monument so completely dominates all other courthouse monuments — and so commands the attention of any visitor — that it’s difficult to conceive that it came after the World War I plaque. And it wasn’t just the black men on the [WWI] bronze whose stories were swallowed by the Lost Cause. More than half the names on the Great War memorial belong to white men. The dashing Confederate figure towers over them, too. Examine Palatka’s World War I plaque today, and you won’t even find the date of its dedication. I had to look it up in old newspapers.
What does it mean that shortly after the Great War, the Palatkans of the day…raised a monument to a conflict and a society few of them remembered? Why would they give it a position of honor and dominance in front of the courthouse that enforced the laws of the very country the honored dead fought, killed, and died to abandon? Why do so at a time when Confederate-inspired lawlessness ran rampant throughout North Florida?
After a lot of research and thought, I answered like this:
Palatka’s UDC and Masons laid the monument cornerstone on April 26, 1924, Confederate Memorial Day. Judge A.V. Long, the judge who presided over the trial of the mob who attacked the Putnam jail in 1923, served as master of ceremonies, just as he had for the World War I monument in 1921.
Long brought with him a “ancient battle flag of the 47th Georgia Infantry Regiment, shot through with 32 bullet holes, a tattered emblem, bullet-scarred, wind-frayed and sun-faded,” as the Daily News put it. The banner caused a sensation, with elderly veterans clamoring to touch it.
“One grizzled old Veteran of the sixties saw, for the first time in sixty years, the shrapnel-torn banner under which he fought for four long, bloody years. Many wept with him when he fell upon his knees and kissed the flag he had followed across the Sanguinary fields of Missionary Ridge, Lookout Mountain and around Resaca.”
The men and women weeping in solidarity on that day lived in a fractiously inclusive incarnation of America — inglorious, confusing, capriciously violent, and industrial. Why wouldn’t they mourn and worship a dead alternative, one that had the unifying advantage of never having existed? Why wouldn’t they love their monument to a nobler, but false, narrative?
Understand, when you’re looking at the Munn Park monument, you’re looking at something much, much deeper and more political than simple mourning of battle valor. If that were its purpose, Annie Darracott would have also honored the Union veterans, black and white, who fought to save the United States of America. If the UDC was simply a “patriotic” organization, it would have added Union soldiers, black and white, long ago. It never bothered to.
Don’t believe me. Believe Annie Darracott’s heirs in the UDC chapter that still bears her name today. They tend to the monument and claim it as their own.
You know what else they do?
The United Daughters of the Confederacy “sponsor the Jefferson Davis Historical Gold Medal, which is awarded to individuals for excellence in historical work, essays, publications and research. Each year state and national contests are held in the area of essays, poetry, historical writing and outstanding chapter historical programs.”
They reward “excellence” — their word — in thought, history, and writing with the name of the political leader of the Confederacy, a long dead political enemy of the United States. Why would they do that?
Again, this monument doesn’t honor sacrifice. It honors a way of life its builders wished they had seen. It was noose-draped nostalgia even 105 years ago. Today, it’s just rude, and not just to black Americans.
When Annie Darracott and her friends jammed that pillar into the ground, they were shouting Confederate Lives Matter.
Unlike the activists of today, they did so from a position of cultural, political, and racial power. The murderers and terrorists of Reconstruction, who were in many cases their daddies, had already established that. Thus these monuments both asserted power and indulged victimhood. At the same time.
That’s a powerful and dangerous cultural mix. It’s what drove The Birth of a Nation and the national fascist movement known as the revival Ku Klux Klan after World War I. That mix of dominance and victim-playing keeps Annie Darracott’s monument to her fantasies — to herself — at the heart of our city’s heart. It why we still choose to tell the world that fantasies of Confederate life mattered more to us then and still matter more now than anything our city does today. That’s the number one reason to move it. There are many others.
Some people out there argue against moving it because of history, or maybe just because it irritates them that people ask to move it. Those are both terrible reasons.
There are only two moderately good reasons not to move Annie’s monument: 1) maybe it’s cost prohibitive 2) maybe it’ll be a big unpleasant thing with people screaming at each other — so maybe inertia is better.
I can understand the appeal of hiding behind these instincts and opting not to face truth. But you need to weigh that against this.
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We continue show the world Annie Darracott’s version of Lakeland. I think ours is better. It’s time to move her dreams somewhere else and create new ones.