Why Edinburgh has a Confederate soldier memorial

Deep in Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh, there's a grey obelisk, around 2m (6ft) high, its inscription faded.

It commemorates Colonel Robert A Smith, a Scot who was struck down in Kentucky during the US civil war.

As a Confederate soldier, he fought for the Southern pro-slavery states who wanted to break away from the Union.

The conflict prompted Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, freeing enslaved African-Americans.

Confederate monuments have been at the heart of heated debates in the US about how the war should be remembered.

This memorial was erected by Robert's brother.

Robert was one of nine children. He left Edinburgh and moved to Mississippi as a 14-year-old, travelling to join his brother James.

James Smith had arrived in the city of Jackson in the 1830s, building a successful stove business.

He made regular trips between the USA and Scotland.

On one of these journeys, in 1854, tragedy struck.

His steamboat – The Arctic – collided with a French vessel off Newfoundland in Canada. The ship sank and James spent three days at sea in a zinc-lined basket designed to carry dishes.

Eventually he was plucked from the sea by a passing ship whose captain happened to be a fellow Scot from Greenock, Inverclyde.

By the outbreak of the civil war, James had moved back to Scotland. So, unlike Robert, he didn't take up arms.

But he supported the Confederate cause from afar – even flying the new red and blue flag from his Glasgow home (that exact flag is currently held by Glasgow's Riverside Museum).

He gave financial support to the Southern states and arranged for weapons to be sent across the Atlantic.

A patent for selling American stoves in Britain had made James a very rich man. He employed hundreds of people at his foundry in Bonnybridge, near Falkirk.

And, after Robert's death at the Battle of Munfordville in 1862, some of that wealth was used to commemorate his younger brother.

The monument in Edinburgh was not the only one he financed. There was one in Jackson, Mississippi, and another on the battlefield where Robert died that is 6m (20ft) high, weighing 30 tonnes.

James's support for the Confederate cause continued long after the civil war.

He was described as an "ardent Southern sympathiser" and even hosted the former President of the Confederate States, Jefferson Davis, in Glasgow.

Lydia Melton is a descendant of the Smith brothers (their fourth great niece). She still lives in the south of the USA.

She believes many Confederate monuments were put up in the 1920s to "intimidate" people and to try and maintain racial divides.

But she defends the memorials to Robert Smith – including the one in Edinburgh - as "private monuments to grief" that don't express explicit support for the Confederate cause.

She considers the Edinburgh obelisk to be a tribute that James Smith commissioned so that the siblings who remained in Scotland could "remember their beloved little brother."

Lydia concedes that it's very difficult to fondly remember relatives who supported a cause that fought to maintain slavery.

She doesn't think these ancestors were personally slaveholders, and likes to believe that their support for the Confederacy was more to do with backing their friends and neighbours.

John Messner, a curator at the Riverside Museum in Glasgow, explains that James's sympathy for the Confederacy in the 1800s would not have been out of place in Scotland.

For some, support was simply motivated by cash.

Union naval forces blocked Confederate ports, so there was money to be made by any merchant who could get supplies to the south. They could also bring cotton back with them for the mills in the west of Scotland.

Many enterprising Scottish captains – known as blockade runners - made this journey. Some shipbuilders even built vessels for this specific purpose.

"There was a huge economic opportunity for people selling items to the Confederacy", Mr Messner says.

"It's a horrible thing to say but it was an opportunity to make quite a bit of financial benefit."

The Edinburgh monument to Robert Smith isn't particularly prominent or well known.

The city has a far more famous civil war memorial – a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Old Calton Burial Ground.

The Dean Cemetery obelisk has attracted a bit of controversy. Some visitors have vandalised it.

Others have left Confederate memorabilia at the site though debate has been far less intense here than in parts of the USA in recent years.

Robert Smith's Edinburgh memorial may be from the 1800s, and it may be separated from the USA by an ocean.

But it touches on a live debate about how we remember one of the most divisive periods in US history.