Charlottesville: Erasing History?

Deadly violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia yesterday.  White nationalist demonstrators were protesting the possible removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, the Civil War general who led the Confederate forces.

Charlottesville is the site of the University of Virginia, the institution founded by Thomas Jefferson.  Mr. Jefferson famously said of slavery that "...this momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union. it is hushed indeed for the moment. but this is a reprieve only, not a final sentence."

Jefferson understood what must happen to the South's "peculiar institution" of forced labor of Africans brought to the Western Hemisphere in shackles under the ghastly conditions of slave ships.

Lee, on the other hand, was one of the men who went to war to preserve that institution.

The statue in Charlottesville is of Robert E. Lee mounted in military splendor upon his magnificent steed, Traveller.  Removal of the statue, according to those who support its being left in place, is an attempt to "erase history."

I know a little something about history - and the history of the South's "peculiar institution."  I have read biographies of all the early presidents who were slaveholders, notably including the four of our first five who were from Virginia.  I have also read extensively on the political history of the decades preceding the War Between the States.

Beyond the thousands of pages I have read on the Civil War itself, my personal library includes biographies of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson.

I can assure you, there is no "erasing history."

But there is something to think deeply about: if we do not want to forget Robert E. Lee, how exactly do we want to remember him?  And what sort of monument would facilitate that?

We are not about to forget that Lee led the Army of Northern Virginia against the Army of the Potomac, that he matched wits on strategy and tactics with Union generals and mostly out-generaled them.  Lee's admirers would say that ultimately his cause was lost because the North had more to work with in men and materiel, and in the final analysis it proved to be a war of attrition.

But the grand monument to Robert E. Lee in the saddle on Traveller suggests admiration for what he did on the field of battle, including exactly what it was he sought to accomplish: separation of the Confederate States of America from the United States of America, and the continuance of slavery.

And I believe that a monument to Lee's quest does not belong in Charlottesville, or anywhere else in these United States.

So let us not forget Lee.  If there is to be a monument, let it show Lee together with the Union general who brought Lee's quest to its proper end.  Such statuary is depicted at the beginning of this essay, showing Lee and Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.

In the spring of 2016 exit polling told us many voters in South Carolina thought Lincoln should not have issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and we would have been better off if the South had won the Civil War.  Monuments to Robert E. Lee serve to support such beliefs.  It may very well be that the names of Confederate Generals attached to US military bases, such as Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Hood in Texas, do something similar.

So let us not erase history.  But let us make thoughtful decisions about having monuments to history that reflect today's values, not the shameful dehumanizing institutions of centuries past.