By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, August 15, 2017
Robert E. Lee wasn’t a Nazi, and surely would have had no
sympathy for the white-supremacist goons who made his statue a rallying point
in Charlottesville, Va., last weekend.
That doesn’t change the fact that his statue is now
associated with a campaign of racist violence against the picturesque town
where Thomas Jefferson founded the University of Virginia. The statue of Lee
was already slated for removal by the city, but the Battle of Charlottesville
should be an inflection point in the broader debate over Confederate statuary.
The monuments should go. Some of them simply should be
trashed; others transmitted to museums, battlefields, and cemeteries. The
heroism and losses of Confederate soldiers should be commemorated, but not in
everyday public spaces where the monuments are flashpoints in poisonous racial
contention, with white nationalists often mustering in their defense.
Some discrimination is in order. There’s no reason to
honor Jefferson Davis, the blessedly incompetent president of the Confederacy.
New Orleans just sent a statue of him to storage — good riddance. Amazingly
enough, Baltimore has a statue of Chief Justice Roger Taney, the author of the
monstrous Dred Scott decision, which
helped precipitate the war. A city commission has, rightly, recommended its
destruction.
Robert E. Lee, on the other hand, is a more complicated
case. He was no great friend of slavery. He wrote in a letter to his wife “that
slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country” (he
added, shamefully, that it was good for blacks — “the painful discipline they
are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race”). After the war,
he accepted defeat and did his part to promote national healing.
Yet, faced with a momentous choice at the start of the
war, he decided he was a Virginia patriot rather than an American nationalist.
He told one of President Abraham Lincoln’s advisers: “I look upon secession as
anarchy. If I owned the four million slaves in the South I would sacrifice them
all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”
He betrayed the U.S. government and fought on the side devoted to preserving
chattel slavery.
That is a grievous political sin, although he obviously
wasn’t the only one guilty of it. The Civil War was an American conflict, with
Americans on both sides. An honorable soldier, Lee is an apt symbol for the
Confederate rank and file whose sacrifices in the war’s charnel house shouldn’t
be flushed down the memory hole.
The Baltimore commission has called for moving a striking
dual statue of Lee and Stonewall Jackson to the Chancellorsville, Va.,
battlefield where the two last met before Jackson’s death. This would be
appropriate, and would take a page from the Gettysburg battlefield. A statue of
Lee commemorates Virginia’s losses and overlooks the field where General George
Pickett undertook his doomed charge. If you can’t honor Robert E. Lee there,
you can’t honor him anywhere.
For some of the Left, that’s the right answer, but this
unsparing attitude rejects the generosity of spirit of the two great heroes of
the war, Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant. Notably, Grant vehemently
opposed trying Lee for treason.
For supporters of the Confederate monuments, removing
them from parks and avenues will be a blow against their heritage and
historical memory. But the statues have often been part of an effort to
whitewash the Confederacy. And it’s one thing for a statue to be merely a
resting place for pigeons; it’s another for it to be a fighting cause for
neo-Nazis.
Lee himself opposed building Confederate monuments in the
immediate aftermath of the war. “I think it wiser,” he said, “not to keep open
the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavoured
to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings
it engendered.” After Charlottesville, it’s time to revisit his advice.
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