Crowd Cheers as Confederate Statues are Removed
The statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia that was the focal point of a "Unite the Right" rally four years ago was removed from its location on July 10, following several months of court battles over whether the city had the authority to remove them, in spite of the fact that its residents had voted to take them down.
During the white supremacist rally four years ago, a large crowd of counter-protesters also gathered. One of the white supremacists drove a car into their protest, resulting in the death of 32 year old Heather Heyer. Her death prompted calls to drape the Lee statue in black, and added to the pressure to remove the monuments altogether. They have been placed in a secured storage area as the city decides what to do with them permanently.
A large crowd gathered, applauding and cheering as the monuments were removed, expressing the sentiments of those in the city who have been pushing for this moment for a long time, long before the recent rise in white supremacist activity began about the time Trump was elected President. The sentiments expressed by a clear majority of Charlottesville's citizens about the removal of the statute of Robert E. Lee, along with one of Stonewall Jackson was that "it's about time."
Yes, It's History, But...
Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, along with all of the other Confederate military and political leaders, fought against the United States, its constitution and the idealism that was expressed by it, even though its society had not come to full acceptance of the principle that "all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights." As far as the law itself was concerned , they were committing treason. And above all of that, in spite of the fact that they hid behind the banner of "states rights", the fact of the matter is that they were fighting in order to keep a group of people in bondage because of their race.
The Confederate constitution codified white supremacy as its key, foundational principle. Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, delivered the "Cornerstone Speech" in Savannah on March 21, 1861, declaring, about the Confederacy as a nation that, "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery--subordination to the superior race--is his natural condition. This, our new government, is the first in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth." Stephens used the Biblical imagery of Psalm 188:22 which says, "The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone," taking the verse out of context and applying it to the belief that enslaving African Americans was the "substratum of our society."
This "foundational principle" was written into the Confederate constitution. The army that was put together, made up of officers who, for the most part got their training at West Point or in the American military, including Lee and Jackson, and who had sworn an oath of allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, along with most of the politicians like Stephens and Jefferson Davis, the Confederate President, who made up the Confederate government, and had taken the same oath, abandoned it and the principles for which it stood. Then they took up arms in rebellion against it, committing treason in the process, and fought to dismantle the very principles to which they had once committed their lives and fortunes.
It was a dishonorable cause, intended to perpetuate a society that was exactly opposite of the idealism of America's founding fathers. Not only was there a social order which enslaved people because of their race, but it also created social classes among its citizens based on their wealth and their family background. It perpetuated the European social order that their ancestors had come to America to escape and was bent on the destruction of the work of several generations of American settlers and pioneers.
So yes, it's history. And it should be told, accurately and factually. Putting up statues which memorialize the very leaders whose goal was the dissolution of the American Republic, and who seceded from the authority and recognition of constitutional law is a misrepresentation of the truth. It glorifies what was wrong and leaves a distorted and inaccurate impression of who those men were and the values for which they fought.
But Didn't the Founding Fathers Own Slaves?
Slavery was a cultural institution entrenched in the society of the American colonies. Many of our founding fathers, who wrote the documents with statements about the equality of humanity and the idealism surrounding the formation of the American democratic republic owned slaves. There were varying practices involved in how they were treated, though the fact that human beings were denied their freedom was a basic evil that couldn't be justified by any standard under any circumstances.
But American idealism, which included healthy doses of Christian revivalism and European Enlightenment among other influences, slowly chipped away at the foundations of slavery, enough to move the nation from a position of fencing it in and preventing its spread to a willingness to defend abolishing it, even from those places to which it had been relegated. The fact that some of the founding fathers, including the men who declared their belief that "all men are created equal" and wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, were still held captive by the moral limits of the culture in which they lived doesn't change the ideal.
Abraham Lincoln was not initially an abolitionist, but as a politician favored preventing the spread of slavery to new states being created out of territories. He struggled, as did many Americans, including many abolitionists, with the idea of black equality and an integrated society where free blacks lived and worked alongside whites. But in the years leading up to the Civil War, Lincoln observed the aggressive manner used by those in government who were advocates for the expansion of slavery. He saw the weak, conciliatory lack of conviction, action and total lack of leadership from two of the worst Presidents ever to serve, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan, and grew concerned that their lack of leadership was leading to the nation's fracturing.
Visionary leaders look beyond the limitations of their own society and culture, and past their own biases and prejudices to discern what is best for the country in the long run. Lincoln correctly discerned that preservation of the Union was of vital importance, and that in the event of a Civil War, the United States needed a leader who would not give in, compromise and settle for a negotiated peace that permitted the South to keep its slaves. Preserving the Union would come at a high cost, and would require the dissolution of institutional slavery. His ability to have that vision, and to inspire and encourage Congress and the American military leadership to see the ultimate goal made him one of the greatest Presidents in American history.
Robert E. Lee, along with Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens and Stonewall Jackson, among others who created and fought for the Confederacy, on the other hand were unable to see beyond the limits of the society in which they lived. They had no vision or concept of what it meant to be an American, caught up as they were in the provincial backwardness of the South and of their own personal interests. They were not great men deserving of statues, monuments and the memorialization of their names, they were failures bent on destroying America. What they deserved was not a statue on a courthouse square, but a prison cell in which to contemplate their failure.
Those Who Don't Know History Are Destined to Repeat It
The justifications given by those who insist on leaving the Confederate statues and memorials in place betray a lack of understanding of the issues and events of the time. Where is there any moral justification whatsoever in denying the basic human rights and freedom of people, based on the color of their skin, in order to facilitate personal economic prosperity, so that one family lives a privileged life at the expense of others? Slavery, by any standard that our culture in this country measures morality, is evil.
The Confederate Vice-President, Alexander Stephens, was right when he said that the Confederacy was the first nation in the history of the world that was built on the belief that race makes some human beings inferior to others, and that inferiority justifies their subjugation. It was a country created when eleven state legislatures seceded from a federal government that was increasingly interpreting its Constitution in a way that threatened institutional slavery and it withdrew from a culture that was making progress toward the guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Confederacy stepped back and away from the progress being made toward American idealism, retreating into the old world philosophy that people had been coming to America for over two centuries to escape.
Robert E. Lee had the opportunity to exercise the same kind of leadership as Abraham Lincoln did. He was already a distinguished officer in the United States Army which included his service in the Mexican-American War and as commander of West Point, among other achievements. However, when Virginia seceded from the Union, he turned Lincoln down, saying he could not be expected to fight against his own people. He ceased being a loyal, patriotic American at that point.
In spite of the fact that he was married to Mary Anna Custis, the great-granddaughter of Martha Custis Washington and step-great granddaughter of George Washington, and he lived in the Custis family's Arlington plantation house that overlooked the Potomac River and the city of Washington, DC, Lee failed to see himself as an American, and as a defender of the Union and of American idealism, choosing instead to fight against the union and its values and ideals to defend slavery. And that failure makes him unworthy of the statues of him displayed in courthouse squares, or to have schools and colleges named after him, because those are honors reserved for genuinely great men. Robert E. Lee missed his chance at greatness.
What would the United States, and for that matter, the world, look like today had President Lincoln and Congress decided, in that first year of the war, that the fight was not worth the cost and had settled for a negotiated peace instead of committing to press forward? The Confederacy fought against freedom, imposed tyranny not only on black slaves but it perpetuated a whole system of social class that perpetuated poverty, creating a sub-class of poor whites who were also without individual freedom and in economic slavery.
What Charlottesville Represents
Named for Charlotte of Mecklenberg-Strelitz, the wife of British King George III and Queen of England and Ireland, Charlottesville is a mid-sized city of about 50,000 people, with a metropolitan population of about 150,000, in North Central Virginia, just east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Among its past residents are two Presidents, Thomas Jefferson whose plantation home Monticello, is just three miles outside the city, and James Monroe.
It has a history similar to that of most cities in Southern states, including being a place where slaves were brought to auction. It experienced the whole spectrum of the ugliness of the Confederacy and the Jim Crow period following Reconstruction. It has a large, vibrant African American population that has experienced a measure of discrimination in its time, including the razing of an entire African American neighborhood to make way for urban renewal in the 1960's.
But the African American population of the city, a high percentage of whom are members of some of the larger Christian churches in the city, combined with the presence of the University of Virginia and the students, faculty and staff who live in the community, and being a regional medical center for their part of the state means that Charlottesville and Albemarle County have a higher population of people with a higher level of education than most places in Virginia, and by extension, in the South. It is also far more diverse from a political perspective. As a result, Charlottesville is, in fact, not an unlikely place for decisive action in the movement aimed at removing Confederate monuments and memorials. It's a place where people know their history, know that the Confederate statues represent an attempt to re-write it, and are stepping up to set the record straight.
It is a place that has set an example for other municipal, county and state governments all over the South, to do the right thing when it comes to statues and monuments intended to honor those who fought to destroy the union and preserve the evil of institutional slavery.
Author's Note: No decision has been made regarding what will eventually be done with the statues that were removed. Virtually all of those statues were placed by local and state government officials who were trying to rewrite and change the history surrounding the American Civil War and the fight to abolish institutional slavery.
The only way to end the influence of the kind of racial prejudice that justified slavery was to convince those who believed in it that it had absolutely no future in the United States. Reconstruction, especially under Grant's presidency, aimed to do exactly that, but partisan politics and an election "bargain" in 1876, just eleven years after the end of the war, softened the penalties on former Confederates and opened the door for a complete distortion of history to occur.
Former Confederates who had served in either the army or the government, should have been permanently banned from being able to run for office or even hold American citizenship. State constitutions should have been re-written to include permanent laws forbidding the flying or displaying of the Confederate flag, commemorating its holidays or erecting statues, memorials and monuments to its leaders. History classes taught in schools in the 11 states that seceded should have accurately taught that the Confederacy was a country established by rejection of the American Constitution and Republic and all of its ideals, and attempted to sustain itself by rebelling against American patriotism.
The statues and monuments now being removed were put up during the post-Reconstruction period. Resentful of the fact that some four million freed African-American slaves had been given the property of their former owners, once the protections and restrictions of Reconstruction were lifted, local and state officials set about the task of re-writing and changing the history of the Confederate States of America, in order to improve its image and make it into something that it never was. That included imposing a system of immoral segregation, undoing most of what had been done on behalf of the freed slaves and turning traitors into heroes by memorializing them with statues in public squares and by naming schools, streets and public institutions after them.
The record needs to be set straight. In the words of the citizens of Charlottesville, Virginia, "It is long past time."
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