I’m a Yankee by birth and abolitionist by heritage, and my
Polish ancestors were fighting Russians and Germans (Austro-Hungarians) during
our U.S. civil war in 1861-65. So I don’t
have an ancestral dog in the fight of tearing down confederate statues
throughout the land. As an American who
loves my country, I do have some thoughts.
Firstly, the civil war was not fought only about slavery. There were myriad other reasons - state’s
rights, industrial vs agrarian economies, tariffs and taxes, religious and
abolitionist pressures on the South, demise of the Whig party, election of Lincoln
– and yes, the expansion of slavery into new western territories recently won
from Mexico that were not cotton producing.
Some of these issues were festering from before our revolution and
resulted in substantial compromises in the very foundation of our republic.
Upwards of 700,000 men died in our civil war, some 300,000
from the confederacy, all led by honorable leaders and officers who believed in
their respective causes. Many on both
sides were descended from those who were slave owners at the time of the
revolution, and who had a big hand in founding our country. Slavery was a corrosive thread in our young
country, and should have been expunged at our formation. However reality was such in the late 18th
century, that the country would never have been formed without compromises on
slavery and on some of the other issues that eventually resulted in our civil
war.
When men die in war, statues and monuments are erected to
commemorate the bravery of those who conducted themselves with honor. We did not fight back invading hordes such
that we could erect memorials only to the victors. We fought amongst ourselves. There literally were no winners. The monuments that were erected commemorate
the bravery of the men that died for their causes. The South’s cause was wrong and they
lost. We, in modern, secular,
politically correct times are now endeavoring to say that the people that
fought bravely for their cause, wrong as it may be, should now be erased from
our memories. And we say this from some
distorted view of social justice fueled by identity politics. This, to me, is exactly the kind of twisted
elitist thinking that caused the backlash in our country that got Trump
elected.
For shame, to say that a statue of Robert E. Lee, an
American hero who fought for his Virginia, and most probably otherwise would
have been one of our presidents, that his statue somehow elicits some sort of
approval of slavery. Similar for other
heroes of the South. One can’t deny that
slavery was an issue in the civil war, but much of the South fought for their
homelands and their way of life, wrong as that way of life was if it included
owning slaves.
The civil war and all of its ramifications are part of our
history, just as the holocaust is part of Europe's history. We should not deny our progeny a
full and honest view of that history, rather than some revisionist version of
history that we manufacture strictly to make ourselves feel better about the
parts we don’t like.
The Charlottesville riots, this weekend, primarily by a
white supremacist mob has inflamed the country, particularly since one of the goals
of the alt-right protesters was about preserving a confederate statue. Let’s not this kind of mob mentality pervade
our thinking about indiscriminately revising our history. Next we’ll be tearing down statues of Washington
and Jefferson, and taking Jackson (an egregious white supremacist) off of our
twenty dollar bill.
These articles add more eloquence than I can to this topic -
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453338/john-kelly-civil-war-comments-confederate-honor
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450749/confederate-statues-removed-while-racist-progressive-statues-remain
These articles add more eloquence than I can to this topic -
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453338/john-kelly-civil-war-comments-confederate-honor
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/450749/confederate-statues-removed-while-racist-progressive-statues-remain
