Confederate Statues

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 18^th 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