Confederate Symbolism; Time to Stop Nursing Grievances and Relitigating Past

[Gyrate]

@madmonk28

JBGUSA, if you are opposed to nursing grievances, I would assume you are for removing the statues. They are, after all, monuments to an army that marched to defend slavery and that was defeated 152 years ago. The issue is settled and dotting the landscape with monuments to honor them is clearly keeping the wounds from healing. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the statues are present in the parts of the community where racism has been most cruelly institutionalized over the years. So in the interest of not further nursing grievances, they must come down.

Robert E Lee was himself not a fan of Civil War memorials (of any kind, including and especially battlefields) for exactly the reason that they keep the wounds from healing, and said the following regarding them:

@Lee

I think it wiser not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the example of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.

I cannot personally agree that a collective forgetting of history is a good thing (those who forget history yadda yadda yadda) but there is a good point about not trying to keep the feelings that led to such strife alive. We must forgive but not forget.

But on that note, the Snopes article on Lee’s viewsfinishes with a touching anecdote from a historian:

Lee knew that the war was over and that everything depended on a new attitude for a new day. He was taken to call on a lady who lived north of Lexington, and she promptly showed him the remains of a tree in her yard. All its limbs had been shot off by Federal artillery fire during Hunter’s raid, and its trunk torn by cannonballs. The woman looked at him expectantly as she showed him this memento of what she and her property had endured. Here was a man who would sympathize.

Lee finally spoke. “Cut it down, my dear Madam, and forget it.”

[madmonk28]

@Gyrate

Robert E Lee was himself not a fan of Civil War memorials (of any kind, including and especially battlefields) for exactly the reason that they keep the wounds from healing, and said the following regarding them: I cannot personally agree that a collective forgetting of history is a good thing (those who forget history yadda yadda yadda) but there is a good point about not trying to keep the feelings that led to such strife alive. We must forgive but not forget.

But on that note, the Snopes article on Lee’s viewsfinishes with a touching anecdote from a historian:

Of course, choosing not to memorialize racists who condoned the murder of POWs and the enslavement of blacks is not the same thing as forgetting history.

Grant saw Lee’s posturing after the war as empty and self serving, saying that Lee was “setting an example of forced acquiescence so grudging and pernicious in its effects as to be hardly realized.”

The Myth of the Kindly General Lee

[DrFidelius]

My town’s Confederate monument (an obelisk rather than a statue) accidentally broke while being removed. I choose to see the Hand of God in this.

While moving it in the middle of the night, crews break Confederate monument