To those in favor of the Lee statue, what positive contribution did he have to history. In what way would the world be a worse place if he and never existed and all his efforts in the defense of slavery, in favor of the dissolution of the union and in the prolonging of the most bloody war in our nations history had been eliminated?
I am by no means an expert on Robert E. Lee, but I do recall reading some of his words from the time when he was being suggested as commander of the Union forces. It seems that his loyalties were mostly concentrated on the state of Virginia. It was apparent to him that any war between the North and South would inevitably focus on Virginia, and if he were to command the Northern forces, he would be obligated to lead troops to Virginia’s destruction.
Which is to say, his loyalties were more regional than national, a notion aligned with the commonplace view that the USA was a collection of sovereign states entitled to dissolve their national ties as they chose. From that view, the Union assertion of ultimate sovereignty was false and worthy of resistance, regardless of the cause.
At the time of the confiscation, Lee was in violation of the law - and his home was arguably used to commit the crime. Civil forfeiture is about the stupidest law we have (well, that might be an exaggeration), but it is legal and many people have discovered that they have little recourse.
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It was apparent to him that any war between the North and South would inevitably focus on Virginia, and if he were to command the Northern forces, he would be obligated to lead troops to Virginia’s destruction.
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Whether tactically or strategically, Union forces never aimed for the complete destruction of a state. That’s hyperbole to the extreme. The initial political and military goal was the defeat of any hostile insurrectionary force and the restoration of loyal State and local governments.
As an officer of the United States Army, Lee swore allegiance and service to the United States of America. Full stop. Not Virginia and the U.S., with a caveat if there was ever any possible conflict between the two. Given his service first in the Mexican-American war with future General-in-Chief of the Army General Winfield Scott, a fellow Virginian who remained loyal in the Civil War, then as commandant of West Point, and later during various conflicts with Native Americans in Texas, Lee knew he was serving a nation-state and not merely a state.
If he felt that he could not participate in military action against his rebellious state government in a secession that he himself opposed, he was entitled to resign his commission and take no part. But taking up arms against his national government and fellow officers and soldiers was not an exercise of conscience but an abandonment and betrayal of his sworn allegiance and duty to his fellow soldiers.
Moving from Elections to Great Debates.
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This is the problem with all of a sudden such a big deal about Confederate statues (it was always there but ramped up alot just lately) while scoffing at the idea Washington would ever be targeted. The Founders from the slave states mainly owned slaves. Not all the Founders from (later in the pre ACW period at least) non-slave states were free of direct connection to slavery and all, obviously, were tolerant enough of it to form a union including the slavers. If you heavily emphasize ‘slave owner’, let alone ‘racist’ in saying Lee monuments have to come down, you’re a long way toward arbitrary if not contradictory in saying Washington and Jefferson should stay up.*
And ‘traitor’ is a matter of perspective. If Washington had entirely failed he’d absolutely have been a ‘traitor’. No legalisms about ‘subject’ v ‘citizen’ are really relevant to that. From ‘our’ POV Washington isn’t a ‘traitor’. But a lot of the left leaning view of things is generally rejecting past concepts of ‘us’ and ‘our’ so again can easily become arbitrary to imagine ‘us’ all holding hands to honor Washington when so many other things ‘we’ identified with are now identified as evil phobia/isms, sometimes at quite short notice.
Personally I’ve always been a Damned Yankee, have never revered the Confederacy one bit, and haven’t and wouldn’t vote for monuments to any of their personages where I live. I don’t have a problem with them in a military history context**. I don’t have a problem either way if other localities had these monuments but now by local popular will want to move them or junk them, or keep them.
I just smell BS in it being such a national cause celebre instantaneously now (and no there isn’t some huge wave of Nazi/KKK now to justify it), and the claim of the ‘reasonable’ people so worked up to tear them down that it isn’t or won’t turn into a kind of Red Guard/ISIS type iconoclastic hysteria. I think it already has.
*then there’s Columbus, on Bill DeBlasio’s apparent hit list in NY (technically ‘up to an independent commission’ but one seriously considering designating statues of Columbus ‘symbols of hate’).
** at battlefield memorials, or in the context of their military excellence. The latter might be debated for Lee but not as much for Jackson and their armies anyway were in general among the better led and tougher American armies in history.
Personally I’m all for the idea that England should take down all their statues of George Washington that were put up by a terrorist group in order to terrorize people. I think they should get on that right now.
I’m a life-long Texan, and my perspective is these folks are guilty of treason, and has been since I knew enough to say anything on the subject. I honestly don’t know how that can’t be dead in the center of the perspective of a US citizen when viewing the statues dedicated to these fools. Even if they weren’t all gung-ho for being able to own other people, the best you can say for them is that they were duped into killing and dying for it. Get the statues for them off public land. If you can’t find anyone to take them and give them a private home, melt them down and make monuments to the loyal Southerners who died resisting The Confederacy. Heck, just make it into a bigger base for the monument dedicated to victims of the Nueces Massacre if you’re feeling lazy.
Ehhh, I don’t think anyone’s going to forget the civil war if we melt down a few statues. If anything is shown by these statues finally coming down is that they had been up so long that some fools had forgotten which side lost.
Maybe my childhood was weird, but we had these things called history books in which we recorded history, it was much easier to fit in to a backpack than a statue. These people who are worried about losing history, do they know who bin Laden is? Have you noticed how we know who he is without a statue?
Even the best made statue is a product of man, and bound by those constraints. You might call it the limitations of statue. Well, you might…
The reaction of a lot of white Americans to the proposal that we take down the statues and confederate symbols reminds me a lot of how people reacted in Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. I lived in Moscow in the mid 90s and a lot of older Russians were really having a hard time getting their head around what was happening, statues came down and holidays changed. Some people just flat out refused to re-evaluate what they’d been told was true. They bought in to a narrative when they were kids and that was it as far as they were concerned.