Should statues of Washington, Jefferson, and Grant be removed?

Great Debates
202

I’m not saying they weren’t the enemy during the war, but afterward quite a few were formally pardoned. Does that count for nothing? And now, 155 years later, are they STILL the enemy? I mean, many of them fought for what they thought was their homeland and way of life, wrong as it may have been. Just like lots of people fought for Germany and Russia during WWII, not for the Nazis or Communists.

It’s absurd to apply 21st century moral standards to people from the distant past. Are we going to quit teaching Aristotle or Aristophanes because of their attitudes toward slavery?

At any rate, my opinion is that if the statue is deliberately intended to commemorate Confederate service, then by all means take it down. But merely having served in the Confederate army doesn’t negate everything some people did afterward, especially if the reason they’re commemorated doesn’t have anything at all to do with their Confederate service.

203

Its like the joke:

They don’t call me Bob the Bridgebuilder, or Bob the Handyman, or even Bob the Lifesaver, even though I’ve done all those things all of my life.

Fuck one goat though…
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Yeah, you fought for the Confederates, you done fucked the goat.

204

And, I remember that statue to JFK that honored his mental abuse of women. I can’t believe they renamed the JFK Abuses Women building at Harvard!

205

Most of the Confederate statues are actually honoring the goat fucking!

206

I am black and really don’t care about the statues to be honest bro. That stuff sucked,but it was in the past. Honestly I feel this is just a way to look like they are doing something to help black people. I could not care less about this.

I find it hard to think any black person is that weak to be menaced by a statue of a long dead person.

Honestly I would rather we find a way to work on employment,business ownership,education and stable two parent homes.,

207

It’s not just that the statue is honoring a long dead person. Those statues were erected specifically to glorify those who fought to maintain slavery. Many of them also were put up in reaction to the Civil Rights movement, to glorify something by the state governments in one part of the country which is against what the Civil Rights activists were protesting for. That’s not a hundred plus years in the past. What else is not a century or more in the past is the current actions of certain government bodies in an area of the country to assure that Blacks do not benefit from what you just said you want worked on.

By the way, have you ever read How It Feels to Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston?

208

[donning asbestos undies]

And here is where I piss everybody the fuck off.

Look - throughout human recorded history and probably since we first said a word instead of ‘ook’ we had kept slaves. War slaves, random bought in the market slaves, WIVES who were sold to or gifted to men no matter what WE though of the deal. Black, brown, white, yellow. Why don’t we cut to the chase and make it illegal to have images of people displayed entirely just in case someone accidentally was doing something that offends someone else.

Look, I agree, slavery was and is bad, but for pretty much everything except the last few ticks of the world clock it was universal. We did it to them and they did it to us , and everybody over there was doing it to each other.

The rush to remove the Founding Fathers for doing something that was rendered illegal after they died is absolutely stupid, if we go by those guidelines, we need to remove pretty much all statues of men who married someone under the age of 18 who wasn’t in lurve with them, anybody who had any link to the war industries, any politician/governmental entity because somewhere sometime they did something someone doesn’t like and is triggered by [fucks sake, my abuser wore a nicely trimmed beard, I have issues coming out of anesthesia and seeing a man with brown shortish hair and a brown beard hovering over me, should I make all men be cleanshaven because I might trigger?]

209

Well, there seems to be multiple aspects to this and you are only addressing one. Certainly slavery was, if not the universal condition you are claiming at least pretty extensive throughout human history. We don’t know how much or even if it was a thing in the stone age societies you are implying with your ‘ook’, but certainly it was pretty common once people started to settle down into farming communities. I don’t think anyone denies that. People still revere the Roman empire, yet we know they extensively used slaves.

And if we are talking about just the founding fathers of the US, then I think most are in agreement that those statues shouldn’t be removed. But most in this thread are talking about why the Confederate statues are being removed, and why that is justified. It isn’t nearly so simple in this case. While I’m unsure that every Confederate statue should be destroyed, I think a good case can be made that every one of them should be taken down and moved somewhere else. Preserve the history…even the dark, grim history that they actually represent (i.e. they weren’t put up in memorial of the war for the most part, but for other, darker reasons) and ensure that this history is not only preserved but that a frank statement of WHY the statues were put up, clearly describing it so future posterity understands, is the best way to go. I think this should be done with all of US history, to be honest…instead of the white wash that we teach the kids, instead give a frank and open discussion of what our real history is. The good and the bad, warts and all.

210

This is true, but this is also one of those cases where a short summary hides the full historical reality.

One of the central arguments made by historians of slavery is that the slavery that emerged as part of the Atlantic slave trade was, in very important ways, qualitatively and quantitatively different from the slavery that went before. In the late Renaissance, at the start of the early modern period, slavery was almost non-existent among Western European countries, and yet the changing nature of European civil society, along with expansion into the western hemisphere, changed that very quickly. Not only did the Atlantic trade contribute to slavery on a scale never seen before, in terms of sheer numbers, but it turned slavery into a massive commercial and economic institution, and it essentially made slavery into a permanent, inherited, and racialized condition, in a way that had never really been the case in prior forms of slavery, such as those that existed in the Roman empire.

You can see these sorts of arguments in some of the most prominent scholars of slavery over the past half century, folks like Robin Blackburn, David Eltis, Edmund Morgan, Ira Berlin, etc.

211

I agree. There was a lot more to it than either the poster above me or that I went into. It’s a complex subject and probably deserved a thread of it’s own instead of, essentially, little more than a drive by summary I gave it. In the context of this thread, there is a pretty big difference between the statues and monuments put up to the founding fathers and those put up, especially those at the turn of the last century, to commemorate various Confederate figures or ideas/ideals. And pointing out that slavery was wide spread in the past doesn’t address this even peripherally. It’s a distraction.

212

I’m also confused why the OP added Grant. Grant did own a slave. But the rest of the story is that the save was a gift, he owned the man for less than a year, and the freed him without asking for any payment.

That combined with the thought that if Grant dies from the flu in 1860, you could argue that the North loses the war and slavery continues.

213

Because a statue of Grant was toppled in San Francisco.

214

Like the Roosevelt statue in NYC, here’s an example of a statue that tries to express a good thought but does so in a way that is completely out of step with modern sensibility.

215

Well that was a stupid thing to do.

216

I believe it was another thread years ago that discussed “cotton pickin’ hands”. The southern cotton plantations experienced an economic resurgence with the invention of the cotton gin. Meanwhile picking cotton was horrendous work, the cotton would prick the hands causing sores and extreme scarring/callouses. It was work in the blazing sun, but only for a month or two a year. Consequently, hired (European) workers were totally uninterested in this sort or seasonal labor. if slaves “did less labour” it was because they did very little work for much of the year. Presumably,many slave owners as a consequence economized their upkeep in other ways, such as food. Even excluding the lethal punishment they could inflict, slave owners usually did not make life better for their slaves.

OTOH, reading about Sally Hemmings - she spent a few years in Paris looking after Jefferson’s daughter, where slavery was illegal; she could have chosen to stay behind, but did not.While the power dynamic of a rich 50-something and a ditsy 16-something is bad enough even without the slavery aspect, this does not appear to descend to the level of the Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sugar” lyrics.

My attitude is that we need to balance the good and the bad a person did, and see what predominates.

Yes, Lincoln articulated the view that Negroes were inferior, and possibly wanted to go back to Africa. Does that diminish the massive effort he put into abolishing slavery, at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives of all colors? Does it diminish it to the point where history should forget him?

Yes, very many of the founders owned slaves. If one’s family was rich from agriculture, and of course the elite tended to be the rich, slavery was part of that. Presumably even the non-agricultural elite owned a slave butler or housekeeper rather than paying wages, we just don’t hear about those. Keep in mind that despite all this, the USA did move (slowly!!) to limit slavery. Jefferson was in fact president when the USA banned the importation of slaves. A major debate on the constitution (and alleged deal-breaker) was the argument over how slaves counted.

The other point needing to be mentioned - the current protests highlight the point that many of the “memorials” to the Confederate elite - statues, base and street names, etc. - are very recent, from the 40’s and 50’s, as an extended middle finger to the emerging civil rights movement, not a reaction at the time of the generation defeated.

217

I concur.

218

The came for Frederick Douglas now! Frederick Douglas!!

219

Looks like white supremacists are retaliating.

220

Assuming you meant “they”, not “the”, what is your opinion on the likelihood that this is the same “they” as those tearing down Confederate statues? I think it’s unlikely to be BLM protesters, for example. What’s your view?

221

My view is that THEY don’t know history. And any statues or monuments are fair game.