Of course, he meant and should have said, “For every white Southern boy.”
While I have no problem with communities deciding to rename things currently known as “The Robert E. Lee Mini-Mall” or “Bedford Forrest Bouncy Castle”, I stand foursquare against any attempt to change the name of the southern perennial shrub known as “Confederate Rose”.*
*while lots of Southerners think the name honors the Confederacy that went to war with the U.S., it actually refers to the plant’s southeast Asian origin (the Malay Confederacy).
Why stop with those with ties to slaveholding? How about other bad things? Kennedy was a philanderer and an adulterer; his father was a bootlegger, a man, likely, with plenty of blood on his hands, should we remove “Kennedy” from all buildings, schools, parks, etc.?
As someone pointed out earlier, you are indeed judging people with the morality of another time. It’s hard enough for people to be great in their own time, but for them to be great when measured against some future morality, that seems ridiculous. I think it’s safe to say that with everyone we celebrate from history, we don’t think, “Well, he really was an amazing A, and of course he was a pure and noble saw in every other aspect of his life and thinking, too.”
You’re right, of course, that nearly everyone would fall short when judged by modern sensibilities, but the confederates were particular assholes. Sundering the nation, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands, to enshrine slavery. That’s laughably evil. That’s like cartoony evil. Being a moderate shitheel by modern standards is expected, but the confederates were like the world’s biggest shitheels at the time they lived.
Or maybe he defended the south in spite of its slavery. I know it’s taken on a given on this board that the war was about slavery, but it wasn’t. It really was about states’ rights. Yes, for many people it might very well have been about slavery, but you give the example the person who led the battle, a person not a fan of slavery. In Georgia in I think it was the late 1820s, Georgia almost went to war against the federal government over not being allowed to move into the Indian lands to the west and mine the silver. It was anathema to them that the federal government would/could try to control the activities of Georgians.
I don’t want to derail the thread, but the fact that there was more to the cause of the war than slavery really needs to be taken into account. No that it will. ::shrug::
Bull-fucking-shit.
There was more to take account of. But the driving goal was to keep the free labor.
Slavery, particularly the chattel strain that was present in the US was 100% vile. But it was possible because slavery was a fact of life in the world leading up to America. For hundreds, thousands of years, slavery was a present. The East African slave trade was in full swing hundreds and hundreds of years before Columbus ever set sail. I bring this up not to excuse the slaveholding in the American South, but to understand it. How could people treat other humans so monstrously? I just don’t think we’re equipped to understand it, given the fortunately reality that slavery seems SO “Huh, you must be kidding” to us.
Says you. I even made a note. 
I don’t think so. Slavery really was on its way out anyway, due to economics. And the only people who would benefit from free labor would be the slave owners. But most southerners did NOT own slaves. It was only the wealthy landowners who could afford to keep them.
And it was only the wealthy landowners who had a voice on politics.
As always it was a rich man’s war despite being a poor man’s fight.
Not necessarily. It was much more efficient and profitable than is now appreciated.
That’s funny. Too bad it isn’t true.
As are most wars that are not revolutions. But, then, the American Civil War was a revolution of a kind.
How not? Why can there not be such thing as Southern pride that does not celebrate slavery or the Confederacy? If there can’t, then of course Southern pride needs to go, and be buried deep underneath the ash-heap of history, but, still, why can’t there be?
Albeit an Unfinished Revolution.
Funny how “states’ rights” only comes up when a state wants to be allowed to do something unjust, like slavery or Indian removal or segregation or union-busting. No conservative ever seems to invoke that disreputable and disgraceful phrase in connection with Colorado legalizing pot.
Consider, after all and for instance, the history of the Confederate battle flag.
Oh, good, we’re doing this thread again. Yay.
Personally, I think this ship has sailed. The Great Internet Outragigensia has decided that any man who wore a Confederate officers coat was a vile, corrupt, hateful monster, fit only to be remembered as a salutary example of how degraded a man can be. Fair enough, I suppose; it’s only been about fifty years since, at least in the South, every Confederate general was a preux chevalier, sans peur et sans reproche. Both views are equally simplistic, equally inaccurate, and equally comforting for those holding them.
I assume the purge of memorials to Confederate officers will also include Maury Hall at the US Naval Academy as well as the USNS Maury, both named after Matthew Fontaine Maury, first superintendent of the US Naval Observatory, arguably the founder of modern oceanography, and one of the foremost scientists of 19th century America? He accepted a commission in the Confederate Navy, so clearly he was a monster, as well.
Don’t be so sure. The historian Charles Bracellen Flood said that even if we had lost all record of what Lee had done during the Civil War, he would go down as one of the great educators in American history.
The trustees of Washington College, in Lexington, Virginia, probably expected nothing more than a fund-raiser and figurehead when they offered Robert E. Lee the presidency of the college in August of 1865. But what they got was an educational revolutionary. Under his presidency, Washington College was the first college in the country to offer courses in photography and Spanish, and one of the first to offer courses in international law. He also created “press scholarships”, the genesis of what would become a journalism school. He did not live to see it come to fruition, but he proposed what would have been on of the nation’s first Schools of Business. The college offered courses in surveying and agriculture, a dramatic departure from the then-typical classical curriculum of most liberal-arts schools. He actively sought students from the North and West, part of his attempt to reconcile and rebuild Virginia within the United States; a motive recognized by the group of New York businessmen who held a fund-raising dinner for Washington College in 1869. Lee became so enamoured of education that he called pursuing a military career “the greatest mistake of my life”, and deliberately marched out of step with the schools cadets whenever they paraded. This from a man, remember, who had commanded one of the Army’s elite cavalry units, had been Superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy, and is one of the greatest military geniuses the United States has ever produced.
You’re right, though, that the various Lee High Schools and such were probably not named in honor of his educational achievements. Yet if Lee is worthy of any honor at all, a school is perhaps the most appropriate memorial. But of course pace Drum God, Lobohan, and Chronos, he was the Arch-Traitor, so obviously an irredeemable fiend.