I said the supreme law of Virginia. That’s not the Virginia Constitution. If Virginians didn’t want to be bound by the Constitution of the United States, then they shouldn’t have ratified it.
Yup, Washington was a traitor, too, and he admitted as much. Treason isn’t always villainous, but it is always serious. Nobody commits treason over some cause unless they believe in that cause very, very strongly. Washington believed strongly in the cause of representative government, and was willing to commit treason over it. Lee believed strongly in the cause of slavery, and was willing to commit treason over it.
I grew up in the South, and never really questioned all the statues, memorials, etc. It was just part of what I grew up with. At the same time, I was taught in school the reasons for the Civil War, and I’ve always known it was good that the Union prevailed. To me, that was a no-brainer. To my parents and grandparents, they still harbored ill will toward the North.
I admit that I have mixed feelings on what to show in the public square, and what not to show. I think we can have good battlefield memorials & real history without making super-heroes out of the leaders of the Confederacy. Some of these men were truly reprehensible in every way, and others were a more mixed study in the human condition, and a product of their time.
Stone Mountain, GA, has a great Confederate carving on the side of the mountain. It’s in a state park that’s visited by millions each year, people of all ethnic groups and from all walks of life. And at night, they do a laser show off the side of the mountain, which IMO is tastefully done to show that after the war, the nation became one again. The show isn’t done to showcase hatred, but to showcase reconciliation. I hope they leave the carving on the mountain, and continue the show as a way to show that we’ve moved beyond the hate.
Robert E. Lee fought in the name of a racist slave state whose economy was based on human trafficking. It should not be glorified or honored with statues. I really don’t need any political mumbo jumbo designed to obscure the fact that, if he had put human decency above all else, he would not have been the commanding general of the Confederate Army. Like Nazi Germany, it needs to be remembered for the lessons that it teaches. It does NOT need to be romanticized or glorified or honored in any way.
As previously noted, Lee was (for the most part) a highly successful military leader, brave, revered by his troops, distinguished-looking and rode a magnificent horse (Traveler). He was perceived as being gracious in ultimate defeat; his directive to his army to accept the outcome of the war and go home (as opposed to fighting on as guerrillas) was well-received (possibly more by Northerners :dubious:). So it was natural for him to become a symbol for Southerners who (ironically) had difficulty accepting reintegration into the Union.
Not all of his fellow Southern generals were worshipful of his military prowess. Longstreet was shunned for awhile after the war for saying that he thought Lee’s missteps had cost the South the battle of Gettysburg, and Pickett was bitter about the sacrificing of his division in a doomed charge.
So where was the equivalent leader 100 years later, who could direct Southerners to accept that they’d lost the fight over segregation and to move on? Not to paint everyone in the South with the same brush, but there are still plenty who can’t seem to get over it.
Even if Lee were only fighting because of loyalty to Virginia, it is still immoral to be loyal to someone on an immoral cause.
To go to the extremes: someone who was loyal to the Nazis doesn’t get honored for being loyal. Someone who fought for the Nazis due to loyalty to Germany is still a Nazi. (Other reasons, like fear for one’s life, can be okay, but not loyalty.)
Loyalty is not a value in and of itself. One should only be loyal in causes that are just.
Edit: I’d go back and sprinkle “I believe” and “in my opinion” to this, but I think that makes it seem weaker. I am quite sure of these things, to the point that I not only practice them, but judge the actions of others through this lens. I genuinely believe that, if everyone saw things this way, we’d resolve a lot of the problems in this world.
I think for every statue of RL Lee, we need to have one of Edwin Rommel. Both took up arms and slaughtered Americans by the thousands, all in the service of regimes which stole the lives of tens of millions, so why not?
Of course, among those “having a bad taste in their mouth…” would have to be counted Lee himself:I think it wiser . . . not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered[RIGHT]—Robert E. Lee in a 1869 letter declining an invitation from the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association[/RIGHT]
And:My conviction is that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt in the present condition of the Country, would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its accomplishment; & of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour.[RIGHT]—in a letter from Lee to former Confederate general Thomas Rosser who in 1866 queried Lee about a proposed commemorative monument[/RIGHT]
The erection of and advocacy for statues of Confederate statues enshrining “heroes” of a rebellion against the abolition of human slavery—an institution that the United States was nearly the last of all industrialized nations to prohibit—is not about recording history or celebrating Southern culture but instead continued and systematic domination over former slaves and free blacks, often with legal trappings (the “Black Codes”, poll taxes, and the peonage system). The culture of slavery and repression has become shrouded in a language describing the antebellum period in romantic terms of self-determination and “state’s rights”, with a generous view of plantation owners providing shelter and food for illiterate slaves while ignoring the role that those involved in the slave trade and ownership had in assuring that blacks brought from Africa remained uneducated and unorganized. And many of those statues are hardly from the era of Reconstruction; most of the statuary emerged coincident with the rise of the Kyu Klux Klan and even more recent white nationalist sentiment in the ‘Twenties and ‘Thirties, and through the ‘Seventies and ‘Eighties.
As for celebrating what was a resounding defeat of a pointless cause, I cannot think of another nation to do anything comparable; the closest is the post-Yeltsin veneration of Stalin as a “strong leader” in Putin-approved Russian propaganda to a generation that does not remember how the Red Terror and post-WWII purges under the Stalin regime. That a large region of the United States would celebrate a failed rebellion which shattered families and left the nation with a legacy of horrific experiences such as Andersonville as some kind of positive cultural watermark is as bizarre as it is offensive. It would be like the Germans celebrating Heinrich Himmler’s birthday, which they’re largely aware enough not to do.
Here is a long form piece by Last Week Tonight on the topic of modern celebration of the Confederacy. And if having an obnoxious British man mocking your “culture” for its blithe hypocrisy and sugarcoating its most heinous aspects with a thick layer of saccharin romanticism seems offensive, consider the fact that as a member of a former global colonial power with a long history of horrific repression and making terrible decisions about its protectorates which have resulted in many of the conflicts we are dealing with today, he knows exactly what he is talking about and that you should probably have a good think about why you believe that erecting the statues of people who committed treason against the United States in support of the institution of human slavery is anything worthy of celebration and monument.
This thread is about Robert E. Lee and potentially related tangents. Who was a groper, and naming airports after other political figures like Reagan, Bush, Clinton, etc. is a childish hijack to participate in. No more of that in this thread.
