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Recognition of Confederate Military Service
Earlier this year, the Arlington County School Board voted unanimously to rename Washington-Lee High School (mascot: The Generals). Now, I can drive on Lee Highway, through Arlington County (named for the home of Robert E. Lee), to the more virtuously styled Washington-Liberty High School. Surely Lee has enough monuments and memorials to him that we don’t need to worry that history will forget him entirely, but is this trend of erasing disfavored historical figures necessary or helpful? 
Specific memorials can be attacked and defended on their individuals merits, but in general, they are an invitation to learn about history. I recently happened to visit the Stonewall Jackson House in Lexington, VA. It’s a modest building of brick and stone, with a small garden out back. While I knew who Stonewall Jackson was before I took the tour and browsed the museum’s small bookstore, I actually didn’t know much about the man, and I didn’t know what to make of the tour guide’s assertion that Jackson would have preferred a quiet life of obscurity in Lexington. I’ve since picked up a copy of the late James I. Robertson’s biography, Stonewall Jackson: The Man, The Soldier, The Legend. Reading the first-hand accounts of the man and the times leading up to the Civil War, it’s hard not to acknowledge the complexity of the choices that he made.
Apparently there are proposals to rename Washington and Lee University, just down the road from Jackson’s home. What will our future look like if we continue to bury our past? If we plan to replace Confederate military figures with other historical or modern heroes, who will ever be flawless enough to be worthy?
The true character and actions of men like Lee and Jackson or Grant and Sherman are actually far more interesting than the debate over their memorials, so please feel free to share Civil War trivia or your own stories of interesting museums and monuments.
Published in Group Writing
Guess we can kiss the Wailing Wall goodbye . . .
I think Lee was like many Americans of his time –‘I don’t really approve of slavery but what are you gonna do? Aren’t we just stuck with it [like abortion, drug abuse, urban political corruption, violence & decay] because abolitionist schemes are just not realistic, are they?’
George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson all grew up in a culture that reconciled itself to slavery in just this way. It is awful that this ancient practice is here in a nation committed to freedom but the consequences of immediate abolition to slaves themselves (the great majority of who were deemed wholely unready for personal independence) and to whites affected by the inevitable rise in violent crime resulting in the outbreak of an incipient race war in which blacks would suffer disproportionately … abolition would be vastly worse than the status quo.
Many people view antebellum USA with an anachronistic lens. In those times many viewed Lincoln as a radical, a member of a radically unrealistic political party that would bring catastrophic change to the south. Succession was widely regarded as an act of self-defense even in the eyes of Southerners who profoundly wished slavery would indeed go away whether the answer was Liberia or some other prudent and peaceful end to this horrid institution.
What I hate about the present-day PC cleansing is that there is no learning, no recognition of the humanity of the historic villains or of the complexity of those times in much the same way they deny the humanity of their political adversaries in the present day.
Exactly.
The land was taken unilaterally during the war. Lee ‘donated’ it about the same way the pig ‘donates’ the bacon for breakfast.
Guess we can, it wouldn’t be the first or the last Temple to be buried by the sands of time. If it comes to it. Very few things of the past are really preserved and of these even fewer preserve their original meaning or intent. But would perfect knowledge and preservation of the past really be better for us than its slow erasure? The past may be a foundation for the present, but only if we are no carrying it with us constantly then it is just as likely to become a burden. Keeping us from being able to move on or change.
Yes, that is how they viewed the situation, but they were clearly wrong to view it a such. Their opinions in this regard were not only the product of motivated reasoning by people with deep financial self interests in the practice but also fundamentally wrong with respect to the nature and humanity of the slaves themselves. Their view of the situation and reality of slavery was tortured because it was in direct contradiction the Truth. A truth that was not in fact absent in their day as many examples and arguments by those said abolitionists existed that far more closely struck next to the mark. The times were complex, but clearly there were people who were more right in their thinking, and perhaps those are the men and women that should be remembered and commemorated in our statues, street names, and folklore. While the tale of those who stuck by their error unto the out break of war should only be recalled as a warning from the past. Robert E. Lee should be remembered as a man who made a terrible mistake in supporting an unjust war fought to maintain an unjust social system. Much like one would remember Erwin Rommel. Though I don’t think the Germans have a University or countless streets and parks named after him despite his well reputed conduct as a military officer.
I think it’s important to know which propaganda is part of our history. I’m all for letting some of the monuments fade into the background, to be replaced by newer propaganda/memorials. Fading is different from tearing down, though. It’s dangerous to tear down memories and pretend they didn’t exist. Sometimes we need to do dangerous things, but sometimes that doesn’t have the effect we desire.
An example of fading is in Vernon County, Wisconsin, where some old memorial monuments about the last days of the Black Hawk war are cringeworthy now. What has been done in many cases is to place newer monuments next to the old ones, with a few notes added to the new one pointing out the old ones are of a different time and different sensibilities.
In Frankfurt (Oder) Germany there was a Soviet-looking memorial in a public park near our hotel. Going up closer we noted that it was indeed a Soviet memorial, with individual markers for the Russian and other Soviet soldiers who had been killed. I wondered why those hadn’t been torn down, but later read that when the Soviet empire broke apart the maintenance of these markers that honor the Soviet war dead had been part of the agreement by which the old parts of the empire went their own ways.
Some of my ancestors came from German villages that are now part of Poland, or which had long been part of Poland. The Germans were evicted after Potsdam, and in the angry aftermath of WWII the churches and cemeteries were not always treated nicely. It’s understandable that Germans were in bad odor with the Poles, and that there was a lot of desecration of old German monuments. In two places I learned from old maps and other sources that we had been standing in or next to old German Lutheran cemeteries where some of my ancestors are probably buried. One is now a playground, grown up in trees and grass, not very well kept up, but not trashy, either, and no new buildings have been put up on it. In another case the location is now just a lot overgrown with trees and grass, but again, not eradicated by new buildings. I have since, with the help of old maps and StreetView, identified other places where we have family connections, where the old German Lutheran cemetery is treated the same way. That’s fair enough and respectful enough, I figure. And in one case the Lutheran chapel in my great-grandparents village has been reconsecrated as a Catholic one. In another, the old German church bells are down and cracked, whether by fire or by anger, I have no idea, but they are preserved, lying on the grass next to the sidewalk leading to the newer, Catholic church. I like that the new people didn’t eradicate all the old memories while creating their own.
There are cases where tearing down is an act that should be commemorated, too.
Back to the case of Confederate monuments, I like Mark Gumby’s take on the subject.
I do wonder why people like Lee, who were genuinely conflicted on the subjects that divided our country, are being dishonored, while a full-throated racist like John C. Calhoun still has his name on the Michigan county where I now reside. Of course, trying to change the name would just make the memory of the old name stronger, because one cannot conduct county business without reference to the old documents with the word “Calhoun” on them.
I did find it amusing that if you want to go to what looked like the most prestigious banks in town, you’d go north to Karl Marx Straße, where you’d find it as well as some relatively upscale stores and restaurants (if upscale is a term that you can legitimately use in this town). A good memorial to the guy, I figure.
I essentially agree, and I do think Lee is remembered as having chosen the wrong side, but I think it’s worth learning more about the specific circumstances so we can understand our history better. I think the preservation of historic place names encourages us to learn more.
Also, I get why current school board members want to signal that Arlington is clearly no longer the home of the Confederacy by taking Lee’s name off the high school. It’s just so obvious to me as a long-time resident that it has changed that I don’t think historic names need to be removed to apologize for the sins of the past.
Oh, come on. Do you want a shelf life on monuments? Might as well have a living Constitution. Sheesh . . .
I agree 100% with your last paragraph, but think it a mistake to conflate Washington, Madison, and Jefferson with the discussion of Confederate monuments and namings. That conflation is unfortunately something we are increasingly seeing from Progressives as well as some defenders of the legacy of the Confederacy and obscures some important distinctions. W, M, and J belonged to a generation which believed slavery wrong but unable to come up with a solution (though Washington’s will freed the slaves he personally owned, along with providing for their continued care). Lincoln in his 1854 Peoria speech makes the same point – he opposes slavery but does not know, as a practical matter, how to solve the problem.
In contrast, the Confederacy was explicitly founded on the belief that the preamble to the Declaration of Independence was wrong in its assertion that all men are created equal, a doctrine developed in the decades leading to the Civil War by people like John C Calhoun who viewed race slavery as a positive good. Eventually, acting upon that belief, they sought to destroy the Union.
Ironically, the seceding states, panicking upon the election of Lincoln, who was not an abolitionist nor was most of the Republican Party, ended up bringing about within 5 years the outcome they most feared.
Lee chose his state because states were the primary source of loyalty. It was tough to unify them into one nation because states considered themselves sovereign in spite of being in a union.
I’m reminded of the line from National Treasure 2. Before the War Between the States, we referred to “These United States”. After the war, it became “The United States”.
Big difference . . .
I think Lee thought of it as defending ‘his country’ from invasion. It wasn’t until after the Civil War that the country really thought of itself as the United States
I think that’s an important aspect of the issue, but I think it’s more complex than that with regard to Lee. I need to do more research on this, as I realize that I’m no Civil War scholar. But this discussion has been really interesting.
If I lived an hour or so closer to Charlottesville, I would have been there to protest removing the statue. I guess that tags me as a racist or white supremacist, but I also admire Lincoln, Grant and Sherman. I think removing our history -and all of its lessons about human complexity, reduces us as a country.
I live outside Leesburg, Va and expect that there will be pressure to rename it soon, even though it is named after a different Lee (Light Horse Harry Lee) who fought in the Revolutionary war.
Worse than losing our history, we are losing it at the hand of those who are ignorant of history.
And that was precisely Trump’s actual point (not the invented one), that there were good people on both sides of the argument about what to do with the statue, not an endorsement of neo-nazis and, for that matter, antifa.
Jefferson and Madison seemed to believe that slavery would melt away. The invention of the cotton gin intervened.
The vast majority of Confederate soldiers were not slaveholders and largely resented the rich guys who were. They fought because they believed the north was imposing its will by force to effect an impractical and probably disastrous outcome on their home states.
Comparisons to Nazis are stupid because slavery was an ancient status quo that many believed would always exist in one form or another. Freedom and equality were novelties. In contrast, the Nazis expressly concocted innovative evils on an unprecedented scale in the name of a new ideology which contradicted all known moral referents.
It takes no courage nor creates risks of any kind to condemn slavery in 2019 yet some think they are banking major moral credits when they do. The tragedy of the South is precisely the extraordinary amount of virtue, sacrifice and courage expended on behalf of an inherently doomed, unworthy political order increasingly at odds with the substance and spirit of the American project (paraphrasing Grant in that last sentence). It is not an endorsement of slavery to acknowledge that.
And we Southerners who want to embrace our past and keep our statues are also not endorsing slavery. However, we’re not ignoring it either. We choose to celebrate the good things about the South, just as we celebrate the good things about our country.
Those who say we shouldn’t celebrate anything because of slavery are the kind of people who say we shouldn’t celebrate the victory over Japan in WW2 because of FDR’s internment of Japanese Amercians . . .
I am all for this removal of historic names from all things if just one person has an issue. I am all for removing MLK and Muhammad Ali from every thing possible.
Love the way you think!
Wonder how many Senators since have been willing to put their lives at risk for what they purport are their principles?
Many of them did it before becoming Senators.
True. Kerry comes to mind.
Just ask him. He’ll tell you all about it. And Do you know who he is?
Interesting. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2018/11/21/veterans-in-the-116th-congress-by-the-numbers/
What I want is irrelevant, everything has a shelf life ultimately. I argue that this shouldn’t be viewed as a bad thing. You can’t fight off entropy forever. So how much effort is worth investing in doing so? I think the value of some monuments today is dubious at best. Just because something is old doesn’t make it priceless. We wouldn’t want the ability of our cities and communities to grow to be hampered by our nostalgia. Sometimes tearing down the old to build something new is the best thing you can do. Just look at houses. How many communities in growing cities are being hampered by historical building societies? How many examples of Victorian homes do you need to preserve memory of the past vs having high rise buildings that can accommodate more families per the same acreage. You might say that is different, but even things like cemeteries are restricted in space, and likewise space of monuments is also limited. What do we today care to commemorate more is a worthy question, and I would like to point out further with respect to at least some of the “confederate monuments” most recently in the news the decisions to remove or replace them have come from the local communities.
All things considered, it’s hard to say, but Valiuth has been right with what he has been saying on this thread.
I have been watching an old British show on Youtube lately. It’s called Time Team, an archeology show. Britain has been occupied for thousands of years, and it is not unusual for them to be coming across four-thousand-thousand-year-old sites. It also is not unusual for them to be called in to either help a homeowner against the bureaucracy or try to find proof that something should be a scheduled monument.
You want the past? Take a picture. Keep it virtually. But bring on the creative destruction.
Organic change by communities, forgotten figures replaced with recent heroes, urban renewal is natural. It is the new, perverse ideological attack on history that I resent. Presumably they should tear down the Forum, every Roman aqueduct, the Coliseum and every arch because no society was more slavery-intensive. The utter narcissism of proclaiming deep offense at an old Confederate memorial as if it had power to undo who we are is virtue-signaling.
My Deep South kin have somehow long managed to oppose slavery and racism while enjoying a love of history including admiration for the likes of Lee and Jackson. They have a much healthier relationship with history than the self-absorbed nihilists who want our values and discourse to be a monument to themselves.
I will just note that it was after Nixon was ousted (in the 1974 deep state coup?), that the U.S. Senate voted unanimously, to fully restore the citizenship of both Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. This happened over the Ford and Carter administrations. Lee’s restoration came first, signed by President Ford. Joe Biden voted for Jefferson Davis’s restoration in 1977, a bill signed into law by President Carter in 1978.
This post is part of the November theme, “Service.” There is one late opening, the 30th, first come first seated!
I agree with the above and with creative destruction, to a degree. In the case of renaming the school, I actually think it’s fine. But it’s not entropy. It’s an affirmative decision that is costing the county about $250,000. That’s not terrible if current residents value the change, and I think they generally do. Although anecdotally, I heard that some African-American alumni of the school were surprised and baffled at the change.
The thing is, most people don’t go around NoVA thinking of the history associated with the street and place names. Those names become known for their practical uses and modern associations. At the same time, I really had a serendipitous experience walking down the street in Lexington, VA (a town which benefits from its historic charm) and happening upon the Jackson House because I learned a lot from deciding to go inside.
And if you’re not from Arlington and haven’t visited recently or ever, don’t despair that it’s caught in a time capsule. It’s changed so much in the 20+ years I’ve lived here, and when I arrived, Virginia was a solid Republican state. Now the Metro corridor is dense with high-rises and if I go out of town for a week, I’m routinely surprised by the newest gaping hole where a house used to be. Arlington County is more than happy to replace a 1500-2000 SF home with a 6000-10000 SF home that it can tax accordingly.