The Removal of Robert E. Lee’s Statue from Charlottesville
The Removal of Robert E. Lee’s Statue from Charlottesville
Early this morning the statue of Robert E. Lee was finally removed from a park in the city of Charlottesville. This issue had brought the awful racist riot on August 17, 2017, which led to Heather Heyer being killed by a racist in a car. A statue of Stonewall Jackson, long located on the city courthouse site, was also removed, as well as later in the day without warning a statue of Lewis and Clark with Sacajawea. The statues are going into city storage with the ultimate destination of these statues still to be determined. The statue of Lee in Richmond remains in place, more seriously in place. It took a change in Virginia state law in 2020 to allow the City of Charlottesville to remove these statues.
I note that the statue of Lee in Charlottesville, an impressive piece that I have always thought looked pretty impressive, was only put up in 1926, with the photo of the event showing what it was really about, a manifestation of Jim Crow, with many people in the photo of that inauguration in full white robes of the KKK. Really.
I have a family link to all this. It is fact that Lee himself opposed putting up any statues to himself. His official view was that war was over and people needed to move on. This was shown in two letters he wrote. One was to a group who wanted to put a statue of him at Gettysburg. Lee said no. The other was a letter to my relative Gen. Thomas Lafayette Rosser, who also was supporting a statue of him somewhere, and Lee said no, in that letter laying out this “move on” argument. Ironically Gen. Rosser is buried in Charlottesville off the same street, Market Street, where Lee’s statue long sat. On Rosser’s grave it is noted that he was a true follower of Lee.
Barkley Rosser
Not everyone that wanted to preserve the confederate monuments in Richmond and Charlottesville, VA, was necessarily a racist, but everyone that was willing to injure others or even kill others in pursuit of preserving the confederate monuments was necessarily a homicidal sociopath.
@ Ron,
Agreed. And taxpayer-supported statues honoring traitors needed to come down. No patriotic American wants their tax money spent honoring treason against the US, which is what the Confederacy was.
@Joel,
No, I got to stick with Dale Coberly on this treasonous secessionist thing. It was a matter of self-government choices. All men have never been created equal, but the consent of the governed is not cheaply set aside. Mankind only grants the rights that subjects are willing to fight and die for. That said, then slavery was another thing yet despite the linkage between the two. Slavery had a history of convenient immorality, but convenient morality is little better in the long run.
After being forcefully dragged out into the tall weeds, it might still be worth mentioning that the confederate memorials were erected to celebrate Jim Crow far more than dead grandfathers. Some of them were still not bad as art, if one can set aside their reflexive reactions to symbolism regarding things that we are still poorly prepared to justly address. Out of sight, out of mind works well for the mindless.
The bottom line is of course that taking down confederate monuments cost probably less than one percent as much as repairing the social fabric and bestows a proud feeling of having made a visible accomplishment in just a few months despite that the invisible accomplishment would have taken at best half a century, but far better to just respond with empty tokens.
@Ron,
The removal of taxpayer-funded statues (and place names) honoring traitors has nothing to do with “out of sight, out of mind.” Indeed, if some privately funded organization wants to display them, they can be in sight.
The out of sight out of mind misdirection smacks of the right wing “erasing history” phony claim. We learn history from research, not statuary. There are no monuments to treason where I live, and yet I’ve been able to read several histories of the Civil War, keeping the history very much in-mind.
Finally, the arguments that the Confederacy wasn’t treason because the South seceded and that the traitors weren’t traitors because they were not prosecuted: there is no mechanism in the US Constitution for states to unilaterally secede, so the Confederacy was still part of the US; and there are many instances of crimes not being prosecuted, which doesn’t mean they weren’t committed (Nixon was still guilty of obstruction of justice even though he was never tried for it)>
@Ron,
” . . . far better to just respond with empty tokens.” Not sure what this is supposed to mean. If the point you’re making is that it’s OK for taxpayers to be forced to maintain monuments to treason because it doesn’t fix racial injustice, that’s a false dichotomy. We can and should do both.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s no daylight between a state claiming the right to unilaterally secede from the union and an individual who claims exemption from all federal laws as a “sovereign citizen.”
@Joel,
In what capacity is an individual person the same as a sovereign state?