Confederate Monuments in the US

I have talked about the issue of Confederate monuments (or more accurately, Confederate flags) on this blog before, but in light of the events that took place in the US in the past month, it's worth revisiting the issue. But before I get to that, I would like to join almost everyone with the exception of the part-time resident of the White House and his dedicated followers in saying that "very fine people" don't march alongside white supremacists, neo-Nazis and others of that ilk and there is no equivalence between such people and those who protest in opposition to them. Of course it is not acceptable for counter-protestors to initiate violence, but the worst violence, including of course the use of a car as a weapon of mass slaughter, was initiated by the white supremacist side. Even if the issue they were using as an excuse to gather and chant hateful slogans was a legitimate one, no decent people could or should allow themselves to be associated with them in any way. That's even if the issue was a legitimate one, which it was not.

I've talked more than once about the difficulty of objectively judging historical figures. But if we are deciding which ones should be prominently memorialized, then an effort to do so has to be made. Of course no human being has ever been perfect, and every single historical figure, no matter how great their achievements might have been, has flaws. So obviously if we're going to have public memorials to any individuals at all, we can't rule out the establishment of memorials to people simply because of some negative aspects of their careers (though the fact that no one is perfect should be sufficient reason to avoid any memorials that deify or excessively elevate those they are dedicated to). But this doesn't mean that we should simply avoid making any judgments at all and simply allow every public memorial to stand. When the bad in a historical figure's legacy outweighs or is even comparable to the good, we should be at a minimum very cautious about how prominently we memorialize them, especially without placing them in proper context. While it might be reasonable to have a statue of Andrew Jackson in his hometown or at the site of the Battle of New Orleans, even there you would ideally want any descriptive plaque or inscription to mention some of the awful things he was responsible for, and he certainly shouldn't appear on the nation's currency, which is a more singular honor and one where proper contextualization is impossible. Similarly, it makes sense to at least question how prominently we should honor people like Woodrow Wilson, considering his racist attitudes and other flaws.

But in the case of statues to Confederate leaders the issue is not even as complicated as it is for people like Jackson and Wilson. At least Jackson and Wilson did make some significant, positive contributions to the US that are deserving of some recognition, as long as we don't lose sight of their flaws. But for most Confederate leaders, their primary claim to historical significance is that they fought for the cause of slavery. As I explained in my previous writing on the subject, this is unquestionably what the Civil War was about. Claims to the contrary are at best historically ignorant and at worst deliberate white supremacist revisionism. The Confederates were only fighting for "states' rights" in the sense that they were fighting for the right of slaves to maintain the institution of slavery, and they were only fighting to maintain "the Southern way of life" in that the Southern way of life was based on slavery. Not only was this made explicit in their secession resolutions and a major speech by the Confederacy's vice-president, but all the disputes and tensions between North and South in the decades leading up to the Civil War were over slavery, from the Great Compromise to the Kansas-Nebraska Act to the election of Abraham Lincoln. It's also beside the point that there was plenty of racism in the North or that there were Southerners who treated their slaves decently. The war was over the continued existence of slavery as an institution, and that institution was inherently evil, regardless of the character of the individuals fighting for and existence. So even if some Confederate leaders were noble individuals (and the hagiography regarding people like Robert E. Lee tends to whitewash some of the worst aspects of their characters - in Lee's case, for instance, there is reason to believe he was fairly cruel to his slaves or at best indifferent to their suffering), the cause they fought for was evil. There is no reason to have any monuments to people whose historical significance derives from fighting for such a cause.

The argument that removing the statutes and other monuments is erasing history is nonsense. For one thing, we don't learn much history from a statue, unless it is accompanied by a detailed explanatory plaque (and even then people have to actually read it). Americans should of course learn about the Civil War, but they should learn about it in more detail than they can from monuments. More importantly, what they learn should be factual and objective (not necessarily neutral, which is not the same thing - for instance, as noted about, the Confederates were fighting for the cause of slavery, a fact that must be emphasized in any discussion of the war, even though it puts them in a bad light). Furthermore, if monuments were to serve as the starting point for people's education about the history of the US South, then there should be monuments to all the other significant people from that era, including slaves and ex-slaves like Harriet Tubman and Nat Turner, the black soldiers who fought and died for the Union, and the many victims of lynching in the years after the war, the black and white people who fought to end segregation in the South. There are vastly more monuments in the South to those who fought for slavery and against African-American rights than to those who fought on the other side of those struggles, even though it is the latter who truly deserve memorializing. If statues and monuments are to represent the history of the region, then they should be an honest representation of the whole history. Instead, most of them represent a narrow segment in terms of both time and population, and they glorify what should be condemned. Even their representation of Confederate leadership is biased in exactly the wrong direction. While there are plenty of statues to Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, and many other of the top Confederate leaders, there are relatively few of James Longstreet and William Mahone, two high-ranking Confederate officers who deserved with distinction in the war. They don't particularly deserve to be memorialized for that any more than their fellow Confederates do, as they also were fighting for the cause of slavery, but they both worked in favor of integration in the post-war period, something which would be worth honoring. Instead, for that very reason, they were largely ignored by the segregationists who put up all the statues of their comrades.

Speaking of Confederate generals, recently someone offered a bizarre argument that the reason for all the Confederate monuments is because of all the Civil War battlefields around the region. This is absurd, as the vast majority of monuments, and certainly the ones that have received the most attention, are (or were, for those that have already been removed) not on battlefields but in town squares, parks and other such places. An actual battlefield might be one place where I could see statues to the military leaders of the pro-slavery cause being appropriate - but even there appropriate context is a must. If there are statues of the Confederate generals, there should of course also be ones of the Union generals, and explanatory plaques at the site should again not whitewash what the Confederates were fighting for. But in any case, the main issue is all the statues in other places, not to mention the schools, streets, and other things named after Confederate leaders. Much as here in Taiwan all the statues of the dictator Chiang Kai-shek should be removed from public places, statues of Confederate leaders who represent the causes of slavery and white supremacy should be removed from the towns and cities of the American south (a stance that has also been publically supported by several descendants of the men in question, including Jackson and Lee). There are no good excuses for not doing so.