Robert E. Lee

Yesterday, Robert E. Lee’s monument came down. For me it was a bittersweet moment. Most of my younger friends were ecstatic. Indeed, many of you can’t possibly understand my ambivalence. Much of it is generational. Some of it is the fact that when I was a young history major in college I read scores of biographies about the major players during the Civil War, Union and Confederate. I came away with a profound respect for many of them, great but flawed men. However, my feelings about many of them have changed over the years. The two portraits in the picture below once hung on a wall in my library. They no longer do for a variety of reasons. But in light of yesterday’s events, I remember now a blog I wrote just after the Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville several years ago. I have reprinted the salient passages below:

When it comes to this entire statues controversy, I am not an absolutist. Each generation should have some say in how they interpret history. Although I happen to believe that the Monument Avenue statues are astonishingly beautiful works of art, and think that they are a valid record of the fact that our city was, in fact, the former capital of the Confederacy, I also understand how they might be viewed differently by a rather large segment of the city's population. The legacy of the Antebellum south was one of human bondage, the buying and selling of human beings. This is a fact of history that for many Americans is something that can't and shouldn't be celebrated.

 I am conflicted even as I write this. For over my shoulder on the wall behind me are two portraits hung in my library, one of Robert E. Lee and the other of Thomas Stonewall Jackson. I studied each of these men extensively in college and found them to both be fascinating men, complex, and tortured, whose lives were shot through with great tension and contradictions. Jackson, perhaps the finest  tactician in the history of this country, also nearly was kicked out of his Lexington Presbyterian church for teaching a class full of slave children how to read. The ironies were overwhelming. But, I came away from all of that study with a profound respect for each man's character. So their portraits hang in my library. For some of you reading this, you might be nodding in agreement. Others might be scratching your heads. I get it. I understand the tension, and the disagreements that flow from different readings of history.

But, here's the thing. What would I do if I knew that a family of African Americans were coming over for dinner? And suppose that this particular family had just lost a child at the hands of a white supremicist mob. What would I do with the portraits? You know what? I think I would remove them before they showed up. Not because I no longer cared about Lee or Jackson, but because I care much more about the tender feelings of my friends than I could ever care about a couple of dead generals. This is the essence of my position on statues. Let's all be a little less entrenched in our own positions, and more in tune with the point of view of people who might view them in a different light.

I suppose my bottom line is that I’m glad the Civil War turned out the way it did. Robert E. Lee made the choice to defend his home state of Virginia rather than honor the vow he took upon graduating from West Point as an officer in the United States Army, a decision that caused him a great deal of soul-searching anguish. But, ultimately he made the wrong decision. While his primary motivation may have been a sense of devotion to Virginia, his armies also were defending the institution of slavery, a crime against humanity that no amount of post-war rehabilitation can erase. Had he prevailed, thousands of African-Americans would have been kept in human bondage for years longer than they were. Ultimately, this is the verdict of history, one for which I am grateful.

So, where are these two portraits now? In the attic. The thirteen biographies of Lee, Jackson, Grant, JEB Stuart and Sherman are still in my library, but the portraits are not. They are still worth reading about, but the time for enshrinement has passed.