Why Lee Should Go, and Washington Should Stay
By JON MEACHAM AUG. 21, 2017
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To me, the answer to Mr. Trump’s question begins with a straightforward test: Was the person to whom a monument is erected on public property devoted to the American experiment in liberty and self-government? Washington and Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were. Each owned slaves; each was largely a creature of his time and place on matters of race. Yet each also believed in the transcendent significance of the nation, and each was committed to the journey toward “a more perfect Union.”
By definition, the Confederate hierarchy fails that test. Those who took up arms against the Union were explicitly attempting to stop the American odyssey. While we should judge each individual on the totality of their lives (defenders of Lee, for instance, point to his attempts to be a figure of reconciliation after the war), the forces of hate and of exclusion long ago made Confederate imagery their own. Monuments in public places of veneration to those who believed it their duty to fight the Union have no place in the Union of the 21st century — a view with which Lee himself might have agreed. “I think it wiser,” he wrote in 1866, “not to keep open the sores of war.”
Of course, Lee lost that struggle, too, and my home state is dealing with just this issue at the moment. In 1973, the Sons of Confederate Veterans raised money to install a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Southern cavalry commander and early leader of the Klan, in the state capitol.
It’s ahistoric to judge figures from the past by our own moral standards. Yet we need not contort ourselves to find Forrest wanting as an object of veneration. He was condemned for outrages and atrocities in his own time. One example: the massacre at Fort Pillow in April 1864, in western Tennessee, where Forrest’s men “cruelly butchered every colored soldier they could lay hands upon,” according to a report in The Chicago Tribune not long after.
More than a century and a half on, the battle over Forrest’s memory here may offer lessons for others. Taken as a whole, my state was always ambivalent about the Confederacy. In February 1861 a majority of its voters opposed a proposed secession convention, with pro-Union sentiment particularly strong in the more mountainous eastern region of the state. Then came Fort Sumter and the federal call to fight the secessionists, and secession carried the day at last.
By the end of the war, 120,000 Tennesseans had fought for the Confederacy, but a significant number, 31,000, took up arms for the Union. As historians have noted, that meant Tennessee alone provided the federal forces with more soldiers than all other seceded states combined.
Given its history during the Confederate era, then, Tennessee has the capacity to be more reasonable in the neo-Confederate one. According to a 2016 law, the removal of a monument like the one to Forrest requires either an act of the General Assembly or a two-thirds vote of the state’s historical commission, most of whom are appointed by the governor. And the position of Gov. Bill Haslam, a popular Republican, is clear: It’s time for the Forrest bust to go. “I don’t believe Nathan Bedford Forrest should be one of the individuals we honor at the Capitol,” he said. “That history should be put in a museum, not in a place of honor.”
“There will never be peace in Tennessee,” Union Gen. William T. Sherman once said, “until Forrest is dead.” Like his more celebrated remark that war is hell, Sherman was onto something. The good news in this grim period of 2017 is that reasonable Southerners may be ready to give peace a chance.
complete article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/21/opinion/why-lee-should-go-and-washington-should-stay.html?mcubz=3&_r=0
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