19 August, 2017
President Donald Trump on Thursday denounced the removal of monuments to Confederate figures as "sad" and "so foolish", days after white supremacists and neo-Nazis took to Charlottesville, Virginia, to violently protest the planned removal of a statue. "Each of us deserves a voice in determining how to address the questions raised by the statues of Robert E. Lee and others, and confront the darker moments in our nation's history". And Thomas Jefferson? Is it that we are going to remove his statues?
While many of America's Founding Fathers owned slaves, there's a clear difference between their hypocrisy and those who sought to destroy the republic they created in order to safeguard slavery.
These arguments aren't exactly offered in good faith.
As for the rest of America, they want the statues to stay.
"To me, I don't care if it's a George Washington statue or Thomas Jefferson, they all need to come down", liberal analyst Angela Rye argued in a panel discussion on CNN Thursday. Several States have passed laws that forbid local governments from removing Confederate symbols.
But the issue isn't whether Washington and Jefferson owned slaves. The reputations of individual founders wax and wane over time. They are commemorated due to their role in founding the nation.
Jefferson is in the pantheon because he wrote the Declaration of Independence and because of his wartime diplomatic service. The larger point is the perspective is key in American politics.
Loyola University Maryland historian Karsonya Wise Whitehead said numerous monuments came long after the Civil War ended.
I often turn to him to help me understand the political football that goes on in Washington.
Confederate leaders, by contrast, are being celebrated purely for doing something bad.
On the eve of the Civil War in April 1861, Lee was living at Arlington House (now inside Arlington National Cemetery) and had just finished reading a biography of Washington when an emissary for President Lincoln arrived and asked Lee if he would take command of the Union army.
Nor were they alone among our Founding Fathers: James Madison was a slave owner; even Ben Franklin owned two slaves before the practice was banned in Pennsylvania. And the CSA itself was a political project that had no real goal other than to maintain slavery as an institution. While Lee and Jackson do, also, stand in a tradition of apologetic Virginia slaveholders, the cause they fought for was anything but ambivalent about slavery. There are no people who are heroic who don't have lead feet. Judah P. Benjamin was the first Jewish US senator before he became a member of Davis's cabinet. My friend, an award-winning scholar of Supreme Court Justices John Marshall and Joseph Story, had spent his adult life studying the American past.
The irony is that General Robert E Lee opposed monuments commemorating the Confederates after the South lost the war.
It would obviously be unreasonable to expect every celebrated historical figure to be without any kind of significant blemish. Typically, he had made a powerful historical distinction between Washington and Lee in an eloquent, plain-spoken way.
"Washington recognized slavery was so deeply rooted in the USA that to end it immediately would cause another war, and that's not what he wanted because he just finished fighting an eight-year war", says John Stauffer, professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
