I had the opportunity to visit Edenton, NC about a year ago. Near the waterfront, at the end of its main street, a Confederate monument still sits. One morning, there were mild-mannered protestors at the monument– those against the monument on one side of the street, those in support on the other side.
It was all very civil. There were no open hostilities. They all peeled away as the mid-day heat arrived.
This long-recurring standoff had become the object of a lengthy Washington Post article recently, as described at the Abbeville Institute blog. Those in support of the monument, of course, were portrayed in an unfavorable light despite the fact that the protests have not been violent.
The writer of the Abbeville piece, Casey Chalk, explains the following:
(A) civilization that refuses to honor its ancestors, however checkered their story may be, is in decay and on its way to self-destruction.
Moreover, what is now being overturned is a pact forged by our nation at the end of our bloodiest, most terrible conflict: Southerners who lost the Civil War would be welcomed back as citizens, their constitutional rights protected, their own unique civilization permitted to be memorialized. Post-war presidents honored both “the blue” and “the gray” precisely to emphasize that we are all one people under one flag. Woke attempts to scrub all memorials to the Confederate war dead thus amounts to a nullification of that sacred agreement...
Yet we must remember the impulse motivating the pietas that seeks to preserve some place for memorializing our ancestors is ultimately one of love. We love our forebears, because they are a part of us, and we seek to share their story with our children, flourishing by both emulating their virtue, and learning from their mistakes.
Confederate memorials were generally erected by the surviving wives and children of men who defended the South from brutal invasion. Not by governments, though both Southern governments and those contributing to the memorials voluntarily were impoverished by Lincoln’s War and the “Reconstruction” (a euphemism for further destruction and chaos). They were erected at some sacrifice by individuals who had survived the tribulations.
Trashing such memorials isn’t unlike going into a graveyard and defacing tombstones of people you never knew, but who meant a lot to the people who paid to place the tombstone.
That is a great analogy, J. Sobran. I hope there is a massive effort to erect them back in place again wherever they were taken down.
President Dwight Eisenhower had pictures of 4 Americans hanging on his office wall. He was asked how the President of the United States could have a picture of Robert E. Lee as one of his most admired Americans. His response:
General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.
From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee’s caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation’s wounds once the bitter struggle was over, we, in our own time of danger in a divided world, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.
Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.
Sincerely,
Dwight D. Eisenhower
That’s a great letter, Fred. Thanks for posting it.