In these willfully ignorant, fiercely partisan times, let’s recall that we fought our bloodiest war to end human bondage. Almost three-quarters of a million…
In these willfully ignorant, fiercely partisan times, let’s recall that we fought our bloodiest war to end human bondage. Almost three-quarters of a million Americans died in a complex struggle that began to right an inexcusable injustice.
Now we’re re-fighting our Civil War with neo-Stalinist, fact-purging propaganda that makes cartoon villains of the dead. We rush to tear down statues of men we refuse to understand. We rob one group of citizens of their heritage to please another.
And the president’s chief of staff cannot state facts about our history without triggering mob-rule outrage from those who could not even tell you when the Civil War was fought.
Yes, slavery was the catalyst of our Civil War. Without slavery, sectional disagreements would have remained, but none would have brought us to make war on ourselves. Still Trump Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly’s televised remark that “the lack of an ability to compromise” provoked our Civil War was also accurate. Despite repeated attempts by Northern states to find a political compromise, nothing satisfied Southern firebrands.
There’s much more to it, though. While slavery brought us to fratricidal war, that doesn’t mean everyone who wore a Confederate uniform fought for slavery. Quite the contrary. Rare was the Rebel soldier who owned a slave (as usual, the rich often stayed home).
Let’s judge the dead as we’re admonished to judge the living: as individuals. As a student of the Civil War since childhood, it astonished me when the media reacted to Kelly’s statement that Robert E. Lee was “an honorable man” as if Kelly had praised Pol Pot.
Robert E. Lee was, in fact, a man of flawless honor in his times. He abhorred secession and viewed slavery as doomed. But when Virginia seceded from the Union, this hero of multiple wars felt compelled — as Gen. Kelly honestly noted — to defend his state, his family and friends. It was, for him and others, an anguished choice.
Nor was Lee alone in detesting secession. Many of the West Point-trained officers who became Confederate generals strongly opposed it. Jubal Early argued bravely against it. Thomas J. Jackson, soon to be known as “Stonewall,” preferred continued unity and peace.
Now students who have never taken a course in American history demonstrate to tear down statues of Jackson, a man who, before the war, defied his neighbors to start a Sunday school for blacks; who broke Virginia law by teaching slaves and free blacks to read; and who saved slaves from being sold into the Deep South (Virginians, such as General-to-be Robert Rodes, were appalled by the treatment of slaves in the Cotton Belt).
Jackson continued sending regular donations back to that Lexington, Va., Sunday school until he died of wounds.
Such men did not think of themselves as defending slavery. Overwhelmingly, Confederate soldiers believed they were defending their homes — most former officers took off their blue coats to put on gray only after Lincoln called for volunteers to keep the Southern states in the Union by force. In their view, the North was an aggressor — and, indeed, the Union was preserved through devastation.
Lest I sound like a Southern sympathizer, let me state that my sentiments are pure Yankee. I lost an ancestor who wore blue and recently visited his grave in the National Cemetery in Beaufort, SC.
But as a serious student of the war and as a soldier, I have come to respect and honor the valor, skill and fortitude of the Confederate infantry — particularly those who served under Robert E. Lee.
But the statues must come down, we’re told, without regard for individual merit. And monuments to simple Southern soldiers must be stripped from county seats because activists in search of a cause insist they honor slavery.
No. Those bronze or granite Confederate privates atop columns in North Carolina or Alabama honor the hometown boys who went to war and didn’t come back.
It’s true that those statues didn’t go up right away. The South lay impoverished. But monuments were erected as soon as the shattered South could raise the funds. And they didn’t build monuments to Jim Crow, but to Private Jim Dandy, CSA.
Activists beware: Today, you remove the statues others cherish, but tomorrow the statues you revere may go.
Ralph Peters is the author of 13 books set during the Civil War, the latest of which is “ Judgment at Appomattox .”
