Conservatives Should Feel No Investment in Confederate Monuments

In the wave of cancellations sweeping America, Confederate statues have been particularly hard hit.

They have been graffitied, assaulted, and in some cases torn down, while state and municipal authorities rush to remove them.

For his part, President Donald Trump has been a steadfast defender of the statues and other forms of recognition of the Confederacy. He has come out strongly in favor of preserving the names of military bases named after Confederate generals, and pointedly said the other day that we should build on our heritage rather than tear it down. He took the same posture after Charlottesville in 2017.

Conservatives tend to come down the same way. They reflexively oppose politically correct campaigns to track down and destroy anything giving offense. They fear where the slippery slope of a campaign of woke iconoclasm will lead—first it’s Jefferson Davis, then Thomas Jefferson, finally George Washington. They value tradition, and Confederate statues have been part of the landscape of American cities for decades now, and they worry we are trashing part of our history.

This impulse, though, is a mistake. The firings, shamings and acts of destruction that have occurred across the culture over the past two or three weeks are deeply disturbing, but Confederate statues and symbols deserve to be reevaluated, and often mothballed.

Statues of Confederate leaders are an unnecessary affront to black citizens, who shouldn’t have to see defenders of chattel slavery put on a pedestal, literally.

It is impossible to evaluate these monuments without considering the context of why they were created in the first place. Many of them were erected as part of the push to enshrine a dishonest, prettied-up version of the Confederacy—they weren’t a testament to our history, but a distortion of it.

Finally, if we want to learn about, say, Robert E. Lee—and we should—we can do it without staring up at a 60-foot-tall statue of him on a major Richmond, Virginia, thoroughfare.

We should make distinctions, of course. Big statues in prominent public spaces erected to make a point about the supposed glories of the Confederacy should come down and be transferred elsewhere (ideally to museums or battlefields). But this should always be done lawfully and with due deliberation, not via mob action or under mob pressure.

The Confederate flag should be shunned, as a symbol of a viciously flawed cause.

Direct commemorations of the Confederate war dead—obelisks with lists of names of local causalities, Confederate cemeteries—should be preserved as an appropriate way to mark the human cost of a terrible conflict.

The bases are a harder case, since their names have themselves entered the American military tradition and places like Fort Bragg and Fort Benning are better known than their namesakes, the Confederate generals Braxton Bragg and Henry Benning. But as the source of their names becomes more widely known, it’s going to be harder to ask African American soldiers willing to sacrifice life and limb for their country to look past them.

The Richmond statue of Lee, which Virginia Governor Ralph Northam has said is coming down, has long been a point of contention. Its unveiling in 1890 was a key moment in the creation of a cult of Lee, as a man of “moral strength and moral beauty” as a speaker put it that day.

Frederick Douglass appropriately scorned this movement. “It would seem,” he wrote sarcastically, “that the soldier who kills the most men in battle, even in a bad cause, is the greatest Christian, and entitled to the highest place in heaven.”

The apotheosis of Lee was an element of a Lost Cause mythology that maintained that the Civil War wasn’t truly about slavery, only Southern states defending their legitimate prerogatives. This interpretation became very influential; it was also completely false.

Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, made the purpose of the Confederacy unmistakable in his notorious Cornerstone speech in 1861. He said of the new government: “Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

The theory of state rights that the Confederacy used to justify secession wasn’t meant to preserve our constitutional scheme, but to destroy it. It had been developed by South Carolina's John C. Calhoun, who disdained The Federalist Papers and believed the country had set off on an erroneous, nationalist path from the very first Congress.

Besides, the South supported state rights only to the extent that they were useful in protecting slavery. It insisted, after all, on a federal Fugitive Slave Act to ensure that Northern states had no discretion in deciding whether to return runaway slaves.

Secession was a traitorous act that threatened to destroy the American nation, to create a rump republic built on slavery, and to make impossible the subsequent rise of the United States to a world power. Its leaders don’t deserve to be given a place of honor in our landscape denied to worthier men. Confederate statues shouldn’t be vandalized, but they should be reconsidered.