Reconciliation: 18

Lyndon Johnson told the story of a Texas schoolteacher who, faced with a school board divided on whether the world was round or flat, concluded, “I can teach it both ways.” That’s how I feel about the current controversy about removing confederate statutes. That may not be surprising for someone who had great-grandfathers who fought on opposite sides or our Civil War.

On the one hand, I worry that, when we start removing history, we lose more than we gain. Remember how the Taliban blasted ancient monuments away as target practice? In the more distant past, after her death in 1457 BC, Hatshepsut's monuments were attacked, her statues dragged down and smashed, and her image and titles defaced, information lost—we regret—to future scholars for all times.

On the other hand, those who find themselves apoplectic over the removal of statues of Robert E. Lee should read a good history of the United States and its civil war. Consider then, that there are no statues of Benedict Arnold in the courthouse squares of America, and no controversy attached to their absence. Sadly, Robert E. Lee was as dedicated to, and capable of, destroying our country as it existed in his day as Arnold was in preventing its creation in his.

Both, as loathe as we may be to admit it, abandoned their oath to America in order to support her enemies.

I know that Lee is considered by many to be “an honorable man.” When I first gazed upon the mile of open fields that his troops were ordered into in the tragic three-division assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863, I  was no longer sure exactly how he merited that praise, but so be it. Let us simply try to understand those whose ancestors were owned by Lee’s wife and over whom he held total authority of life, punishment, or death. Let us further consider how, according to historian and author Elizabeth Brown Pryor, he referred to the family’s slave children as “my ebony-mites.” Is this an American badge of honor?

Were our ancestries different, so might be our feelings.

As a final thought, I primarily regret seeing another divisive movement settle upon our country like a primal, festering sore. Surely there is a need: poverty, the abandoned American Delta, collapsing infrastructure, and the need for decent healthcare for all, that could occupy our attention more productively.

Back to sending 15,000 men toward Cemetery Ridge for the purpose of preserving the institution of slavery, there have been moments when much of America wasn’t that great when we recall them. No matter how we may feel, couldn’t we, instead, recall the beaches of Normandy, and other times when she was?

Perhaps it's an institution
that isn't worthy of
monuments to its supporters.