Confederate monuments tumble; and others?

As we watch the continuing saga of demonstrations against Confederate memorials and statues vs. Southerners who claim removing these icons demeans their history and heritage, America needs more clarity and understanding on this issue

 

As I wrote last week, the statues of Confederate soldiers that can be found in most county seats of the old Confederacy, which was defeated 165 years ago, pose no threat to Americans in the 21^st century.

 

Last week, a San Francisco mob protesting Confederate statues tore down a statue of Gen. U.S. Grant. The Union general was largely responsible for defeating the Confederate army and freeing the slaves. As president from 1869 to 1877, Grant presided over what was probably the administration friendliest to African-Americans until the Truman administration. Grant had ordered U.S. troops to defend the civil rights of freedmen, a practice that would end after the “Compromise of 1876,” which ended Reconstruction.

 

Yet, the mobs who want to tear down statues tackled Grant, too, reportedly on the grounds that he, at one time, owned an inherited slave. The same San Francisco mob knocked down a statue of Spanish missionary Father Junipero Serra, a Catholic saint. A statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded last week by protesters condemning his treatment of indigenous Americans. Where will this attitude lead? Are the tombstones and homes of soldiers and slaveholders off limits? How strong a disinfectant will be needed to purge America of its infection of racism, slavery and white supremacy?

 

The protesters want to punish men and women who lived in the 19^th century or earlier and failed to adopt the moral principles and social norms of the  21^st century, but those fighting to preserve the heritage of the Confederate years may not be truthful in their protection of statues, flags and other icons.

 

James McPherson, a Princeton history professor who wrote what is to me the best one-volume history of the Civil War (“Battle Cry of Freedom”), has a new essay in The New York Review of Books in which he breaks the news to defenders of the Old South that their version of history of the Civil War and of the antebellum and post-war years is seriously flawed. McPherson calls it “Southern Comfort” — a comforting explanation of how and why their southern armies failed to defeat the Union and what caused the war. The myth of the “Lost Cause” claims superior armies, greater sacrifices and better leaders succumbed only to the superior numbers and wealth of the enemy. Southerners had to comfort themselves that their cause was greater, wasn’t about slavery and wasn’t a fair fight.

 

But it was slavery. McPherson and other historians make clear, slavery was the primary cause of the Civil War and its 620,000 deaths. Worse, the iconography of the South after the war, its tale of noble cavaliers and fearless infantrymen. States’ rights and economic differences perpetuated the lie that the South had God and morality on its side. This led to the discrimination and racial segregation that continued halfway through the 20^th century.

 

But Confederate soldiers and leaders do not bear the guilt alone for slavery and racism. New England merchants profited from the slave trade. Universities, including Yale, Harvard and Georgetown, exploited slave labor to build their institutions. British ships carried Africans in chains to slave auctions in the South and the Caribbean. To participants, these voyages were, as a Mafia don might explain, “just business,” and a profitable business at that.

 

Protesters who want to wipe out every vestige of slavery and discrimination will have to require a lot of historic figures and institutions to do penance for their crimes. Many historians have argued that it is wrong to judge people of the past by today’s (vastly changed) standards. That warning should add nuance to the roles of people in the history of slavery and race in America.