Robert E. Lee: ‘Confederate Monuments Would Retard’ The Accomplishments Of The South

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Via Fred Barbash for WaPo

President Trump may see the statues commemorating the Confederacy and Robert E. Lee as things of “beauty” that will be “greatly missed.”

But Lee himself did not share the sentiment. To him, they would only “keep open the sores of war” and the ill will war engendered, which he thought should be consigned to “oblivion.”

He said so on several occasions in the years after he surrendered his army to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox, Va., some 70 miles southwest of Charlottesville, which erupted in violence last weekend after white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched in the name of saving a statue of Lee from dismantling.

He expressed his views in two famous letters that are now recirculating widely in the wake of Charlottesville.

The first was to Thomas Rosser, a former Confederate general who in 1866 queried Lee about a proposed commemorative monument.

“My conviction is,” Lee wrote, “that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt in the present condition of the Country, would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its accomplishment; & of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour.”

Lee thought it better to tend to the graves of the fallen. “All I think that can now be done, is to aid our noble & generous women in their efforts to protect the graves & mark the last resting places of those who have fallen, & wait for better times.”

The second came in 1869, when Lee declined an invitation from the Gettysburg Battlefield Memorial Association to help mark the positions of the troops in that 1863 battle with granite memorials.

He responded that his “engagements will not permit me to be present.” But even if he were able to attend, he added, he thought it “wiser … not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”

“I don’t think that means he would have felt good about the people who fought for the Confederacy being completely forgotten,” University of Georgia historian James Cobb told PBS correspondent Lisa Desjardins. “But he didn’t want a cult of personality for the South.”

Lee, Horn said, “believed countries that erased visible signs of civil war recovered from conflicts quicker. He was worried that by keeping these symbols alive, it would keep the divisions alive.”

Most of the Confederate statues and monuments, as University of North Carolina Charlotte historian Karen L. Cox wrote in The Post, were built between 1895 and World War I at the behest of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

“They were part of a campaign to paint the Southern cause in the Civil War as just and slavery as a benevolent institution,” she wrote, “and their installation came against a backdrop of Jim Crow violence and oppression of African Americans. The monuments were put up as explicit symbols of white supremacy.”

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So that’s from WaPo. 

And for those that missed it, here’s our post on what Lee’s ancestors are saying about Trump and Charlottesville…

As you might have heard, Donald Trump got himself into a little bit of hot water yesterday.

Already under fire for waiting some 48 hours to explicitly fault white supremacists for the violence that stemmed from … well … from a rally organized by white supremacists, Trump turned the crazy knob up to a Spinal Tap-ish “11” at a press conference in New York on Tuesday.

You can read the full recap here, but for the purposes of this post, just note that at one point during the exceedingly bizarre proceedings, Trump launched into an orange-faced rant about the removal of Robert E. Lee statues and what that presaged for monuments to Thomas Jefferson who, he reminded one reporter, “was a major slave owner.”

Trump: Jefferson was a "major slave owner… are we going to take down the statue?… you're changing history, you're changing culture." pic.twitter.com/IIoIuxbKfK

— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) August 15, 2017

That, along with pretty much everything else he said over the course of a truly surreal Q&A session, cost him the support of corporate America on Wednesday and drew the ire of nearly every lawmaker in Washington.

You’re reminded that this whole thing started on Friday when a group of Tiki torch-wielding white nationalists trekked throughthe University of Virginia’s campus to protest the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from Charlottesville’s Emancipation Park.

Well, in the final and most hilarious insult of the day for Trump, his stance on Lee and on white nationalism in general has now been officially rebuked by … wait for it … Robert E. Lee.

Or at least General Lee’s ghost.

Here’s CNN:

The great-great grandson of Gen. Robert E. Lee condemned last weekend’s violence in Charlottesville, Virginia and said it might be “appropriate” for Confederate statues to be exhibited in a museum.

“Eventually, someone is going to have to make a decision, and if that’s the local lawmaker, so be it. But we have to be able to have that conversation without all of the hatred and the violence. And if they choose to take those statues down, fine,” Robert E. Lee V, 54, of Washington DC, told CNN’s Polo Sandoval.

“Maybe it’s appropriate to have them in museums or to put them in some sort of historical context in that regard,” he added.

Lee, who works as an athletic director at a Virginia school, called Saturday’s incidents “senseless” and “sad” for his family.

“Those sorts of acts on Saturday, that’s just not to be tolerated,” he said. “We feel strongly that Gen. Lee would never ever stand for that sort of violence.”

In a statement, the Lee family said the life of the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia “was about duty, honor and country.”

“At the end of the Civil War, he implored the nation to come together to heal our wounds and to move forward to become a more unified nation,” the statement said. “He never would have tolerated the hateful words and violent actions of white supremacists, the KKK, or neo-Nazis.”

So to all the folks out there fighting to keep General Lee’s statues from falling, just know that his great-great grandson thinks they should probably come down.

And, in a speech from the great beyond, General Lee himself has this message for Donald Trump: