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As far as I know, the locals got a say. They didn’t want Lee to hang around. I believe the bronze is going to be used for some sculpture or installation. While I’m sure you will find it low-effort or objectionable, it will still be public art. I think that’s a perfectly valid use of the materials. There’s no statute of statue limitations, and if the current residents (owners? Caretakers?) wanted to melt the statue, more power to them.
I do think the authorities were wary of what you describe. The article also cited a risk of “violence” if the statue were to remain on display somewhere. I imagine they were thinking of white supremacists reclaiming Mr. Lee for Stone Mountain, Dukes of Hazzarding their way over innocent museum visitors along the way. If I’m feeling charitable, they were probably also worried about attracting anti-Confederate vandals.
Your speculation, though, is off-base. Lee is just too removed to merit personal hostility. Can you think of any particularly gentlemanly myths about the guy? All I’ve got is that he joined the Confederacy out of some kind of principled stance; partial credit, but not particularly unique. And I expect my knowledge of historical trivia is a lot broader than the average statue-tipper.
No, sometimes people mean what they say. Lee represents the Confederacy more than he personifies it. Hundreds of thousands died because he, and people like him, chose to stand up for a garbage cause. Nothing personal about it.
I feel like this is a "tell me you haven't actually read any contemporary accounts of the civil war" type moments. I know liberal the liberal tendency is to dismiss or at least deemphasize the role of personal virtue in favor of other factors, but in their memoirs both Sherman and Grant make a point to praise Lee for "leading from the front" and being unusually honest, considerate, and humble for a man in position of high command. Then there are all the (likely apocryphal) stories about his time as a college professor and post-war travels. Finally, there is the simple fact that in the closing weeks of the war and it's immediate aftermath he was one of the more vocal advocates for peace and not turning to insurgency amongst the Southern leadership.
Long story short, I find it notable that both while the war was being fought and for over a century after it's conclusion there doesn't seem to have been anyone on either side who had a negative word to say about the man. Meanwhile from where I am sitting, the demonization of Robert E Lee as the Arch-Traitor and Defender of Slavery (along with the wider confederate statue controversy) seems to have come out of nowhere in the early 00s. Does anything about the timing there strike you as just a tad convenient?
Let's lay our cards on the table.
Do you know how I can tell that you are lying when you claim that there's "Nothing personal about it"?
Because just a few sentences earlier you said " Lee is just too removed to merit personal hostility."
You and I both know that this is about is people like you wanting to express their antipathy for people like me. How can it be anything other than personal?
I was objecting to “Lee was such a perfect personification of the Southern patriarchal ideal of gentlemanliness that he invites leftist hostility like no other figure in US history.” That would require leftists to know enough about the man to form an opinion on his personal conduct. I think this is unlikely, and disdain for the man is driven more by his allegiance than the other way around.
You’re correct about my unfamiliarity with Civil War primary sources. I’m sure Lee was very articulate; elsewhere in tbis thread, his letters come across quite well. It’s not his gentlemanly credentials to which I object. No, I find it unlikely that “leftists” take offense at his personal charms more than his affiliation. If I—someone who grew up in the South, is actually interested in military history, and generally retains more Civil War trivia than was required for school—if I couldn’t think of a sage anecdote to show Lee’s personality, why should I expect the same from a random protestor?
Lee “inviting hostility” by being too cool and gentlemanly, or by “cutting too close to the bone,” is wishful thinking of the same sort which brings us “they hated us because of our freedom.” Cute, but not realistic.
Sometimes the simplest answer is the best. Slavery bad, therefore Confederacy bad, therefore dead Confederates bad, therefore statue must go. Or, as you suggest: outgroup bad, therefore people they admire bad, therefore statue must go. Yes, I would say that the latter approaches a personal enmity for you and yours, and I think that’s terrible. But I support protestors’ right to remove the statue on the former grounds. I will defend them against accusations that they are merely seething at men they couldn’t recognize on the street. There’s nothing personal about that.
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Imo he clearly meant “nothing personal” to mean nothing personal against Lee. It’s the ideology/Confederacy that he represents (and/or is claimed to represent) that attracts progressive’s ire.
Whether Stalin was an honorable gentleman isn’t too relevant when discussing his statues.
Yes, but Lee is "people like [us]", and as a stand-in, the one being retconned into an Arch-Traitor and Defender of Slavery.
The loogie in the face of southern identity is being hurled at a statue for plausible deniability - the desire is actually for the phlegm to land on anyone who doesn't lay down in front of a giant shit test about the civil war.
That's a Bingo
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This is the outcome of pernicious lies about American history; not yours, though the use of "traitor" reveals so much of the ignorance in those speaking. Lee saw no superior allegiance to the Union because the gestalt US is a postbellum creation. Today states have such say in mutual governance because of the vast expansion of the federal government--both disastrously alien ideas in the 19th century. Slavery was the flashpoint on the magazine of this idea as the north asserted previously nonexistent authority on the south but were slavery not at issue it would have been something else. As insulting as you and many may feel at the idea of southerners fighting for states' rights, it is far more insulting to be told 19th century Americans would die in mass to free slaves, an insult not least of all because so many weren't American.
It was a war over the government of the country, federal or decentralized, and while the gestalt US has on balance made the world a better place (though this wanes by the day) than would be if the US had stayed decentralized, the term "War of Northern Aggression" still most accurately describes the conflict and is the reason men so principled as Lee found reason to oppose the north.
This is an extremely heterodox interpretation of history. You can argue that the entire field has been "captured by the left" and therefore shouldn't be trusted, but please be clear that this is the level of claim you're making.
Put simply, as a civil war aficionado, I have consumed various primary sources and secondary ones produced in less contentious times. There has been a dramatic shift in tone and removal of information over the past two decades, all of which have yet to be predicated by anything like new information.
I'm not even arguing the Civil War wasn't about slavery. It very clearly was the most major factor in the conflict. Just that the effort to cast it into cut-and-dry, black and white, hero-villain bullshit is just so obvious if you're remotely educated on the subject. I won't be gaslit about it.
I hope no one here is trying to cast hero-villain bullshit. My knowledge of the civil war comes is not as specific as yours or hlynka’s, yet I don’t believe it relies on sources written in the last 20 years. I’m in favor of argument from primary sources and resisting the urge to paint today’s values on a 150-year-old conflict.
My objection to Jake was similar to token’s. When a guy shows up, drops two or three classic revisionist lines, and insists that the whole premise of Civil War scholarship is “pernicious lies,” it’s not hard to see where he’s going. I have not been particularly reassured by his subsequent responses. If, like me, token suspected him of playing motte-and-bailey, making the motte explicit was a reasonable decision.
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As another civil war nerd; how do you know how haven't already been gaslit? There was a strong, well funded revisionist and revanchist effort to deny the historical reality of the south, the civil war, and the way the war was fought for several decades up until at least the 1960's.
How do you know the sources you read weren't based Rutherford's feelings about it rather than the historical reality?
It's turtles all the way down if we want to go tit for tat on "how do you know". What I can say about my older textbooks is they use far less emotional language and have more graphs than contemporary cruft.
Again: Do they? When you read accounts of EG Shiloh from pre about 2006 you'd think Johnny Reb had carried the day and not gotten driven from the field. When you look at nice books full of nice graphs from those days, you might notice the casualty numbers are somewhere between "enthusiastic" and Plutarch, with the union loosing something like 2 times as much as they actually did; by folding in a certain amount of loses to disease and desertion into battlefield casualties while at the same time only counting Confederates that were shot dead on the field. This leads to ridiculous figures (again, to pick shiloh) where the union looses twice as many men on the line in a battle where the confederates attacked, lost, and retreated.
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It always strikes me as odd that in history we have to find THE reason while in modern times we understand actors are motivated by disparate reasons.
For some people, state’s rights were why the civil war was fought. For many others, slavery was why the war was fought. For others, it was defense of home and hearth.
One final point. If it was solely about slavery, why didn’t Lincoln prior to any shooting use the fifth amendment to secure the slaves freedom while compensating the south? Would’ve in the long run been cheaper than the civil war and probably could’ve more orderly transitioned to a post slave situation.
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Pleading for clarity while citing Wikipedia in a two-sentence reply is poor decorum.
Yes, the field has been captured by those united in ideological opposition to any who argue the north shares blame in the war. The north as righteous crusaders is their orthodoxy, one which quite naturally requires such suppression of dissent when individuals like Lincoln himself so immediately and totally dispel their false history of the war in the quote already given:
Lincoln governed with extreme use of nonexistent power. He would have addressed all those grievances he had power (or contrived power) to solve. Had slavery alone been the issue, he could have simply done nothing at all as the Corwin amendment would have prevented secession. Had tariffs then been the remaining issue, Lincoln would have found a way to lift them unilaterally or else pressured congress to removing them, perhaps even pursuing beneficiary changes to those once hurt by the tariffs. But decades of northern antipathy toward the south and the sum of harms resultant meant the final grievance of the south became the Union government itself. They were no longer interested, and indeed no longer consented to its governance. With that, Lincoln's only remaining option was war. The south fired the first shot, but Union soldiers remained at Fort Sumter in hopes exactly that would happen.
One should note that Lincoln actually mentioned the Corwin amendment in his inaugural address and said he had no objection.
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Notice that I did not say anything about slaves. The “garbage cause” I had in mind was secession first and the social order of the Old South second. There’s a nice letter that sums it up:
The words of a man with allegiance to, and respect for, a higher federal Union. His personal loyalty to Virginia won out, in the end, but it wasn’t an easy decision.
“War of Northern Aggression” is pure, ahistorical revisionism. It was the South that agitated for dismantling the Union, the South which passed Articles of Secession, and of course the South which fired the first shots.
A Union that no longer exists, a Union that had he fully felt his own prescient words he would have fought against to his dying breath:
(And a Union that had all Americans of the time known would follow, would have themselves seen Washington burned to the ground.)
Ahistorical revisionism is ignoring the economic destruction the north wrought on the south and the nullification crisis that spurred decades before South Carolina seceded; it's ignoring their secession despite the Corwin amendment; it's ignoring the refusal of New Jersey and Delaware to ratify the 13th; it's ignoring how so many of those who would "die to free black men" went on to murder, often first raping, untold numbers of Native Americans in the decades that followed, atrocities led by such wonderful Union officers as George Custer. Ahistorical revisionism is most of all the idea whites would fight a war in the 1800s over the quality of life of blacks. It beggars belief so incredibly dissonant positions as the supposed totality of racism to this day, only finally being truly addressed, can be held simultaneously with the belief racism weighed so heavily on the hearts of American men 160 years ago to be the sole basis, absolutely-no-other-reason-whatsoever, for nearly a million of them to murder each other.
And that ignores so much on just the financial interests involved in the conflict. Still, there is nothing difficult, for there is nothing truthful in denying the part slavery played in the civil war; reciprocally, only falsehoods are found in asserting that without slavery secessionist war would have never happened. Rather, it as as we so often see ("Wet streets cause rain"), if slavery were truly the only issue, the war would have never started.
When I call you on
you backpedal to defending what he would think about today’s government. And when I point out that “War of Northern Aggression” is a revisionist attempt to gloss over all the ways the South started it, your response is to cry Both Sides and insist that Southern suffering is overlooked.
I can’t even tell why you’re quoting “die to free black men” as if it’s something I asserted. Again, I did not mention slavery at all until you brought it up. Perhaps it was buried in one of the sources you’ve tossed out? No?
I’m starting to suspect you’re more interested in pushing a narrative about racism than actually arguing any points.
You equivocate; on the entity you call "Union" and conflate with its successor and on what "allegiance" meant to the man. Lee considered himself Virginian first, this is fact, the federalized gestalt US and notion of American first not existing until the 20th century, also fact.
This is very bad. It is low-effort, uncharitable and antagonistic. In a discussion about causes of the civil war, the south suffering from economic policies enacted to benefit the north is wholly relevant. Your poor mockery amounts to "but other than taxes, what did the south have to complain about?" Frame this in context just-antebellum America would know well: "But other than taxes, what did the 13 colonies have to complain about?" Or most crudely but certainly most accurately, "Aside from all that shit the north did to the south, what did the north do to the south?"
Again low effort, uncharitable and antagonistic.
The Lincoln and Lee quotes were provided because they alone settle this matter. The President of the United States and the final commander of the Confederate Forces could have only been more plain in conveying "Slavery is not the cause of this war" if they said that verbatim. You, or rather those whose words you repeat, go to incredible lengths with total institutional backing and control to call liar on both sides.
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: the south suffered tremendously under tax policy enacted to benefit the north
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: the Corwin amendment would have made slavery constitutionally protected
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: two northern states refused to ratify the 13th amendment
You claim it is ahistorical revisionism to dispute the relevance of slavery: northerners would not have died to free blacks from bondage
If two factions were poised for war and the supposed cause at issue was commonly viewed with apathy by one faction while the oppositional faction could have achieved their goals peacefully, why did they still go to war?
You must either contrive some many-stepped rationalization or take the simplest explanation: the cause of the war was something else.
It wasn't Fort Sumter. First shot, yes, in a war that was inevitable. A first shot there is no controversy(archive) in saying resulted from Lincoln's maneuvering. Please fully read that article as I expect the title may provoke misconstruing. A plain reading will enlighten you to that inevitability of conflict.
I hope you apprise yourself of my history here, the image you have of me is false. You do not know how I think, you do not know why I chose to comment on this. It was not to make demons of the north, nor martyrs of the south. I'll leave you on that, as your poor behavior has made me disinterested in dignifying your words again after this final reply.
I never claimed that it was disputing the relevance of slavery that was revisionist.
I said “war of northern aggression” was revisionist, and I’ll stand by that statement. Even though I’m fully aware of the tariff crises, the debate over nullification and federal/state primacy, and the various unsatisfactory compromises which left the nation at the boiling point. These are mitigating factors; they do not overrule the fact that the South made the final decision.
You have consistently argued against a position I haven’t taken.
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Hardly seems like economic destruction according to this [pro-Southern source](Ahistorical revisionism is ignoring the economic destruction the north wrought on the south):
Insofar as I've understood, the "Tariff of Abominations" was only a temporary thing and basically in large part happened due to Calhoun et al engaging in machinations that only blew up in their face, the South had if anything a hegemonic position in American politics before the Civil War with most presidents in the preceeding decades being either pro-slavery Southerners (Pierce, Tyler, Polk) or South-friendly Northerners (Buchanan, Fillmore etc.), and the whole Civil War was basically Southerners getting scared that this hegemony might be over for good (which would then have reprecussions on many things, not the least being slavery) and leaving in a huff.
I would have responded to this earlier but I didn't want to ignore your first line, and there it looks like you meant to include a link.
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The Vice President of the Confederate States of America (via Wikipedia):
Historian William C. Davis (Look Away pp. 97-98 via Wikipedia):
I won't tell you Northerners fought "to free slaves" because that's as obviously wrong to me as it is to you. It's easy to reconcile the seeming inconsistency in Mr. Lincoln's thinking: the South seceded to preserve slavery, and the North took up arms in reaction. Perhaps the North didn't care about slavery, but that doesn't matter in evaluating the South's cause.
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I'm aware that it was a local decision, a product of a political milieu that, as far as I know, was one of the long-term consequences of a large and recent demographic shift in Northern Virginia, namely that a great number of white liberals have settled in the region after getting jobs in the enormously expanded federal bureaucracy in the capital.
I'm not surprised they don't want Lee around.
Regarding "myths", I'm not aware of any, I've only read that Lee was regarded as a true Southern gentleman his whole life. I don't see that as a myth.
And Rommel was regarded as a true German gentleman. But if a statue of Rommel stood in a place of honour in central Stuttgart as part of the pantheon of military heroes of Baden-Wurttemberg, and it was melted down at the request of the local synagogue, we wouldn't be complaining about "teabagging the outgroup". In fact, part of the "Reconstruction" process in post-WW2 Germany was the removal of Nazi monuments.
I would.
Isn't it weird how Lee statues only became equivocated with Nazi ones over a hundred years after the war, rather than immediately after alike actual Nazi statues?
Well it’s also weird that the statues were erected decades after the war ended. The Confederacy lost too fast to put up monuments to their glory while they existed.
You're underestimating the national divide that existed post-Civil War.
Up until World War 1, there was an honest question among those that considered such on wether or not any of the Southern states would actually fight for America, period. (Instead, they turned out in droves that carried a consistent trend... up until very recently. Funny, that.) Most statues were put up as a meager act of concession, allowing pride to a defeated foe who nevertheless gave a good fight.
It's not as if the South had anything else in the aftermath.
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As I understand it from comments here (might be wrong! I have no idea!), part of the Civil War was that it ended in a sort of "okay, let's both now calm down and work together, you lost but that isn't the end" agreement. And whereas the same thing happened, sort of, with World vs Germany, it certainly did not happen with World vs the Nazi movement - that lost, and was destroyed, and eradicated, and all its flags destroyed, and the Earth salted and so on, already after the second World War ended. There was never anything like a truce with the Nazis; the most that occurred was "alright, if you completely repudiate the Nazi project and also are useful, we're going to keep using you and not look too closely." And that was more a matter of civil necessity.
The equivalent here would not be "US vs the South" but "US vs. the Southern secession movement", with the secession movement indeed having been conclusively defeated and buried by the war.
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Two completely different historical contexts, those two are. To argue that those two are anything but completely different is indeed leftist revisionism in action.
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Charlottesville isn't a part of Northern Virginia.
It's got some standard southern city dynamics going on. Most of the city population itself is black. The county that surrounds it, the college (UVA), and most of the rich people are white.
The city is a separate political entity from the county. So you often get a very extreme liberal core in the city. And it has no brakes. I grew up in the surrounding county, and this sort of racial politicking has been happening for decades. City council members get elected by finding and igniting racial grievances. Most of the time people just ignore them. It was probably their dream come true for this to be a flashpoint for the nation.
From what I have heard, similar things happen in Richmond and Atlanta and other large southern cities.
Northern Virginia is strange in that the population of their cities are not predominantly black. (aside from DC, where similar racial politicking takes place). Usually the newer a city the more functional the political system is within that city.
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You could (with or without 'Southern' depending on the case) say that, no doubt, about a whole host of basically contemptible people. Between fighting a war to preserve slavery, and being a good chap, the latter struggles to be a minor footnote in his legacy.
The personal character of Lee is the Motte to the Bailey of broader Confederate apologia. These statues of Lee (and Jackson and Davis and Forrest and almost anyone but Longstreet) are first and foremost celebrations of the Confederate cause.
More or less.
I think the inverse is true, too, and most statue-detractors don’t know a thing about the personal character involved. Toppling the statue is first and foremost about denying that cause, not about being jealous of Lee’s great social skills.
No doubt. As far as I can tell, there isn't a particular ire for Lee statues. There's just a lot of Lee statues.
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If the locals are saying “nah we don’t need this statue, we want to make mediocre abstract art out of the pieces”…
And you don’t have any skin in the game, except for the vibe that Lee was a pretty gentlemanly guy…
Then what’s wrong with the locals going on ahead?
But it's obviously not just a pragmatic decision to reuse bronze that is contained in some old useless statue that nobody likes. People responsible didn't even try to pretend that it was, calling it"grim act of justice", "haunted spectacle" or "destruction of icon of hate" instead.
And I think that’s their prerogative, not mine, and not OP’s.
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