It is high time for the United States to remove statues of Confederate leaders.
by Rabbi Schmuley Boteach**
This week, I took my family to Virginia in pursuit of one of myfavorite summertime activities, visiting Civil War battlefields. Wetraveled to the four great battlefields around Fredericksburg, wheremore than 100,000 soldiers died in the course of the war. I alsofulfilled my lifelong dream of visiting Appomattox Courthouse where onApril 9, 1865, Lee famously surrendered to Grant, in effect ending thewar.
What consistently baffles me in making these visits is the romanticism of the Confederacy that continues 140 years after thewar’s end. Wherever you go in the South, Robert E. Lee, JeffersonDavis, J.E.B. Stuart, James Longstreet, and the other Confederateleaders are venerated as heroes. In the course of my travels, I havedriven on Robert E. Lee Drive and Jefferson Davis Highway. I’ve seenmyriad monuments to Stonewall Jackson, and I’ve seen the Confederateflag flying from cars and homes.
As an American who loves his country, I am appalled by thepersistence of Confederate hero worship in the South 140 years afterthe Civil War’s end. After all, the South fought for a truly evilcause. While there were other factors that led to the Civil War, noserious, objective historian would deny that the principal cause of thewar was the institution of slavery, and that the South fought topreserve its “peculiar institution.”
Whether or not the soldiers of the Confederacy personally believedin slavery, they still fought to preserve the hideous, reprehensiblepractice of buying and selling human beings–each and every one createdin the image of G-d–like animals. Babies were torn away from theirmothers’ breasts; men, women, and children were whipped like beasts.This was the essential, defining institution that the Confederacystruggled to keep.
**Although the majority of the American people– including many moderatepoliticians like Abraham Lincoln–wanted to avoid Civil War and werecontent to allow slavery to die a slow, inevitable death, the mostinfluential political leaders of the day were not. On the southernside, “fire-eaters” like Rhett and Yancey were willing to make war toguarantee the propagation of their “right” to own slaves. On thenorthern side, abolitionists like John Brown and Henry Ward Beecher ofConnecticut were willing to make war in order to put an immediate endto the institution of slavery.
So-was the war about slavery? Of course. If there had been nodisagreement over the issue of slavery, the South would probably nothave discerned a threat to its culture and the southern politicianswould have been much less likely to seek “their right to secede.” Butwas it only about slavery? No. It was also about theconstitutional argument over whether or not a state had a right toleave the Union, and–of primary concern to most southern soldiers–thecontinuation of antebellum southern culture. Although the majority ofSoutherners had little interest in slaves, slavery was a primaryinterest of Southern politicians–and consequently the underlying causeof the South’s desire to seek independence and state rights.
The message here is that the reasons a nation goes to war are usuallyvarious and complicated. The American Civil War is no exception.