James Kirchick

Treason – not racism – is the only legitimate reason to pull down a statue

Donald Trump has a point when he asks, with respect to the tearing down of Confederate statues: ‘Is it George Washington next? You have to ask yourself, where does it stop?’.

The reason he has a point is the rationale being advanced by many advocates for removing such monuments: that the individuals depicted were racist or, in some cases, slaveholders. ‘Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson will be removed from the CUNY hall of great Americans because New York stands against racism,’ New York Governor Andrew Cuomo tweeted. ‘Confederate statues are all about racism,’ declares Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. Karen L. Cox, professor of history at the University of North Carolina, insists that, ‘The whole point of Confederate monuments is to celebrate white supremacy.’ 

Well, not the whole point. For it’s more than anti-black racism that inspired the erection of so many statues and monuments memorialising the Confederacy, the vast majority of which were built many decades after slavery was outlawed. Sympathy for treason against the United States, which is what the Civil War (or War of Southern Aggression, as I like to call it) ultimately amounted to, was another motivating factor. And treason, not racism, must be the criteria by which we determine whether to remove statues, monuments and other insignia from public property.

To use any other benchmark – like the attitudes held by historical figures, or even whether they owned slaves – is to fall victim to a dangerous presentism that would effectively stigmatise each and every American of note from the founding of the United States up until the 1990s (and in some cases the current day) as beyond the moral pale. Yes, Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. But they also laid the foundations for a democratic republican form of government – theretofore unknown to humankind – which provided the tools for the eventual freedom of those slaves.

It would take several generations before the declaration that ‘All men are created equal’ would be fully realised to include blacks (and several more generations until it encompassed women).

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