ATTACK ON ROBERT E. LEE IS AN ASSAULT ON AMERICAN HISTORY ITSELF
By
ALLAN C. BROWNFELD
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Early
in February, the City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia voted 3-2 to
remove a bronze equestrian monument to Robert E. Lee that stands in a
downtown park named in his honor. Vice Mayor Wes Belamy, the council's
only African American member, led the effort to remove the statue. In
the end, this vote may be largely symbolic. Those opposed to the
statue's removal intend to file a lawsuit and point to a state statute
that says Virginia cities have no authority over the war memorials they
inherited from past generations. "If such are erected," the law reads,
"it shall be unlawful for the authorities of the locality, or any other
person or persons, to disturb or interfere with any monuments or
memorials so erected."
The
attack on the Robert E. Lee statue is, in reality, an attack on
American history itself. It has been suggested that the Washington
Monument and Jefferson Memorial are inappropriate, since they celebrate
men who owned slaves. Those who seek to erase our history sound a bit
like the Taliban and ISIS, who are busy destroying historic structures
all over the Middle East if they predate the rise of Islam. History is
what it is, a mixed bag of mankind's strengths and weaknesses, of
extraordinary achievements and the most horrible depredations. To judge
the men and women of past eras by today's standards is to be guilty of
what the Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood called the "sin of
contemporaneity."
Those
who refer to slavery as America's "original sin" should review history.
Sadly, from the beginning of recorded history until the 19th century,
slavery was the way of the world. When the U.S. Constitution was written
in 1787. Slavery was legal everyplace in the world. What was unique was
that in the American colonies there was a strenuous objection to
slavery and that the most prominent framers of the Constitution wanted
to eliminate it at the very start of the nation.
Our
Judeo-Christian tradition, many now forget, accepted the legitimacy of
slavery. the Old Testament regulates the relationship between master
and slave in great detail. In Leviticus (XXV: 39-55), God instructs the
Children of Israel to enslave the heathen and their progeny forever. In
the New Testament, St..Paul urges slaves to obey their masters with full
hearts and without equivocation. St..Peter urges slaves to obey even
unjust orders from their masters.
At
the time of its cultural peak, ancient Athens may have had 115,000
slaves to 43,000 citizens. The same is true of Ancient Rome. Plutarch
notes that on single day in the year 167 B.C., 150,000 slaves were sold
in a single market. The British historian of classical slavery, Moses I.
Finley, writes: "The cities in which individual freedom reached its
highest expression----most obviously Athens---were cities in which
chattel slavery flourished."
American
history is flawed, as is any human enterprise. Yet those who now call
for the removal of statues and monuments commemorating our past are
measuring our history against perfection, not against other real
places. What other societies in 1787---or any date in history prior to
that time, would these critics find more free and equitable than ours?
Where else was religious freedom to be found in 1787? Compared to
perfection, our ancestors are found wanting. Compared to other
real,places in the world, they were clearly ahead of their time,
advancing the frontiers of freedom.
In
the case of Robert E. Lee himself, there is more to his story than the
Charlottesville City Council may understand. Everyone knows that Lee's
surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox effectively ended the Civil
War. What few remember today is the real heroism of Robert E. Lee. By
surrendering, he was violating the orders given by Jefferson Davis, the
elected leader of the Confederacy. The story of April 1865 is not just
one of decisions made, but also of decisions rejected. Lee's rejection
of continuing the war as a guerrilla battle, the preference of Jefferson
Davis, and Grant's choice to be magnanimous, cannot be overestimated in
importance.
With
the fall of Richmond, Davis and the Confederate government were often
on the run. Davis, writes Prof Jay Winik in his important book "April
1865: The Month That Saved America," : "...was thinking about such
things as a war of extermination...a national war that ruins the enemy.
In short, guerrilla resistance...The day after Richmond fell, Davis had
called on the Confederacy to shift from a conventional war to a dynamic
guerrilla war of attrition, designed to wear down the North and force
it to conclude that keeping the South in the Union would not be worth
the interminable pain and ongoing sacrifice."
But
Robert E. Lee knew the war was over. Grant was magnanimous in victory
and, Winik points out, "...was acutely aware that on this day, what had
occurred was the surrender of one army to another---not of one
government to another. The war was very much on. There were a number of
potentially troubling rebel commanders in the field. And there were
still some 175,000 other Confederates under arms elsewhere; one-half in
scattered garrisons and the rest in three remaining rebel armies. What
mattered now was laying the groundwork for persuading Lee's fellow
armies to join in his surrender---and also for reunion, the urgent
matter of making the nation whole again."
Appomattox
was not preordained. "If anything," notes Winik, "retribution had been
the larger and longer precedent. So, if these moments teemed with
hope---and they did---it was largely due to two men who rose to the
occasion, to Grant's and Lee's respective actions: one general,
magnanimous in victory, the other gracious and equally dignified in
defeat, the two of them, for their own reasons and in their own ways,
fervently interested in beginning the process to bind up the wounds of
the last four years...Above all, this surrender defied millenniums of
tradition in which rebellions typically ended in yet greater shedding of
blood...One need only recall the harsh suppression of the peasants'
revolt in Germany in the 16th century, or the ravages of Alva during the
Dutch rebellion,,or the terrible punishments inflicted on the Irish by
Cromwell and then on the Scots after Culloden, or the bloodstained
vengeance executed during the Napoleanic restoration, or the horrible
retaliation imposed during the futile Chinese rebellion in the mid-19th
century."
If
it were not for Robert E..Lee's decision not to blindly follow
irrational instructions to keep fighting a guerrilla war indefinitely,
the surrender at Appomattox never would have taken place and our
nation's history would have been far different. Fortunately, our
American tradition has never embraced the notion of blindly following
orders, particularly if they involved illegal or immoral acts. No
American could ever escape responsibility for such acts by saying, "I
was simply following orders."
The
effort to erase our past, as the Charlottesville City Council proposes,
comes about, in large part, because we know so little about our own
history. Pulitzer Prize winning historian David McCullough declares
that, "We are raising a generation of people who are historically
illiterate. We can't function in a society if we don't know who we are
and where we came from." More than two thirds of college students and
administrators who participated in a national survey were unable to
remember that freedom of religion and the press are guaranteed by the
Bill.of Rights. In surveys conducted at 339 colleges and universities,
more than one-fourth of students and administrators did not list freedom
of speech as an essential right protected by the First Amendment.
If
we judge the past by the standards of today, must we stop reading Plato
and Aristotlr, Sophocles and Aristophanes, Dante and Chaucer? Will we
soon hear calls to demolish the Acropolis and the Coliseum, as we do to
remove memorials to Washington and Jefferson, and statues of Robert E.
Lee? Must we abandon the Bible because it lacks modern sensibility?
Where will it end? As theologian Elton Trueblood declared,
"contemporaneity" is indeed a sin.Se would all do well to avoid its
embrace."
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