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The widely reported act of destruction was swift, violent and spontaneous. A group of angry demonstrators surrounded the once-sacred statue, tied ropes to its neck, hauled it down into the street, and smashed it to pieces.

No, this particular act of desecration did not occur in Durham, N.C., last week; it took place at Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan on July 9, 1776. The icon that aroused such outrage was not a century-old statue of a Confederate soldier, but a 6-year-old equestrian tribute to England’s King George III.

That statue fell soon after George Washington ordered the new Declaration of Independence read aloud to New Yorkers. Its words proved enough to inspire the Sons of Liberty to bring down the king. Since it was made of lead, it was chopped to bits and made into bullets. The statue yielded 42,000 cartridges to battle the King’s troops in the Revolutionary War.

The point is, iconoclasm is nothing new, either in America or elsewhere. The powerful impulse to eradicate unpleasant historical memory dates back to the Egyptians who tried obliterating effigies of its Pharaonic queen, Hatshepsut.

Roman emperors routinely destroyed statues of their predecessors. The Germans (wisely) buried statues erected during the Third Reich. And Argentinian dissidents toppled a statue of Eva Perón in Buenos Aries, only to keep the effigy lying on its side in the park where it fell, a testament to both desecration and nostalgia.

The New York Times was mistaken when it reported that the Napoleon statue at the Place Vendôme in Paris has stood untouched since first installed. In fact, the original was toppled and replaced by a substitute only after a new Napoleonic regime rose to power.

For the last several years, American historians have been engaged in a muchneeded discussion about what to do — or say — about the monuments to the likes of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis that remain almost defiantly on their pedestals throughout the Old Confederacy.

Maybe these talks began too late. In May, Mayor Mitch Landrieu decided to purge four such statues in New Orleans: not only Lee, Davis and Louisiana-born Gen. P. G. T. Beauregard, but an odious tribute to the so-called “Battle of Liberty Place,” an insurrection launched by white supremacists against an interracial, post-Civil War government. Good riddance.

As we well know, the Confederate statue controversy accelerated, to put it mildly, just last week, after white supremacists celebrating the KKK and Nazism launched a heinous “demonstration” around the false premise of preserving a Lee statue in Charlottesville — a protest that ended in violence and death.

In short order, protesters toppled the Rebel soldier in Durham, the mayor of Baltimore ordered that city’s Confederate memorials removed and Gov. Cuomo banished New York’s inexplicable tributes to Confederate generals at the old NYU Hall of Fame in the Bronx.

On Tuesday and again on Thursday, President Trump warned that if not condemned, the new American iconoclasm would soon threaten monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

False equivalency? Hopefully. Although he has stoked the crisis himself by refusing to condemn extremists who rampaged in Charlottesville, Trump is not completely off-base about the danger now facing icons of the Founders, most of whom were slaveholders. Rev. Al Sharpton has already called for de-funding the Jefferson Memorial.

There’s nothing wrong with removing truly offensive statues that elevate traitors in public space. But let’s audit these memorials with care and context lest we sweep them away with such a broad brush that we whitewash actual history in the same way their proponents have appropriated historical memory.

Ironically, the extremists who organized their Charlottesville march around the fake trope of saving the Lee statue — together with Trump, who suggested that the haters had no other agenda than preservation (and moreover had “a permit”) — may have done more to propel its removal than a thousand voices sincerely finding it offensive. With some poetic justice, Charlottesville may have the same effect on Confederate memorials as Dylann Roof’s murderous rampage in Charleston so quickly exerted on the inexcusable display of the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina.

In the remote chance there may still be a way to take a breath, dial back the heat, and search for solutions that respect history, memory, art, and understandable human emotion, the following suggestions may offer a path.

First, let’s indeed abandon or relocate statues to Confederate icons that sit in public space outside the old Rebel States.

Why on earth did a Lee-Jackson “Last Meeting” statue ever get built on public land in Baltimore? Yes, it was a hostile, racist city for most of the Civil War. Lincoln avoided it en route to his inauguration for fear of being assassinated there. Massachusetts troops passing through a few months later were attacked on its streets. But Maryland did not secede from the Union. Rebel “icons” have no place there — or, for that matter, in Arizona or Montana, where Confederate heritage groups have stealthily erected monuments in states where little or no Civil War action occurred.

At the least, we should move these statues to schools or museums and use them to educate, not celebrate. As for truly offensive monuments like the Memphis equestrian of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest — a slave dealer who likely massacred unarmed blacks during the Civil War and led the KKK after — they belong in the dustheap of history and art alike.

Second, in some cases let’s consider context over condemnation. Cannot we surround century-old statues with explanatory texts that place them firmly within the historical periods that inspired them? Most Confederate memorials rose not in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. They got installed once white supremacists regained power after Reconstruction, overturned federally mandated rights for African Americans and created a false historical narrative to sanctify the rebellion.

In the eyes of the Jim Crow-era revisionists, secession had occurred to preserve not slavery but states’ rights (study the records of the original secession conventions to learn otherwise). The South had not really lost; it had merely been overpowered by greater numbers. And great generals like the “martyred” Jack-