Conservatives’ defense of Confederate statues is weak
How would you feel about a nation that chose to erect a statue in a place of great honor to a traitor who led a war effort against that nation? Would your feelings be even stronger if a prime reason for the treason was to perpetuate the greatest evil ever to occur in his country? You might be surprised then to learn that the statues of Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens, and other such Confederate traitors reside in the Capitol of the United States. If a statue could smile, I’m guessing these would have done so after observing the Jan. 6 attempted insurrection at the Capitol.
As The Sun reported, the House of Representatives just voted to remove these statues, along with a bust of Maryland’s Roger Taney, the Supreme Court chief justice who wrote the pro-slavery Dred Scott decisions, from their locations in the Capitol. The Senate will now consider the proposal. Almost two thirds of Republicans in the House voted against the removal proposal. The two reasons they offered in opposition are instructive because of what they say — and what they don’t say.
The first reason is a repeat of the belief, most famously expressed by Spanish philosopher George Santayana, that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. For that and many other reasons, there is near universal acceptance of the notion that we should never forget or deny our history. How we interpret our history can be controversial, as evidenced currently by the debate over teaching critical race theory. That we must remember it, teach it and learn from it, however, is not. Remembering our history does not require glorifying those who deserve no such glory. Germans remember the Holocaust without having statues of Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels displayed in their national parliament.
Jefferson Davis was not just “a man of his time,” and therefore his defenders cannot claim he was anything less than entirely culpable for the evil he defended. As president of the Confederate States, he was the leader of the effort to maintain slavery on the North American continent and directed the war effort to do so that resulted in the death of more than 600,000 Americans. His vice president, Alexander Stephens, stood out even among pro-slavery politicians for the ardent defense of the evil institution. Among Stephens’ many notable comments was that the Confederacy rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” This is not merely a truth but a “great truth,” he said, making it somehow truer — sort of like when Donald Trump capitalized his tweets. Stephens is the man the state of Georgia chose as its representative in the Capitol Statuary. That leads to the second argument from Republicans.
It is the individual states that choose which of its citizens is, according to the National Statuary Act, “illustrious for their historic renown or for distinguished civic or military services” and deserves the honor of having their statue displayed in the Capitol. The Republican opponents of the new bill argue that it is the states, then, who must decide whether to remove their chosen statues. Perhaps the people of Connecticut will choose their native son Benedict Arnold as their statutory representative due to his military service. Or maybe Alabama will honor the civic service of Bull Connor, the former sheriff of Birmingham known best for using fire hoses and billy clubs on peaceful civil rights demonstrators. Should they do so, does Congress have to keep the statues prominently displayed?
This is what goes unsaid or denied, at least by those who continue to maintain the romantic historical lie that is the “Lost Cause”: The northern states in 1861 were far from perfect, but it is a profoundly false analogy to compare any of those imperfections with the enslavement of human beings because of their color. The same people who would never consider honoring a Benedict Arnold (although, surely, we don’t want to forget the American Revolution) continue to do so for Jefferson Davis and others. Issues surrounding statues and other memorials, street names, license plates, state songs and the many other examples of honoring those who fought to defend slavery will never be settled until there is a national consensus that this fight was wrong and worthy of contempt. There are many difficult issues with race that Americans struggle with. This is not and should not be one of them.