Some people decry the removal of monuments to heroes of the Confederacy, such as the removal of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. Others object also to the continued honoring of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln because Washington was a slave owner and Lincoln expressed racist views. What’s the most reasonable course of action?
A monument is erected to remind us of a person’s exemplary service to our nation or the world. Robert E. Lee and other Confederate officers and politicians are revered by millions of Americans for their service in the Civil War. But this service was treason in support of slavery. No one who objects to treason or to slavery should want monuments that glorify their actions, because such glorification endorses Southern victory in the Civil War and continued slavery in an independent confederacy.
Putting such monuments in museums, where their actions and points of view can be put in context for visitors, improves our knowledge of history without suggesting that we revere either treason or slavery. This is not a new idea. We retain our historical memory of Benedict Arnold, a traitor during the Revolutionary War, without erecting monuments to him in the public square.
What about Washington and Lincoln then? Given their stands on slavery and racism, does consistency require that we cease celebrating their deeds and revering them as national heroes? I don’t think so. In the first place, neither is famous and revered either for owning slaves (Washington) or for racist beliefs (Lincoln, and perhaps Washington as well). Washington is revered for helping to win the Revolutionary War. As our first president, he established important norms: presidents are not above the law and should not retain the role indefinitely.
Lincoln isn’t known primarily for racist views, as were members of the KKK and Governor George Wallace, for whom there are few monuments. Lincoln is remembered for keeping our country together by waging war to prevent the secession of states wanting to retain slavery. He’s revered primarily for his role in ending slavery in our country. So, although neither Washington nor Lincoln was perfect, it’s their positive deeds, not treason or the promotion of slavery, for which they are honored, making them just the opposite of Confederate soldiers and politicians.
Nevertheless, if our consciousness of evil has evolved to higher standards, shouldn’t we apply those higher standards to historically important Americans, including Washington and Lincoln?
Lincoln is easy to exonerate. He did say during one of the famous Lincoln-Douglas Debates in 1858 that although he opposed slavery (unlike Douglas), he wasn’t advocating social equality between blacks and whites, nor the integration of blacks within white society. He thought that when freed, African-Americans would want to move to Africa, and he was happy to help them.
However, when he consulted black leaders and found that they rejected moving to Africa, he no longer promoted black emigration. He became very respectful of the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, invited him to the reception that celebrated his second inaugural, and made a point of asking Douglass’s opinion of his inaugural address. Lincoln proclaimed so that others could hear him, “there is no man in the country whose opinion I value more than yours.”
Washington was a slave owner who pursued and captured some of his slaves when they ran away. He did arrange for his slaves to be freed upon his death but, unlike Lincoln, he never denounced slavery, from which he profited. Does this mean he was a bad man?
Probably not. We are all at this moment benefitting from horrible practices. Workers in China, Bangladesh, and elsewhere suffer from slave-like conditions so that manufactured products are cheap enough for mass consumption. American companies can’t control the practices of 100,000 suppliers in poor countries who subcontract the work. The buildings in Bangladesh that collapsed in 2013, killing over 1,000 workers, had recently been found safe by auditors. It’s estimated that 80,000 Uighurs were forcibly sent to other parts of China to manufacture textiles. This is just a small sample of the millions who work like slaves to supply us with cheap goods.
Before deciding that Washington was such a bad man that we should no longer honor his service as general and president, we should look in the mirror and decide if we’re really better than him. It would cost us a lot of money to buy only goods manufactured where we know the conditions of work are conscionable, but freeing slaves was very expensive in Washington’s day, yet that’s what he did. We are all guilty of the sins of our generation, Washington and Lincoln included, because human beings are social animals who are influenced by culture and economic interdependence. Graded on a cultural curve, which we would want for ourselves, they deserve our admiration.
You can reply by e-mail at wenz.peter@uis.edu.
Comments