President Gerald Ford
Posted on 09/23/2021 6:06:06 AM PDT by Bon of Babble
A new monument has been unveiled in the spot where the iconic Robert E. Lee equestrian stood in Richmond — just two weeks after it was removed. The statue of Lee was a national historic landmark and installed in 1890.
(Excerpt) Read more at thegatewaypundit.com ...
Richmond’s Lee statue, after 131 years, is an unpardonable insult
by Jeffrey Boutwell Washington Post July 9, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/09/richmond-robert-e-lee-statue-insult/
In the coming weeks, the Virginia Supreme Court will make known its decision regarding the fate of the most prominent Confederate memorial still standing in the nation: the 60-foot-tall equestrian statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee overlooking Monument Avenue in Richmond, former capital of the Confederacy.
Unveiled in 1890, the Lee statue has stood supreme among the hundreds of memorials and monuments throughout the South honoring the Confederacy and its rebellion against the Union. By 1920, it had been joined on Monument Avenue by memorials to Confederate Gens. Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart and President Jefferson Davis, making the street a pantheon to Confederate war heroes.
The dedication of the Lee statue occurred, ironically, on May 29, just days before Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day to honor the hundreds of thousands of Union troops who died in the Civil War. In a ceremony described by one Virginia newspaper as “the greatest day” in Richmond history, more than 150,000 people celebrated with parades, cannons, fireworks and the singing of “Dixie” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia.”
Up north, the Boston Daily Globe provided extensive coverage of the event under the headline, “Immortal Lee.” In an accompanying editorial, the paper echoed the dominant theme of North-South reconciliation then common in the country, noting how “the gaping wounds of civil strife have now healed … [and] the past has lost its power to sting and wound.”
This would have been news to the nearly 4 million Blacks then living in the South and subject to increasingly harsh Jim Crow laws, lynchings and white supremacist violence. For them, “the gaping wounds” of slavery and the Civil War had not healed and the past had not “lost its power to sting and wound.”
The Boston Daily Traveler saw things quite differently. In an editorial entitled “An Unpardonable Insult,” the paper criticized the ceremony in Richmond for seeking to elevate Lee to “the same pedestal of honor and greatness” as George Washington. In blunt language, the paper contrasted the actions of these two native sons of Virginia, declaring that Washington would never “have engaged in a war for the destruction of the American Union in obedience to the action of Virginia,” as Lee did.
The Daily Traveler also noted an incident that was a premonition of things to come. At the ceremony, someone in the crowd placed a Confederate flag in the hands of a nearby statue of George Washington and “there it remained during the day” — similar to the “unpardonable insult” of a Confederate flag being carried into the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6 by supporters of President Donald Trump seeking to violently prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election.
I discovered an original of the 131-year-old Daily Traveler editorial among the papers of George S. Boutwell, a Massachusetts congressman who helped enact the 14th and 15th amendments in the 1860s guaranteeing political and civil equality to Blacks. After serving as treasury secretary for President Ulysses S. Grant, Boutwell was elected to the Senate, where he led an investigation of white supremacist violence in Mississippi. It’s little wonder that Boutwell would greatly sympathize with the sentiments of the Daily Traveler editorial.
By the time of the Lee statue dedication in 1890, it was apparent to Boutwell and the Daily Traveler that the proliferation of Confederate memorials was but a symbol of the victory of the Lost Cause campaign of the South in rehabilitating notions of white supremacy. The next several decades saw the spread of Jim Crow laws and the institutional racism, South and North, that has crippled our society well into the 21st century. Only now, sparked by the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter protests, is the United States beginning to seriously reckon with that legacy.
To give Richmond due credit, its city council made the decision in 2020 to remove and relocate all those Confederate memorials on Monument Avenue that were on city property. As the Lee statue is on property deeded by private citizens to the Commonwealth of Virginia, it is up to the state Supreme Court to decide its ultimate fate.
Whatever that decision may be, our national debate over the potency of white supremacist symbols will continue. Though it is certainly appropriate that Americans remember and respect all who fought and died in our great and terrible Civil War, had Lee and his Confederate flag been victorious, the United States today would be a very different place — if it existed at all.
Sir Winston Churchill
So many of my relatives are named R.L. Robert Nelson. Robert Lee. Michael Robert., Etc. all named after Robert E Lee. a And thy don’t plan to change their names! The Civil War was more about states rights than slavery. Slavery was on its way OUT anyway. Abe wanted the federal gov to rule the land. And he was murdered for this. I don’t think anyone still wanted slavery. Even George W had his slaves freed upon his death.
FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT
32nd President of the United States: 1933 ‐ 1945
Remarks at the Unveiling of the Robert E. Lee Memorial Statue, Dallas, Texas.
June 12, 1936
I am very happy to take part in this unveiling of the statue of General Robert E. Lee.
All over the United States we recognize him as a great leader of men, as a great general. But, also, all over the United States I believe that we recognize him as something much more important than that. We recognize Robert E. Lee as one of our greatest American Christians and one of our greatest American gentlemen.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Remarks at the Unveiling of the Robert E. Lee Memorial Statue, Dallas, Texas. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/208862
President Gerald Ford
You decide:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/emancipation-freedom-monument-richmond-virginia-abolition-slavery/
… A monument dedicated to the abolition of slavery was unveiled in Richmond, Virginia, on Wednesday, two weeks after a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee was taken down 2 miles away...
Confederate Stained Glass To Be Replaced With Racial-Justice Themed Windows At National Cathedral
Confederate stained glass will be replaced with racial-justice themed windows at the National Cathedral in Washington.
I assume they’re going to change the name from Monument Avenue to something else?
Eugene Robinson is not fit to lick the boots of Robert E. Lee.
Does appear to say 2 miles away.
It’s SeeBS but even a detail like that I could believe from them...can’t twist everything, right?
Eugene Robinson--Washington Post Affirmative Action hire
Robert E. Lee
“Lee was the noblest American who had ever lived and one of the greatest commanders known to the annals of war.”
Sir Winston Churchill
It’s a good statue. It captures the moment of emancipation. It’s also much better than that one of the teenage gangster riding a horse they put up a year ago.
He was a man who took up arms against his own nation.
Lee ought to have been grateful he wasn’t hung.
His nation was a nation that had been peacefully voted into existence by the constituent states, one of which he was a citizen of. And he understood that distinction. Prior to the 14th Amendment, there was no such thing as a “Citizen of the United States”. You were a citizen of the State that you were born or resided in.
Thus he no longer saw himself as related to the States which continued to operate under the 1787 Constitution.
So his “own nation” was not the one you assume. That nation staged a provocation at Ft. Sumter to create an excuse for an invasion. They were not there to abolish slavery nor even to secure the fortress. It was merely to force a group of sovereign states to repudiate their own vote - peacefully taken - and continue as vassal states of an emerging centralized superstate, which was contrary to the very provisions in the 1787 Constitution prohibiting that.
So no, in Lee’s view, he never “took up arms against his own nation”. The overall nation that he lived in simply changed. The former group recruited hundreds of thousands of immigrant aliens to help them do the dirty work of forcing them back into a shotgun marriage; those people had no understanding of the original compact, and thus could be used to abrogate it under the absurd legal interpretation that Lincoln applied.
Had Lincoln been a more reasonable person he might have been able to negotiate a better deal for everyone, but he wasn’t. His behavior in the Illinois legislature shows that.
But he wasn’t and his bizarre interpretation of the nature of the Constitutional compact led him only to force. As Lee said, he could not see remaining in a association that was not based on mutual consensus. Everyone in 1787 - like his father, the second greatest hero of the Revolution - would have agreed.
That group of people wrote these words earlier in 1776:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands
which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate
and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the
opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation”
If the colonies of 1776 had such rights, tell us all why 11 descendant states had no such right. They clearly believed they did, and voted in their legislatures as such.
Monument Ave is neither.
Sad.
5.56mm
Anyone who trusts Gateway Pundit is making a mistake.
You have a point
Lee could have rationalized it any way he wanted and so can you. The fact remains he did take up arms against the duly elected government and only out of political expediency was he spared the noose.
As I so ably demonstrated, the “duly elected government” in his state was not the one that Lincoln headed.
No rationalization needed.
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