Monuments to Robert E. Lee

[jonatha]

How GF masks worn by Anonymous is an argument favoring REL monuments is a mystery to me.

It's not.

REL had much more impressive facial hair....

 

[skepticalbip]

Google isn't friendly enough to me to show me English monuments honoring Guy Fawkes. Seems to me the memory preserved is GF's failure.

I'll give you a little help. Here's a statue of Guy Fawkes at Bridgewater Somerset England. There are others but you need to work on your google-fu.

And it appears that statues of Cromwell are not without controversy of their own. So much for direction from England...perhaps a PC infection from America. Those thin skinned Irish...

Yes, there are malcontents everywhere who want to rewrite history. But history happened and saying it didn't doesn't change the fact. Different people have different impressions of people from the past. Those trying to deny others their opinions are egomanical farts who think they have the right to dictate other's opinions.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Thanks, but I think you're the one in need.

The plaque, according to Friend Google, says, in part:

For centuries, on 5th November, the townsfolk of Bridgwater gathered around a bonfire, sited here on the Cornhill to celebrate the failure of Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators to blow up the Houses of Parliament. Throughout the course of the evening the revellers would light their home-made Squibs and make merry around the flames of the bonfire and so the famous Bridgwater Carnival was born.

And, in fact, it's not a statue of Guy Fawkes at all, but the Spirit of Carnival. (Maybe that's why Anonymous seems so ineffective...)

Again, the honor is of his failure, defeat, whatever. It does not honor him as do the REL statues.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Apparently there are several parks around the world acting as reliquaries for a no longer fashionable past. I guess they can always be re-erected should times change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_Park,_Delhi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_Park

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grūtas_Park

This Soviet-theme park was created in the wetlands of the Dzūkija National Park. Many of its features are re-creations of Soviet Gulag prison camps: wooden paths, guard towers, and barbed-wire fences.

Its establishment faced some fierce opposition, and its existence is still controversial. Some ideas originally meant to be a part of the park were never allowed. Examples include transporting the visitors in a Gulag-style train.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Monument_Park

 

[GenesisNemesis]

This seems to me to be an absurd movement. History is history and Lee was a major player in US history whether some people dislike him or the idea of him or not. This movement would be similar to a group of people trying to erase Oliver Cromwell or Guy Fawkes from English history.

The argument is that creating a monument representing someone who has done terrible things doesn't make sense and reinforces the notion that we should ignore everything bad that they did, for the sake of holding them to a higher regard than what they actually deserve. Why should we create monuments to people who have done terrible things? We have no reason whatsoever to idealize them.

 

[fast]

This seems to me to be an absurd movement. History is history and Lee was a major player in US history whether some people dislike him or the idea of him or not. This movement would be similar to a group of people trying to erase Oliver Cromwell or Guy Fawkes from English history.

The argument is that creating a monument representing someone who has done terrible things doesn't make sense and reinforces the notion that we should ignore everything bad that they did, for the sake of holding them to a higher regard than what they actually deserve. Why should we create monuments to people who have done terrible things? We have no reason whatsoever to idealize them.

Creating? They're already created, and he was (and by some, still are) held in high regards, not for these 'terrible-by-today's-pampered-standards', but for those feats and deeds of the times. There are numerous examples of iconic figures commemorated that yet has a tarnished past by new age views.

 

[jonatha]

I'll give you a little help. Here's a statue of Guy Fawkes at Bridgewater Somerset England. There are others but you need to work on your google-fu.

View attachment 5156
.

What is he holding and why is he holding it?

 

[Malintent]

That appears to be a fire staff... used to light fires with a bit of smoldering tinder in a cup at the end.

 

[Sarpedon]

I remember reading about how when Winston Churchill was First Sea Lord he wanted to name a battleship after Cromwell, and didn't understand why this pissed off the King. (of course, the reigning monarch gets the final say on naming of warships, which makes the 'tribal' class of destroyers all the more egregious)

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

So I guess 100 years from now, the argument might be to remove monuments of our current leaders because they used fossil fuels, which 100 years from now, outlawed, and considered a horribly primitive and dangerous means, will be considered very non-PC.

Lee led a rebellion against his own army. He was a traitor to the Constitution. You can take your PC complaints and derail something else.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

So there is a move to get rid of 3 monuments to him in New Orleans. I don't really have a major problem with it if it does not go much further. From what I have read, Lee was not a terrible person on his own time, but still honoring a military leader of the Confederacy seems to be not good.

But there are some other lines which I think should not be crossed. In no specific order:

1.) No Confederate leader should be disinterred - unless he is buried in a free standing monument or the whole cemetery is disinterred.

2.) Monuments to civilians of the antebellum or confederate south should not be taken down unless maybe they were a particularly heinous person. Say there was a monument to confederate nurses - that should not be taken down.

They led a rebellion against the US Constitution. They fired at American soldiers because they didn't like the result of a Democratic election. Fuck them, fuck their statues.

3.) Museums and historical sites of the confederacy (that are not pro-southern) should not be stripped of public funding if they have them now.

Any place heralding their tyranny shouldn't get a dime.

4.) Civil War re-enactors shouldn't be pressured out of their hobby.

All war re-enactors should have their heads examined.

Anyway, with america having lots of Asian, Arab, Latino and other immigration in recent decades I think that a lot of these new people can't even relate to the Civil War as a concept in the same way as whites and blacks can. It is going to fade on its own.

I don't care about the race/slavery angle. It is as simple as the rebellion was waged because the South didn't like the election results, so they wanted to quit the nation and remake the rules to suit themselves. About 1 in 50 Americans died in that uprising. The rebellion betrayed the Constitution and our nation, and inspired the murder of a standing President. Fuck the rebellion.

 

[arkirk]

The only evidence that Union general (and later United States President) Ulysses S. Grant ever owned any slaves is a document he signed in 1859 that emancipated "my Negro man William" (i.e, William Jones), whom Grant stated in the document he had purchased from Frederick Dent (his father-in-law). Little is known about William Jones; as even Grant's biographers note, "exactly when and how Grant acquired ownership of a slave remain something of a mystery." There is no other evidence showing that Grant ever owned more than this one slave, much less "several."

It is often stated that Grant's wife, Julia Boggs Dent, "owned four slaves," and Julia herself identified four "servants" whom she claimed "belonged" to her up until the end of 1862. However, those slaves had been purchased by Julia's father, Frederick F. Dent, and there is no record of his ever having transferred ownership of them to Julia — without such a transfer, neither Julia nor her husband Ulysses would have had legal authority to free them.

From 1854 to 1859 Grant managed his father-in-law's farm, White Haven, where a number of slaves lived and worked. But again, those slaves belonged to Grant's father-in-law, so Grant himself had no legal authority to set them free. (Some of the slaves at White Haven eventually drifted off during the Civil War; any that remained were freed when Missouri's constitutional convention abolished slavery in January 1865.)

The statement attributed to Grant about not his freeing his slaves earlier than December 1865 (when the 13th Amendment was adopted) because "Good help is so hard to come by these days" is almost certainly an apocryphal one. No credible documentation records Grant as having said such a thing, and he was only ever in a position to emancipate a single slave, which he did back in 1859.

"Contrarily, Confederate General Robert E. Lee freed his slaves (which he never purchased — they were inherited) in 1862! Lee freed his slaves several years before the war was over, and considerably earlier than his Northern counterparts."

Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia and (from 1865) the general-in-chief of Confederate forces, neither owned slaves nor inherited any, thus it is not correct to assert that he "freed his slaves" (in 1862 or at any other time).

As in the case of Ulysses S. Grant, the slaves that Lee supposedly owned actually belonged to his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, and lived and worked on the three estates owned by Custis (Arlington, White House, and Romancoke). Upon Custis' death in 1857, Lee did not "inherit" those slaves; rather, he carried out the directions expressed in Custis' will regarding those slaves (and other property) according to his position as executor of Custis' estate.

Custis' will stipulated that all of his slaves were to be freed within five years: "... upon the legacies to my four granddaughters being paid, then I give freedom to my slaves, the said slaves to be emancipated by my executor in such manner as he deems expedient and proper, the said emancipation to be accomplished in not exceeding five years from the time of my decease." So while Lee did technically free those slaves at the end of 1862, it was not his choice to do so; he was required to emancipate them by the conditions of his father-in-law's will.

http://www.snopes.com/confederate-history-slave-ownership/

I think it does not matter what Lee did with HIS SLAVES and it should matter what Grant did with HIS SLAVES. Lee served the principle that it is okay for a white man to keep a negro for a slave and to do with him/her as he sees fit. His army was clearly in support of that, regardless of what Lee personally did. Had the South prevailed in the war, it would have extended legal slavery's stay in America. Now Grant was a lot more of a hypocrite fighting for a condition where his slaves would be freed by a proclamation. If I had my drothers, neither of these two would be celebrated, along with Washington and Jefferson, et al. The real problem is that slavery was abolished in name only in America and there are people working assiduously to reestablish it on a different basis. They are not all called Republicans either. Were they to take away worship of military leadership in this country, that would be a great improvement.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

http://www.snopes.com/confederate-history-slave-ownership/

I think it does not matter what Lee did with HIS SLAVES...

It does in the sense that Lee didn't own any.

...and it should matter what Grant did with HIS SLAVES.

Who the fuck cares? Grant didn't uprise against the Constitution because he didn't like the results of a fair democratic election.

 

[Nice Squirrel]

I'll give you a little help. Here's a statue of Guy Fawkes at Bridgewater Somerset England. There are others but you need to work on your google-fu.

View attachment 5156

.

What is he holding and why is he holding it?

Not Guy Fawkes or the Bronze Fonz, but our (Cable TV donated) statue of Mary Tyler Moore has a bounty on it. Whoever can steal it, cut the hat off and weld a cast bronze dildo to her hand, replacing it the next day gets $10,000.

 

[repoman]

Funny video about Civil War re-enactors. By the way, David Cross grew up in the south.

 

[tantric]

i'm assuming you've never been to the ATL. we have this thing called stone mountain - it looks like this:



it's a bit large. demolishing it would take a tactical nuclear weapon or something similar. i think we should just carve MLK,Jr's likeness on the opposite side of the mountain. heritage, not hate.

 

[Sarpedon]

I find it curious that, if the monument in Georgia is about 'heritage, not hate,' that it would include Stonewall Jackson over the equally (if not more) important James Longstreet, who actually was from Georgia.

Could it be because after the war, Longstreet became a Republican? So much for 'heritage, not hate.'

 

[Horatio Parker]

I find it curious that, if the monument in Georgia is about 'heritage, not hate,' that it would include Stonewall Jackson over the equally (if not more) important James Longstreet, who actually was from Georgia.

Could it be because after the war, Longstreet became a Republican? So much for 'heritage, not hate.'

I'm sure that didn't help.

Jackson was a more dramatic figure, plus he was killed in the war(albeit by his own men).

 

[Sarpedon]

Neither of the other two were. If that's the criteria, where's the Albert Sidney Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, JEB Stuart monument? Plenty of death and drama there.

I'm merely pointing out that the general lack of Longstreet monuments,one of the few reconciliatory southern figures, shows that the idea that this is about 'heritage not hate' is flimsy. Compare that with the number of, say Nathan Bedford Forrest monuments. The former slave dealer and founder of the Ku Klux Klan gets plenty of love down south, despite being a less significant general.

 

[Horatio Parker]

Neither of the other two were. If that's the criteria, where's the Albert Sidney Johnston, Stonewall Jackson, JEB Stuart monument? Plenty of death and drama there.

I'm merely pointing out that the general lack of Longstreet monuments,one of the few reconciliatory southern figures, shows that the idea that this is about 'heritage not hate' is flimsy. Compare that with the number of, say Nathan Bedford Forrest monuments. The former slave dealer and founder of the Ku Klux Klan gets plenty of love down south, despite being a less significant general.

If anyone were to put up a monument to AS Johnston, it'd be the North. "Hey thanks for letting us flank you out of Kentucky and Tennessee"

JEB Stuart was only a calvary officer, not an army commander. Plenty dramatic, though.

Stonewall caught the public imagination on both sides.

I totally agree the heritage stuff is flimsy.