OLD TIMES THERE ARE NOT FORGOTTEN

Is there a difference between George Washington and Jefferson Davis?  Between Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee?  All four of them owned slaves.  So they must be morally equivalent, right?  That’s what Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday. 

Of course that’s bullshit. The differences are obvious. 

First of all, America’s moral vision evolved in the decades between 1790 and 1860.  A fairer comparison of attitudes toward slavery would be Lee vs. Grant and Davis vs. Lincoln. 

But there are more important distinctions.  For all their faults (and I won’t deny or minimize them), Washington and Jefferson were among the most important architects of the United States of America.  Any honest assessment of their careers must take that into account. 

On the other side, whatever personal virtues they may have possessed, Confederates like Davis and Lee did their best to destroy the United States of America in order to perpetuate human chattel slavery.  That’s a pretty big difference.

Before the outbreak of war, Robert E. Lee served honorably for 32 years in the United States Army.  But when he had to make a choice, he rejected the United States and fought for Virginia and slavery.  He may have done it reluctantly, but he did it.  He helped kill tens of thousands of American soldiers.  Lee’s reported misgivings about secession remind me of today’s reports of anonymous Republican congressmen who claim privately to be shocked and embarrassed by Donald Trump.  Then as now, actions speak louder than words. 

It’s hard to find anything positive to say about Jefferson Davis.  He had an undistinguished political career, sandwiching two incomplete Senate terms around a stint as Secretary of War during Franklin Pierce’s doomed presidency.  He resigned from the Senate when Mississippi seceded from the Union, and was almost immediately chosen and the first (and last, unless you count Donald Trump) President of the Confederacy.  That didn’t work out well either. 

It’s important to see those Confederate monuments for what they are.  Statues of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and their ilk are the racists’ way of telling African Americans that the Civil War isn’t over.  Slavers may have lost the initial phase of the war in the 1860s, but they haven’t given up.  They’re continuing the fight in other arenas, and they’re convinced that Donald Trump is on their side. 

The postwar glorification of Dixie was very literally fake news – a massive and largely successful campaign to rewrite history by manufacturing a fictional southern “heritage” that provided white people – in the south and elsewhere – with an excuse to celebrate racism.

Here’s an idea.  If racists demand their participation trophies for finishing second in the Civil War, give them monuments of Robert E. Lee surrendering to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Court House.  Give them statues of Jefferson Davis in chains in a Union prison.  Those events are their real heritage.