Writing in the Guardian on Tuesday, Afua Hirsch called for the statue of British navy hero, Lord Horatio Nelson, to be removed from London’s Trafalgar Square.
Her rationale is very simple: “Nelson… was what you would now call, without hesitation, a white supremacist. While many around him were denouncing slavery, Nelson was vigorously defending it.”
As one of Britain’s greatest heroes, the call to bring Nelson down to Earth has met extreme fury. And that fury is justified because Nelson, like George Washington, is not defined by slavery.
Instead, like George Washington, Nelson is defined by greatness in war and the love he earned from his people.
Put simply, Nelson’s story is defined by two decisive battles in the Napoleonic Wars. At the Battle of the Nile in the summer of 1798, Nelson ambushed a French fleet along Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. Splitting his own fleet in half, Nelson attacked the French from two sides, sending them into chaos.
Next, in October 1805, Nelson destroyed a superior Franco-Spanish fleet off Spain’s Cape Trafalgar. Spliting his forces once again, Nelson sent two columns into a highly aggressive assault at the center of the enemy fleet. As Professor Andrew Lambert explains, Nelson’s quick annihilation of his French counterpart’s flagship sent his adversary into disarray. Though suffering a fatal wound in the battle, Nelson’s victory secured the Royal [British] Navy’s dominance over Napoleon, and that dominance expanded globally and remained until the rise of the U.S. Navy in the second world war.
Still, Nelson’s positive legacy isn’t just rooted in Britain’s security and power in the 17th and 18th centuries. Long after Nelson’s death, when in 1940, Britain was facing a far superior German military power and Imperial Japan’s seizure of the British Empire in Asia, Nelson’s legend gave Britons faith to keep fighting. Recognizing Nelson’s enduring power in his nation’s psyche, Winston Churchill used the admiral to steady Britons against a looming Nazi invasion.
The invasion threat, Churchill said, “ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army [invasion staging] at Boulogne. We have read all about this in the history books; but what is happening now is on a far greater scale and of far more consequence to the life and future of the world and its civilization than these brave old days of the past.”
His military genius and his sourcing of perpetual moral courage is what will always define Nelson, not his views on slavery. And that is why, as with statues of George Washington in America, Nelson should continue to stand proud over London.
