The book-burners aren’t just coming for statues of Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Now, everyone from Thomas Jefferson to abolitionist Matthias Baldwin is on the chopping block.
It makes sense because the hysterical, culture-destroying Jacobins at work right now are not anti-racist activists. They are children corrupted by a lifetime of excess, now searching for whatever meaning they can find from obliterating both good and bad things from the past.
Confederates committed treason, all for the ignoble purpose of preserving slavery. Although President Andrew Johnson graciously pardoned most of them as part of a push for national reconciliation after the Civil War, there was never a need to honor the losing rebellion’s leaders with statues.
What’s more, many of the statues and memorials to the Confederacy and its famous figures were erected many decades after the war, specifically as part of a push against civil rights for blacks. The removal of such monuments seems like a reasonable and attainable goal if pursued through political channels rather than mob violence.
The story of the Founding Fathers is nothing like theirs. They risked being charged with treason against the crown. They took on and defeated the world’s most powerful military. They set in motion the world’s long-term realignment behind Enlightenment principles, embracing such novel ideals as the consent of the governed. The Founding Fathers were not only the winners who got to write the rough draft of history, but they also accomplished things worthy of memorials and statues erected in their honor.
We don’t honor any of the founders because they were sinners — because they owned slaves or shared common, bigoted attitudes of their day. We honor them for those things they did that were bigger than their time. We honor them because they risked hanging and made great personal sacrifices to establish a free, prosperous republic governed by and for its people — including, ultimately, people of all races, in the true spirit of the founding documents that even the slaveholders among them drafted and signed.
When we celebrate our Founding Fathers, we’re celebrating the egalitarian values they espoused in spite of the fact that most of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders. When people celebrate Confederates, they’re celebrating people whose main accomplishment was to betray their nation to protect slavery.
Some people would defend Confederates on the grounds that their leaders sought to preserve state powers against federal encroachment — the so-called states rights argument. But then you need to ask yourself — the states’ rights to what?
We read books and watch movies and enjoy sports created and performed by awful people all the time, and we understand that there’s a difference between enjoying someone’s work in spite of their malfeasance and enjoying work because it specifically espouses bigotry, hate, or lies. Defending our celebration of the Founding Fathers doesn’t necessitate defending their worst crimes. In fact, it’s the perfect time to acknowledge how messy and tragic the origins of the greatest nation in history were from the start. But we ought to defend the men who gave us a republic with the DNA to become a nation where we strive to instill equal rights under the law. Recognizing that its origins were far from perfect and that we’re still working towards fulfilling our founding ideals isn’t unpatriotic or antithetical to denouncing the racist traitors of the Confederacy. Instead, that’s the very essence of America.
