The U.S. Military Academy at West Point is right to begin removing installations memorializing Robert E. Lee and other Confederate leaders.
This is not to say that all public statues or memorials to Confederate leaders should be removed nationwide — although the default position should be to take them down. Context is important, as is a respect for the messiness of history against the alternative of ignoring it. The context at West Point, however, argues overwhelmingly and insistently that Confederates merit no name or place of honor there.
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Frankly, it’s stunning that until now, West Point has featured displays of a uniform, a bust, and a quote from Lee, not to mention barracks and a “housing area.” Ditto for the street called Beauregard Place, named after the Confederate general who led the attack on Fort Sumter that began the Civil War’s armed hostilities.
Before going further, please allow a partially mitigating word for both Lee and Beauregard. It is simplistic to just write off both, or either, as “traitors” or as men motivated primarily by a desire to maintain slavery. Both men felt competing loyalties, more semi-reasonable at the time than we credit in retrospect, and both had mixed records and feelings on slavery far too complicated to recount here.
When the city of New Orleans, for example, acted to remove “Confederate monuments” and rename streets named after Confederates or ardent segregationists, it arguably went too far. Of course it made sense to extinguish statues or place names honoring Confederate President Jefferson Davis and racist former politicians. But a statue of Beauregard was a remarkably exquisite piece of public art, and Beauregard was a constructive New Orleans civic leader on multiple fronts both before and after the war, including his strong and courageous post-war advocacy for civil rights and desegregated public education for freed black people.
Beauregard, at the same time he was risking opprobrium by advocating black civil rights, was co-chairman of the committee that erected the statue of Lee, who by then had become revered as a symbol not just of battlefield bravery but also of reconciliation. That’s why some 200 members of the Grand Army of the Republic — the organization of Union/Yankee war veterans — happily served as part of the festivities at the statue’s unveiling.
People of goodwill thus could argue that, in context, both the Beauregard and Lee Statues should remain, while perhaps the city could add inscriptions or audio-visual technology expressing modern distaste for their Confederate cause and other morally necessary explainers.
All of which is a lengthy digression to explain how and why it might, in some circumstances, make sense to contextualize rather than remove references to storied leaders in a benighted cause. And all of which is to say that even for advocates of contextualization, absolutely no reasonable case can be made for West Point to pay homage to a single Confederate.
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West Point is the academy for the U.S. Army. Confederates took arms against the U.S. They did so, ultimately and despite their own tortured denials and justifications, for states whose main dispute with the United States was that Confederate governments wanted to keep men enslaved. It should be patently obvious that those who took arms against the U.S. military have no rightful place in its pantheon. It should be indisputable that those whose actions effectively abetted slavery should not have pride of place at a citadel of freedom.
Let the university in Lexington, Virginia, keep the name Washington and Lee. But by no means should Lee’s memory besmirch the academy of the union he forswore.
