Touch not that statue of Robert E. Lee in lovely Charlottesville, Va. Let it stand, keep it handsome and dignified, but around it place plaques telling the curious that the man memorialized there was a traitor to his country who went to war so that white people could continue to own black people — to take their women and sell their children, rip apart families and, if need be, take the lives of the recalcitrant or the rebellious. Lee is not a man to be honored. He is, though, worthy of remembering.
Lee should be recalled as a slave owner who would not give them up. He should be remembered as one who felt so keenly about slavery that he renounced his commission in the U.S. Army and enlisted in the Confederate one, whose purpose was to keep emancipation at bay. I have the late Elizabeth Brown Pryor, author of “Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee Through His Private Letters,” to thank for setting the record straight. As I wrote in 2011, Brown’s essay for the New York Times gave us “a Lee who is at odds with the one of gauzy myth. He was not, as I once thought, the creature of crushing social and political pressure who had little choice but to pick his state over his country. In fact, various members of his own family stuck with the Union.”
[Is the Confederacy finally about to die for good?]
Source: Robert E. Lee is worth remembering. Just don’t honor him. – The Washington Post
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