Regarding The Flap Over Confederate Statues

[TheBeardedDude]

Well, excuse me for pointing out that there are, in fact, shades of grey in the issue.

Honestly, I think it might be best to leave the whole issue up to the historians who study the war (I'd personally nominate James McPherson [author of The Battle Cry of Freedom, the definitive book on the war, and Barbara Fields [the black historian from the Ken Burns miniseries, even does a good smackdown of Lincoln when discussing his desire to repatriate freed slaves]) to see if the shades of grey in any given Confederate leader are sufficient to consider keeping any statues of them worth it.

They aren't. Lee might have been a competent general for much of the war (not Gettysburg), but being good at what you do as a traitor to the country isn't really relevant to whether or not you deserve to be memorialized by said country. And while one might try and paint Lee's views on slavery as "grey" or even more generically as not black and white, it still doesn't take away from the fact that people like Lee (and Stonewall Jackson and Nathan Bedford Forrest and etc) have become symbols for various hate groups. Be they the KKK, Neo-Nazis, or Sons of the Confederacy. It also still doesn't account for the fact that memorials to these people went up (largely) in response to the Civil Rights Movement. Statues/monuments of Lee were clearly intended to be reminders to the "uppity blacks" who were advocating for equality in the 50's and 60's. Lee doesn't need a monument to be remembered for his military strategy nor for his conflicting opinions on slavery and serving the traitors of the confederacy (I was born and raised in TN, so don't presume this is just some yankee bashing southerners.)