NEW ORLEANS (AP) — The New Orleans City Council has voted in favor of removing prominent Confederate monuments along some of its busiest streets — a sweeping move by a city seeking to break with its Confederate past.
The council’s 6-1 vote on Thursday afternoon allows the city to remove four monuments, including a towering statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that has stood at the center of a traffic circle for 131 years.
The decision to take down the monuments came after months of impassioned debate. Now, the city faces possible lawsuits seeking to keep the monuments where they are.
Mayor Mitch Landrieu first proposed taking down these monuments after police said a white supremacist killed nine parishioners inside the African-American Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in June.
Anti-Confederate sentiment has grown since then around the country, along with protests against police mistreatment, as embodied by the Black Lives Matter movement.
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New Orleans was very early out of the Confederacy and the Union was involved in abolition and reconstruction in Louisiana well before Lee and the others surrendered.
I’ve been a Civil War enthusiast for a coupla years now. My interest in the history of it extends to both the Union and the Confederacy and mostly the military history of it. I’m not too interested in the politics of how the war got started. My only interest in the politics of it is how it effected military operations,appointment and sacking of officers and postwar reconstruction/reconciliation. I’ve joined a Civil War Round Table and an organization that honors a brigade of Texas infantrymen that served in the Civil War but so far I’ve declined to join the SCV because it’s a bit too political for me. If New Orleans follows through with that,it might push me to join the SCV. This shiite is getting out of hand.
If you want to view confederate memorabilia, the proper place for it is a museum. Meanwhile, “this shiite” is just beginning, and is a long time coming. “Appreciation of history” is one thing. “Preservation of a failed heritage” is what is ending.
About damn time!
I have nothing at all against Robt E Lee. He was very good at a very difficult profession, directing armies in campaigns and battles. I studied his campaigns with great professional admiration when I was an Infantry officer quite some time ago.
But for some perspective, let me name another great general from our history, Benedict Arnold. I studied his campaigns as well. He was absolutely brilliant, and fearless. He achieved something that Washington never did, defeating a British army in the field (Yorktown was a siege), at Saratoga. This was the victory that most historians say won us the war
But we don’t put up statues of people in our public places to honor brilliant strategy and tactics. Arnold doesn’t have any statues of him in public places (except that boot at the Saratoga battlefield, no name, just a boot, to honor his being wounded in the hour of the victory he achieved) because he was a traitor in the end. RE Lee was a traitor too, only spared trial, conviction and hanging for his clear treason by the general amnesty he accepted at the end of the war. Traitors, no matter how talented, no matter what their other good qualities, should not receive the public honor of a statue in a public space.
But the reasons to haul down that statue in Lee Circle go beyond the fact of Lee’s treason against the US.
Arnold committed treason out of personal pique at being denied what he very rightly was owed. He was packed off to command West Point, while Gates was given command of the southern army. The excuse given was that the wound he sustained winning the war for us at Saratoga made him physically unfit to command an army in the field. Certainly this is not an excuse for treason, but at least this personal motivation does not cast any further stain, beyond the treason itself, on his standing as a public figure.
RE Lee committed treason in defense of slavery. His statue was put up high on that plinth in the center of Lee Circle, defiantly facing north, to make the point that the South Was Right, black people did too need to be kept down, by Jim Crow, once slavery had been suppressed.
We don’t honor Lee and his real accomplishments and virtues by letting him stand as a symbol of a Cause that sadly has not yet met the final and complete loss it so richly deserves.
My experience with SCV members is that they’re a group of men who feel a sense of personal accomplishment because of something an ancestor did 150 years ago. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be a direct ancestor. A great - great uncle will do.
But self - importantance is a trait common to most native South Carolinians, so maybe that’s only a local thing.