Robert E. Lee himself refused to wear his confederate uniform after the confederacy’s defeat in the American civil war. At his funeral he was not buried in it and no one in attendance was permitted to wear theirs either. He also declared that his confederate battle flag (what we now call “the confederate flag”) never be raised again and that it was a flag of treason.
So there’s your “southern heritage.”
So therefore his statues should be torn down???
Like, the entire point of Lee statues was that they were supposed to represent reconcilliation. Tearing them down is symbolically calling back the war + reconstruction years.
The Confederacy was a ‘nation’ of white people, created solely for the purpose of slavery. It only ever existed in a time of war, during which they fought to keep slavery. It existed for a very very short amount of time: five years. When they lost the Civil War, and were no longer a ‘nation’ and no longer had any slaves, white southerners hastily reconstructed versions of "southern heritage/and southern nationalism" using lies, vague language, and nostalgia for a non-existent past. White southerners quickly sought to recast the Confederacy in these vague moral terms that would be more acceptable to the wider country, as slavery was now "un-American" and politically unusable. The monuments to Lee you are referring to were erected many years after the Civil War. This was after the period of reconstruction where true political gains and representation for black americans had been stripped away by white terrorist violence and intimidation across the south. They were put up to send a message. The statues you refer to make no reference to slavery, but not because they are seeking true reconciliation. They instead, frame the Confederacy as a doomed military campaign to protect some vague notion of 'southern life' and 'values'. Never explicitly station what this *really means*. These statues were designed to
a) deliberately distance the confederacy from it from what it truly was: a politically motivated entity established by a small minority of white slaveholding elites dedicated solely to keeping slavery
and b) to tacitly remind those in the South that it was white people (even those who had fought and LOST a botched rebellion) that were really still in charge.
By doing this, the south could claim patriotism to the country they tried to destroy AND hail the heroes of its rebellion. Statues of Lee represent the continuation of white dominance from the years of slavery into the twentieth (and twenty-first) century. The south kept its racial hierarchy and reconciled with the white north because they could both agree on the subjugation of black Americans. Those statues stand for reconciliation, but a reconciliation of white Americans only. Taking them down is a step forward in true reconciliation and not a step back.
