The Shenandoah County, Va., school board just voted to restore Confederates’ names to schools. This is not a helpful preservation of history — it is the continued glorification of traitors. And, regardless of whether or not you support the Confederate cause, a community that celebrates treachery is setting itself up for failure.
If Americans wanted to celebrate Confederates who subsequently proved themselves not only loyal citizens but reversed their position to become advocates for civil rights or patriotic reunion, that is one thing. But the Confederates that many conservatives celebrate are those who openly committed horrific war crimes during the Civil War and refused to admit their wrongdoing afterward.
By honoring men like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, who continued to support racist policies, boast of treachery, and oppose civil rights after the war, modern Americans are doing a great deal of harm and pushing a deceptive narrative. And yes, putting a man’s name on a school is complimentary by definition. We would never name a school after Benedict Arnold, though he won some victories for the American revolutionaries; why is the standard so different for American traitors who lived a few decades later in the 1860s?
I am not advocating an erasure of history but accurate history. We should absolutely tell the truth about what happened during the Civil War, but that would by definition include revealing the horrendous crimes which Confederates proudly committed during the war. Schools should be named after patriotic Americans, men who encourage the loyalty to our nation so necessary for our survival, and which is so miserably lacking in U.S. institutions and government now.
The restored names in Virginia are Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary School. The former celebrates a man who, however brave his fighting, eagerly committed himself to the cause of ripping apart the United States and trampling the Union established with such hard toil by the Founders in the Constitution. Turner Ashby, whose name is on the second school, likewise became a traitor and helped plunge our nation into its bloodiest war. Meanwhile, Lee, i.e., Robert E. Lee, was one of the men primarily responsible for enforcing the egregious Confederate Retaliatory Act. The Act said it aimed to protect the “institution of African slavery.”
This act commanded that black Union troops be treated as slaves (that is, executed or re-enslaved) rather than POWs. It also ordained execution or another harsh penalty for white officers of black Union troops. This culminated in the Ft. Pillow massacre, where Confederate general and future KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest boastfully, by his own account, massacred hundreds of black and white Union soldiers who surrendered. After that massacre and in light of the Retaliatory Act, a group of white officers commanding black Union troops resolved that they would stay loyal to their black troops, even though they knew their “doom” if captured by Confederates.
Not only did Lee enforce the Retaliatory Act — the free black community at Gettysburg, for instance, was decimated by Lee’s army rounding up and enslaving them — but he also praised Forrest after the Ft. Pillow massacre had occurred! Lee’s army rounded up the blacks they encountered, including those who had been free for their entire lives. This is the man the Shenandoah County school district wants to honor? How can anyone with a moral compass justify such a decision?
The problem is that the Democrats, who were the Confederates, won the propaganda war. They previously argued many into thinking the Confederates were universally noble, and they have currently and cleverly switched the narrative to pretend that they suddenly care about civil rights. Conservatives, who are too often reactionaries rather than independent thinkers, have fallen into the trap and are now defending traitors and war criminals because they think that makes them anti-woke.
What if we were to take charge of the narrative? What if we reached out to black voters with the real history of the Democratic Party and the Confederacy? What if we explained to Americans that the Confederates started the Civil War because a Republican anti-slavery candidate won the election and that the Democrats have been betraying America and enacting racist policies for centuries now?
The Confederates and Democrats were proud of what they did; they never attempted to hide their treachery and war crimes. Anyone who defends the Confederates today must either take up their arguments and try to claim that treachery and war crimes were honorable and praiseworthy, or they must admit that these men did not deserve our praise, but rather our condemnation for the evils they so arrogantly committed.
