Save Reconciliation Monument from the destroyers
Amazing! Now we are waiting to see if reason prevails or will the autocrats of our "Rich Men North of Richmond" drive the final nail into the coffin of both national and racial unity? Thankfully a stay of execution has been granted by a Trump appointed judge for the planned destruction of the Reconciliation Monument…
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Amazing! Now we are waiting to see if reason prevails or will the autocrats of our "Rich Men North of Richmond" drive the final nail into the coffin of both national and racial unity? Thankfully a stay of execution has been granted by a Trump appointed judge for the planned destruction of the Reconciliation Monument crafted by the Jewish sculptor Moses Ezekiel – a great monument meant to celebrate America's national reunification after the War Between the States and honoring those who fought and died on both sides. Why would the government desecrate Arlington National Cemetery and do such violence to our history?
Those advocating for such destruction claim that they only to want an end to racism, and to honor the South is to affirm racist values.
But was the Civil War fought over the question of slavery? As a "Yankee" who moved to Alabama, I've had to try and consider the contrary points of view. I think that for the Northerners, it's true enough. Many were willing to fight against the thoroughly demonized Southern slavers. Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" had flown off the shelves, sure enough. But I wonder if it holds true of the Southerners, that preserving slavery was enough for them to fight and die for?
The North won, so they've gotten, for the most part, to write the history. The slavery question was a strong motivation and their (self?) righteous excuse for violating the constitutional principles, of the sovereignty of the States and the limits emphatically placed therein, on the role of the federal government. The freeing of the slaves ultimately became a natural point of Northern pride.
Was the continuation of slavery a matter of pride for all Southerners? Maybe not. Less than 5% of them actually held slaves, and the keeping of those slaves very negatively affected the wages of the rest of Southern workers. Did Southerners see the condition of slaves, who, at least from their perspective, were fed and housed, as necessarily worse than the conditions of similar numbers of factory workers up North, who were paid less than it cost to live decently, were often under-fed and forced to live in violent and dangerous slums (sort of like the slaves' descendants do now)?
Only "four score and seven years" earlier the South had been largely responsible for the defeat of the English oppressors and the writing of the U.S. Constitution. So, while the Northerners gloated over their alleged moral superiority, Southerners saw them as hypocrites and traitors to the Constitution their grandfathers had shed blood to bring into being, and styled themselves as patriots, faithful to the urge to fight against foreign rule.
Prior to the genocidal slaughter of whites in Haiti, in 1804, following their declaration of independence from France and Nat Turner's murderous rebellion, in 1831, the central efforts for abolition had come from the South. The Haitians' systematic killings of perhaps 5,000 European men, women and children ignited a fear that swept the South. Some Northern abolitionists' sympathies toward the "Slave Rebellion" further enraged Southerners, being perceived as a sign of contempt for their safety. (It was, in fact, the work of a newly established government, that had forced an end to French rule a year earlier.) After Turner's Rebellion, any thoughts of abolition were themselves fearfully abolished, South of the Mason Dixon Line. Considerations of the Northerners complaints then were seen not only as hypocritical but as dangerously foolish and thoughtless of risks to Southern life, ones not faced by the "Yankees" themselves.
In the end, the continuation of slavery benefited a small wealthy minority of Southerners, but a fear of the possible consequences, of its discontinuation, permeated the society as a whole.
In the end, the emancipation of the slaves was something the North celebrated and the South came, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes gladly, to accept. But the wish to become, again, the United States of America became universal.
The intended removal of the Reconciliation Monument is an assault on our unity as a nation, and yet one more declaration by the present usurping regime in Washington of the intention to divide and destroy us.
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