[villageuser]

Originally Posted by Bucco

You are correct…..removing a statue does not change history…..opposing CRT certainly changes it and removes facts from it. History should be a chronicle of the past, not how we want it to be…..not how we wish it were, but how it was.

Best lesson for young folks is to understand real honest history and do better as they grow.

Best lesson for young folks to learn is that history is written by the VICTORS. Doesn’t necessarily include all the facts nor is the information necessarily unbiased. Maybe all history written by victors should be offset by history written by the defeated, and the people understand that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

[swooner]

Only history is "He Lost"!

[Dave Laluk]

Unvaccinated adults are putting our unvaccinated children at risk. The kids under 12 can't get vaccinated yet. Therefore, responsible adults have a responsibility to protect them in any way we can. Irresponsible adults who won't get vaccinated need to be pressured in whatever way possible in order to protect the kids.

[RICH1]

Originally Posted by bimmertl

Really, kids won't know the history of our great country since a Robert E Lee statue was taken down?

Grew up in Wisconsin. Don't believe there were any Lee statues there or anywhere in the Midwest and probably most of the rest of the USA other than the South. Somehow millions of Americans learned US history without seeing statues of Lee. Amazing!

Ignorance runs rampant thru the empty hallways of your mind!

[Bay Kid]

Originally Posted by Chi-Town

Took a ride down Monument Ave. last year and only saw two statues. Arthur Ashe and Robert E. Lee. Kind of ironic don't you think?

Anyhow the Lee statue was quite a sight to see with every square inch of the pedestal covered with graffiti.

What a disgrace. The profanity was so intense they couldn't show it on tv.
Hopefully they all feel better now.

[NoMo50]

Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby

The history is: The south LOST. The Confederacy LOST. He wasn't even very good at being a hero - he ultimately surrendered to Grant at the end of the war.

Incredible. So, should we tear down the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial since WE lost?

[Lindaws]

They don’t know the history of anything. Our history is being wiped out and not taught anymore.

[COLTempleton]

Originally Posted by Taltarzac725

You can put history in a closet but it keeps coming back at you in many ways.

Robert E. Lee was a great soldier and man. Robert E. Lee - Wikipedia

What people may not realize is that the North actually asked Lee to fight for them. Also, Lee did not have slaves and was against slavery.

[forebubba]

Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby

Monuments typically celebrate the winners, and the honored dead who fought for our country. Robert E. Lee was neither. His monument -should- be reconstructed and placed in a museum of some kind, because the monument itself is an official Historic Monument. But the thing this monument represents doesn't need to be on public display in the middle of a park.

The history is: The south LOST. The Confederacy LOST. He wasn't even very good at being a hero - he ultimately surrendered to Grant at the end of the war.

He led 15 battles during the Civil War. He was victorious in only 5 of them. He was defeated in the first battle, the last battle, and two other battles. The rest were inconclusive, and during one of them, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

There is nothing about Robert E. Lee that warrants his statue being on display in a public park, UNLESS you want to glorify his attempts at maintaining blacks being officially considered inferior and sub-human.

BRAVO, well said. Lee was a traitor to the US Constitution and fought to keep slaves. Would have he won in Afghanistan? Haaaa

[forebubba]

Originally Posted by Bucco

A real student of history which has been exhibited over the years !!!

The soldiers in the Revolutionary War took over the airports to win the war. The man knows history. Which foot had bone spurs?

[graciegirl]

Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby

The statue was erected in 1890, on Monument Avenue, which existed to glorify and celebrate people who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Glorify and Celebrate - the people who rejected the Union (which was, at the time, what we know now as the United States of America) and fought against it. This war, this Civil War, was the culmination of an attempt to overturn the government. An insurrection of "monumental" proportions (pun intended). The population in Richmond was mostly wealthy white people and poverty-stricken black people. The abolition of slavery only happened 25 years prior, so most adults living there were former slaves with no job, no prospects, few people willing to actually PAY them to work. I would venture to guess that the blacks living in Richmond would not have been very happy to see the figure of their former oppressor be placed proudly and prominently in their town center.

It is history. Our ancestor, Charles Schorn won the Congressional Medal of Honor for capturing the last flag of the Civil War at Appomattox. He was an eighteen year old kid who had migrated from Germany. He lived along the Ohio river in Pomeroy, Ohio and volunteered and fought with the West Virginia unit. He returned to be a barber in Pomeroy and was patriarch to an amazing group of people, one of them is my husband of sixty years.

Charles Schorn - Wikipedia

He was poor. Many of his descendants became wealthy and financially successful. I never heard any of them judge anyone on their finances. I never heard any of them say anything negative about the South and it's people.

The people who fought for the South felt as strongly as those that fought for the North I am sure. It wasn't just about slavery at all but about tribe and honor and their patriotism.

People who fought for the South were good people. I think Robert E. Lee was a military leader who was also a good man.

It isn't about biases and hatreds always. It is not about groups always. Each of us is an individual. I so dislike the people who think that folks who are rural or who live in the south are dumb and slow. I HATE that. Each of us then and now were and are individuals. Bigotry throws the baby out with the bath water.

[quietpine]

Originally Posted by Bay Kid

Monument Avenue in Richmond, VA. will never be the same. They have removed the statue. They don't even know the history of Gen. Lee.

Napoleon said history is lies agreed upon. The history of many so called Confederate statues is also the history of return to “slavery” or institutional racism in the south. Robert E Lee became the hero of the Lost Cause lie that sought to justify the acts of treason, slaughter and destruction that wrecked the nation. Lee was an honorable traitor who had he lived would have disavowed the lies about a noble Southern cause that flourished after his death.

[nhtexasrn]

Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby

Monuments typically celebrate the winners, and the honored dead who fought for our country. Robert E. Lee was neither. His monument -should- be reconstructed and placed in a museum of some kind, because the monument itself is an official Historic Monument. But the thing this monument represents doesn't need to be on public display in the middle of a park.

The history is: The south LOST. The Confederacy LOST. He wasn't even very good at being a hero - he ultimately surrendered to Grant at the end of the war.

He led 15 battles during the Civil War. He was victorious in only 5 of them. He was defeated in the first battle, the last battle, and two other battles. The rest were inconclusive, and during one of them, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

There is nothing about Robert E. Lee that warrants his statue being on display in a public park, UNLESS you want to glorify his attempts at maintaining blacks being officially considered inferior and sub-human.

There are many things about Lee that obviously you don't know. For instance, Lincoln offered him command of the United States Army. He refused because of loyalty to his home state saying he could not raise a sword to the state of his home and birth. Lee was a top graduate of the United States Military Academy and an exceptional officer and military engineer in the United States Army for 32 years. During this time, he served throughout the United States, distinguished himself during the Mexican–American War, and served as Superintendent of the United States Military Academy. Countering Southerners who argued for slavery as a positive good, Lee in his well-known analysis of slavery from an 1856 letter called it a moral and political evil. It was said of Lee, "He was a foe without hate; a friend without treachery; a soldier without cruelty; a victor without oppression, and a victim without murmuring. He was a public officer without vices; a private citizen without wrong; a neighbour without reproach; a Christian without hypocrisy, and a man without guile." Yes, he was born into a certain culture and that's all he knew at the time, but it's so much more complicated than what you have stated. He and his wife were both disgusted by slavery even though they were born in to that culture.

[marylees]

Originally Posted by swooner

Only history is "He Lost"!

In 100 Years will they take down the 9/11 monuments because it offends Muslims?

[MandoMan]

Originally Posted by OrangeBlossomBaby

The statue was erected in 1890, on Monument Avenue, which existed to glorify and celebrate people who fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War. Glorify and Celebrate - the people who rejected the Union (which was, at the time, what we know now as the United States of America) and fought against it. This war, this Civil War, was the culmination of an attempt to overturn the government. An insurrection of "monumental" proportions (pun intended). The population in Richmond was mostly wealthy white people and poverty-stricken black people. The abolition of slavery only happened 25 years prior, so most adults living there were former slaves with no job, no prospects, few people willing to actually PAY them to work. I would venture to guess that the blacks living in Richmond would not have been very happy to see the figure of their former oppressor be placed proudly and prominently in their town center.

While I agree in general, I would suggest kindly that further reading in history would be interesting for you. Most white people in Richmond were NOT wealthy in 1890. Indeed, there were only a few thousand white people in the Confederate states BEFORE the war who were wealthy, and a large percentage of those who were then were not wealthy after the war. The vast majority of Southern whites in 1860 were poor, often miserably poor, and had never owned slaves. The same was true in 1890. Many of their descendants are still poor. Most of the Southern soldiers who died had never owned a slave. Perhaps they supported slavery for various reasons (such as hoping they might someday be able to afford one), just as plenty of poor whites today who depend on government handouts want lower taxes on the rich because they hope to someday be rich, but they still lived in poverty and dressed in rags.

Meanwhile, while there were millions of “poverty-stricken black people,” the two were not synonymous. There had been “free people of color” in the South for centuries, and a number of them owned slaves, owned farms, or were respected small business owners and craftsmen. This was even more the case in the North.

However, I agree with you in thinking about how the black citizens of Richmond must have felt in 1890 as they saw tax dollars go to memorialize those who had fought to keep them enslaved.

A couple of my great-grandparents were from British Guiana or Suriname and racially mixed. (One of my third great-grandfathers was a Scot who owned four plantations in Suriname and several hundred slaves, married an African woman he had purchased, and left his plantations to his mulatto children. Two of those mulatto sons were tried for beating a thief to death on one of their plantations in 1867. History is complicated!) When slavery was ended in those countries, instead of having a war, the governments of Great Britain and the Netherlands bought each slave, reimbursing the owners, and freed them. But the slaves were required to stay and work on the plantations for several years while indentured servants were brought in from India to take their place. Eventually, the government bought a lot of these plantations, which were often about 500 acres, divided them up into plots of two to five acres, and gave them to ex-slaves. They could live on that in a shack they built and with a big garden. Many, of course, left the plantations and moved to town, even though it was hard to find work there. Lincoln offered the South a similar deal, buying slaves instead of fighting, but the Southern politicians refused, alas. It would have been very expensive, but still cheaper than the war. Plantations should have been confiscated and divided up and distributed to ex-slaves, but alas that didn’t happen.