While walking across the University of North Carolina campus, I paused to see the controversial statue of “Silent Sam“, a memorial to students who joined the Confederate army.  Some North Carolinians want it removed because it seems to celebrate the causes of racism, slavery, and rebellion against the United States.  Others want to preserve it and similar monuments across the Tarheel state that recognize those who served the Confederate cause.  They say that removing the monuments is tantamount to rewriting history.  The argument raises two questions.  What is the purpose of the statues?  Why did we fight a civil war?

Julian Carr, a wealthy Civil War veteran who delivered the keynote speech at Silent Sam’s 1913 dedication, made it clear that the monument was erected to honor and perpetuate the cause of white supremacy.  Here are a few of his words.  “The present generation…scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the Anglo-Saxon race…the purest strain of the Anglo-Saxon is to be found in the thirteen Southern States —  Praise God…One hundred yards from where we stand, I horse-whipped a negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted…a southern lady…”  Today, a century after the statue was erected, that speech is proudly displayed on the website of the Durham Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The reasons for the war are evident in the reasons for secession declared by the legislatures of Confederate states:

Texas:  “…the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations…”

Mississippi: “There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union…”

Southern state governments claimed slavery as a legitimate social structure that was vital to their economies and they saw the election of President Lincoln as proof that slavery would be ended in the United States.  Underlying slavery and the war was greed that justified ownership of humans, theft of their labor, sale of their children and accumulation of wealth through brutality.

There are “heritage groups”  (a polite description) who regularly honor their ancestors’ loyalty to the Confederacy at its monuments, making speeches and waving battle flags while dressed in Confederate uniforms.  Siding with them this year, Republicans in North Carolina’s legislature made it illegal for local governments and state institutions to remove state-owned memorials; and they rejected repeated requests to stop issuing license plates featuring Confederate battle flags.

It is necessary to acknowledge history before we can rise above it.  Rather than rewriting their Nazi past, Germans acknowledged the holocaust and other horrors of the Third Reich with new monuments alongside Nazi concentration camps and symbols.  An alternative to moving Confederate memorials or preserving them would be to update them by adding a 21st century perspective.  Americans should support victims of Jim Crow laws and descendants of slaves in creating monuments documenting the evils that the Confederacy fought to perpetuate and erecting them beside those of the Confederacy.

Some will deny the comparison of the Confederacy to Nazi Germany, but they have much in common.  Eleven million people, six million of them Jewish,  died in the holocaust.  I can’t find an estimate of how many humans died as American slaves, but approximately four million were  emancipated in the aftermath of the Civil War.  Any estimate of the number who died during more than two centuries of pre-emancipation slavery would produce a count larger than the number of holocaust victims.  Is slavery a fate better or worse than a holocaust death?  I like to think that most humans would fight to avoid either one.

Now is the time to cease government sponsored glorification of the Confederacy, either by removing its monuments or by supplementing them with the values that we have learned in the century and a half since emancipation.  Republican legislators have not yet taken away the authority of local governments and universities to create new monuments alongside old ones.  We are the generation and now is the time for Americans to unite across lines of race and geography into one nation.  If not now, when?  If not us, who?

A victorious Union Soldier looks down in sorrow at fallen comrades