Gone to Shiloh

"Gone to Shiloh" (Elton John, Leon Russell, Neil Young)

Last year, we visited the Shiloh battlefield in Southern Tennessee.  It was a soggy, drippy day—perfect for a somber inspection of a place where nearly 24,000 young men were either killed or wounded in a two-day battle.  Most of the land is densely wooded, just as it was in 1862, and that somehow brought home the horror of the battle.  A soldier in those woods could know little, see little, and understand nearly nothing of what was going on around him, just smoke and slaughter.

Statues and monuments dot the battlefield.  Some commemorate Federal units, some Confederate. Most of them show where units were stationed, or the sites of the bloodiest battles.  Few honor individuals on either side, for their purpose is to help us learn and remember what happened here and its cost—and, perhaps, to warn us not to ever let it happen again.

Throughout the South, and much of the North as well, other statues honor the generals and leaders of the Confederacy.  A groundswell of people demands their removal, at least from public spaces.  Those who defend them argue that they remind us of our (or their) “heritage.”  It would be unthinkable to bulldoze the Shiloh battlefield and build strip malls on it.  How, then, is removing these statues any different? Aren’t we, in both cases, “erasing history?”

Not at all.

It is right and proper to commemorate what happened in those awful days.  The event can be divorced from the motivations of the young men who gave their lives there. I suspect that quite a few didn’t really know what they were fighting for; they were there because of loyalty to their family and community, because of a vague sense of “patriotism”, because of fear of “Yankees” (or, conversely, “Rebs”), because of a thirst for adventure.  Not so, though, with a statue of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson or Jefferson Davis, or any of the other “heroes” of the Confederacy.  These commemorate motivations, the cause for which they chose to lead their troops.  And that's the problem. 

To honor Robert E. Lee is, for all his qualities of courage and leadership, necessarily to honor treason.  To honor Jefferson Davis is to be proud of one of the most monstrous crimes against humanity ever committed, the institution of human slavery.  Stonewall Jackson was legendary for his bravery, all right—but it was the bravery of German soldiers in Normandy on D-Day.  They devoted their service to the cause of white supremacy. And not just to that, but to the oppression and exploitation of human beings they relegated to the status of livestock.

What, then, about such figures as George Washington or Thomas Jefferson?  They were slaveowners, and they too committed acts of treason.  Should their statues, their portraits, their images on our money—should these be erased too?

Yes, they were deeply flawed.  But they articulated an ideal that they themselves couldn’t live up to, but which became the country’s cause.  Washington refused a crown, and broke the concept of “divine right” once and for all.  Jefferson established the concept that “all [people] are created equal,” a concept so radical at the time that we’re still having trouble implementing it.  They set in motion a system that, while deeply flawed like them, has a noble, liberating vision to guide it, and us.

But you know … maybe the Old Testament injunction against “graven images” is the best practice.  Maybe we don’t need statues of “heroes” after all.  Not to get all Platonic here, but heroes usually have clay feet (or, in this case, bronze). A statue of George Washington or Robert E. Lee is really just a sculpted filter through which certain qualities pass to us.  The qualities are what’s important, not the particular representation of them.  What’s happening with the current controversy over Confederate statues is that, for perhaps the first time, large numbers of Americans are aware of just what these figures stood for and realizing that we don’t all agree on what those values should be.  It’s a discussion we need to have. 

It’s the sort of thing you think about on a rainy day in a forested field in Southern Tennessee.