Yesterday I had a back and forth discussion with a Facebook friend about the current impulse to eradicate anything having to do with the Confederacy. What prompted the discussion was the recent article in The Atlantic by Retired U.S. Army General and former CIA Director David Petraeus titled, Take the Confederate Names Off Our Army Bases. I thought I’d recreate the conversation here with some additional commentary.

I started off by saying that I disagree with Petraeus, whose position is that because the bases are federal installations, naming them after Confederate generals is honoring men who committed treason. “Plainly put, Lee, Bragg, and the rest committed treason, however much they may have agonized over it,” he writes. “The majority of them had worn the uniform of the U.S. Army, and that Army should not brook any celebration of those who betrayed their country.”

My interlocutor agreed with Petraeus and said that naming a military base should honor someone who defended and fought for the U.S., not someone who rebelled against the Union and fought for an immoral cause. There’s no doubt that he and Petraeus are correct. The South did secede from the Union. They did appoint a president and they did fight to remain a separate nation—ostensibly over state’s rights, but also over the issue of slavery.

(Questions linger over whether the rebellion can rightly be called “treason.” The North extended an astonishing magnanimity to the South, Jefferson Davis was never put on trial, and the founding generation had done exactly the same some four score and seven years earlier.)

My reasons for opposing the renaming of the bases is grounded in the context of our present situation. After agreeing that he made valid points, I replied along the lines of,

These were American men and are part of the South’s history, a history in which their sons died fighting for what they believed was a righteous cause. That fight, that independent spirit, is woven into southern culture and, frankly, it is part of our shared American history, even if “we” don’t share their views.

Another, more dangerous dynamic at play here is that the effort to do away with the statues and the names of the bases is a form of censorship. Who are you or I to force the American people in the South to remove the symbols of their history—our history?

Don’t misunderstand me—if the people of the Southern states decide through democratic means that they want to do away with those symbols, by all means, do away with them. If the Army follows its protocols and renames the bases, so be it.

But that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing mob rule and unilateral decisions that the statues must fall. That is not the American way and once that ball gets rolling, you tell me how to stop it. I am very cautious about doing away with our history, especially since it still has a lot to teach us.

The effort to remove symbols of the Confederacy has been in motion for a few years now. After Dylann Roof’s horrific massacre of nine black churchgoers in Charleston in 2015, South Carolina decided to no longer fly the Confederate flag at the state house. After the deadly August, 2017 clash over the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, protesters pulled down a statue of a Confederate soldier in Durham, North Carolina. Governor Cuomo of New York demanded that two streets named after Southern generals be changed at the Fort Hamilton Army base in Brooklyn. Debate about whether to remove statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson followed.

In the current rampaging over the death of George Floyd, not only have Confederate monuments been defaced and vandalized, but the Lincoln memorial—dedicated to the Great Emancipator himself—was defaced. Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam has announced that the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, standing in Richmond since 1890, will be removed. And just a couple of days ago, NASCAR announced that the Confederate flag, a staple of racing fans, would no longer be flown at any events or facilities.

Back to my words in bold above: where does it stop? Dominic Green captures my fears in this piece from The Spectator:

The struggle has turned from Confederate generals to the Founders: from those who seceded from the United States to those who laid its foundations. Students at the University of Missouri are petitioning for the removal of a statue of ‘racist slave owner’ Thomas Jefferson, whose statue at Birmingham, Alabama was damaged in an arson attack. Last week at George Washington University, Washington’s bust was toppled from its plinth. On Tuesday night, Christopher Columbus was decapitated in effigy in Boston and overturned, vandalized and tipped into a lake in Richmond, Virginia.

I am not opposed to making changes, as long as they are deliberate and done with sober and prudent judgment. Even Petraeus recognizes the value of history and the danger of trying to stamp out certain memories:

If we attempt to repress the fact of [Lee’s] existence from our institutional memory, we risk falling into the trap of authoritarian regimes, which routinely and comprehensively obliterate whole swaths of national history as if they never happened at all. What distinguishes democracies is their capacity to debate even the most contentious issues vigorously and in informed, respectful, deliberate ways and to learn from the errors of the past. But remembering Lee’s strengths and weaknesses, his military and personal successes and failures, is different from venerating him.

Is there a better time to take such a step? Maybe not. But the weight of my concern lies in erasing history and where that road will eventually lead. There is no question that slavery was a wicked institution that needed to be abolished. The monuments, both North and South, are memorials to the bloody war Americans fought over it. I am very cautious about doing away with that history, especially since it still has a lot to teach us.