Virginia's War on Statues of Dead Men

Lincoln ask Lee to run his army but lee refused citing he could never fight against his beloved Virginia

Lee was a patriot.

kinda just chose wrong

A patriot for his state, not the US.

Can't imagine leading an army against the neighbors and people who raised me.

This is classic communism 101. Erase history and plant your ideology into the minds of mush who refuse to think for themselves.

Robert E. Lee opposed Confederate statues in his lifetime and had interesting things to say about the Confederate flag as well.

The statues came a few decades later, mostly between the 1890s and 1920s, when people became too removed from the war to viscerally feel its tragic history, and the "Lost Cause" narrative gained in strength.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-on-confederate-statues-2017-8#:~:text=Confederate%20statues%20have%20a%20complicated,Caroline%20Janney%20told%20Business%20Insider.

I am from the South and have at least one ancestor buried in a Confederate battlefield. I very likely have other ancestors who fought on the side of the Union -- the war tore families apart, after all.

I choose to identify with the American flag because that is what I am, and because of the awful and hateful ideas the Confederate battle flag rallied troops in support of.

That's totally fair. I will not defend slavery or the Confederacy.

The idea that the Union was an army of deliverance is pretty twisted. That's what I object to. Sheridan burned 400 square miles of the Shenandoah. The Union saw the Confeds as a rebelllion, not a soverreign state. So they burned the homes of their own people. Sherman had slaves shot if they refused to be porters for his army. Statues of Sneridan and Sherman should come down as well, as these guys weren't heroes and no more an example of today's beliefs than Lee.

It was all about maintaining power and control and got re-mythologized into the Union as enlightened savior, a massive embodiment of a messiah delivering the slaves into freedom yadda yadda when freeing them was not the reason for the war.

Further, after they were freed, last thing Lincoln & Co wanted was to give them equal rights, loathing the aspect of freed Africans roaming their streets.

And their job markets. The addition of freed Africans to the workforce caused wages to plummet and forced competition between Africans and the Irish and other immigrants.

Bahaha still truckin’ with that huh.

It’s an apocryphal quote that lines up with words we know he wrote.

Well I don't recall you getting mad about those people owning slaves do you?
The atrocities against them were WAY worse.