UNERASABLE: "Those who would destroy monument after monument to rid the nation of a subset of ugly parts of history do us all a grave disservice. They ignore the truths contained in the closing admonition in [Pres. Abraham] Lincoln's second Inaugural Address.".

• Author: Emord, Jonathan W.
• Position: NATIONAL AFFAIRS

ACROSS THE NATION, people driven by a mistaken sense of righteousness tear down monuments that remind us of U.S. history, that depict Americans who sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War. The desire to bring the monuments down arises from an immaturity and political correctness that compels adherence to suppression over a robust exchange of ideas and information. Those who favor destruction of the monuments generally lack an understanding of the underlying history and operate without a clear distinguishing principle. To them, any statue of a slave owner or apologist for slavery that exists should be destroyed, or at least removed from public view. Theirs is an irrational hatred that superficially removes reminders of history, as if we ought to suppress the errors of our past rather than be reminded of them so as not to repeat them.

The institution of slavery is a horrendous evil, inconsistent with our founding principles and humanity. To own a person, to force a person to perform labor against his or her will, and to subject a person to life dictated in every respect by another is an abomination, a robbery of the very reason for existence, of very nearly a person's soul. Slavery is so fundamental an offense that it defies credulity to distinguish between bondage and perpetual imprisonment and torture.

Although contrary to the Lockean principles so beautifully expressed in the Declaration of Independence, and although controversial even among the families of those individuals who vehemently defended the institution preceding the Civil War, the peculiar institution of slavery grew in the U.S. like a cancer, at first thought benign and likely to disappear without need for abolition but, by 1840, becoming a malignancy in the South, which Southerners dared not discontinue volitionally. Yet, while the institution of slavery is abhorrent, as was the Confederate States of America, which intended to preserve it, individuals such as Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, and Jubal Anderson Early--who believed their duties to their states first and foremost--ought not be condemned with a broad brush stroke that aims to remove any mention of them from history or any image of them from the public square. Those men helped define military tactics of the age and were possessed of many personal attributes that define greatness. To be sure, few of those who we revere in the world can be held to a standard of perfection. Indeed, it was...