No other country in the history of the world — except the United States — has allowed monuments to traitors to be built in on its native soil. None, nada, zero, zilch, not one.
Yet throughout the country, statuary paying homage to men who attempted to destroy the Union by force of arms proliferated, and indeed, many are still firmly in place, mocking the ideals we supposedly espouse as a nation.
When Joe Biden launched his presidential bid, he did so by highlighting the comments made by Donald tRump (sic) after the march in Charlottesville by a group of rightwing nationalists who were shouting “Jews will not replace us,” and “Blood and soil,” the battle cry of the Nazi Party.
After confrontations with true patriot counterprotestors, the march descended into chaos and murder when Heather Heyer was run down by a nationalist madman James Alex Fields Jr., who was charged with first-degree murder. Three other white nationalists, Jacob Scott Goodwin, Alex Michael Ramos, and Richard W. Preston, were eventually sentenced to prison for their actions on that fateful day.
Nonetheless, tRump said there were “good people on both sides” and that some of the white nationalists were there simply to protect the statue of the traitorous Robert E. Lee. So if you believe tRump then you would have to believe that these protestors were not among the rabid crowd spreading hate, they were just there to protect a statue. Really?
But even if you buy that outright lie from a known liar, the marchers were still there protecting the statue of the man that most historians now agree caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans by declaring his allegiance to the Confederate States of America and becoming the South’s foremost general. In the opinion of virtually all historical experts, if Lee had accepted President Lincoln’s offer to become the general in command of all Union forces, the war would, in all likelihood, been shortened by years, thus sparing the country the four years of Civil War hell and the aforementioned deaths.
Indeed, if Lee had not become a traitor to his country, a number of states probably would not have seceded from the Union and the traitorous Confederacy would probably have fallen apart within months, or even in the first year.
The ironic part of this darkest chapter of American history is that Lee, in a letter he wrote in 1856, five years before the conflict began, stated that slavery was “a moral and political evil.” Nonetheless, he lent his effort to the most divisive cause in American history: A war to extend slavery to the new territories that wanted to join the Union.
Of course, the slaveowners told lie after lie, basically saying the war was over “states’ rights.” But the “right” they really wanted was to keep black people enslaved. No other period in American history saw such lying — until the current occupant of the White House took office. Let’s just hope and pray that another traitor to the ideals that our country was founded and built on doesn’t cause another Civil War, something he might try to do to stay in office.
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.
One Response to “MANSFIELD: Robert E. Lee — Traitor”
Midred Dixon
AMEN!