D.J. Tice's column arguing for the preservation the name of Lake Calhoun ("Putting history on trial can be tricky: The case for Calhoun," May 12) demonstrates how dangerous it is to cherry-pick from history instead of learning from it. The picking involves the carefully selected facts he relies on to support his contention that many of the pre-Civil War Americans we venerate were, by today's standards, uniformly flawed when it came to the problem of slavery.

That standard, Tice claims, applies as fully to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln as it does to John C. Calhoun. So why pick exclusively on that slave owning South Carolinian?

What, Tice queries, makes Calhoun's lifelong love affair with human bondage any more heinous than Lincoln's unapologetic white racism or Washington's ownership of nearly 300 fellow humans? If Calhoun's embrace of slavery justifies removing his name in favor of Bde Maka Ska, what renaming might be store for our own Washington Avenue, or for Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo?

Before launching such historically untethered warnings, Tice might have reflected on two Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies, Ron Chernow's of Washington (2011) and Eric Foner's of Lincoln (2014). Each demonstrates conclusively, in sharpest contrast to Calhoun, that the problem of slavery disturbed both presidents profoundly and wracked them with moral contradictions.

Yes, Washington chased down slaves who escaped from his plantation. But this same Washington was unique among the slave-owning Founding Fathers when arranging in his will for their wholesale emancipation.

Yes, Lincoln proposed in 1862 (as Tice notes), that slavery continue in force until 1900. No less shocking, at one point he blamed African-American abolitionists to their faces for causing the Civil War.

But by 1864 this same Lincoln attempted to convince the most prominent of those abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, to recruit free blacks to infiltrate the Confederate States in order to foment slave insurrections.

The point is that whatever their failings, Washington and Lincoln knew in their bones that slavery violated fundamental moral principles. This realization troubled them profoundly and led them into all manner of all too human moral confusion. In this respect both presidents share much with white Americans today who find themselves afflicted by guilt, equivocation and confusion once they begin to realize the dismaying extent of slavery's devastating legacies for black individuals and communities.

This history offers us some profoundly important lessons. Thanks to his cherry-picking, Tice renders these lessons inaccessible.

Calhoun, by contrast, offers us nothing but nightmares. For him, enslavement opened the path to utopia by providing havens of safety within the plantations for helplessly inferior African-Americans and an end to the poverty of subsistence wage workers, black and white together, all over the nation. That's what Calhoun meant when insisting that slavery was a "positive good." He saw it as a much preferred alternative to freedom for the poor, the exploited and the dispossessed whatever their color.

This denial of individual freedom explains why the great historian Richard Hofstadter sardonically anointed Calhoun as "the Marx of the master class." It also documents how egregiously Tice errs when claiming that Calhoun's critique of capitalism anticipates the economic ideas of today's political progressives. Slavery for the poor is not exactly what Bernie Sanders stands for.

In all these respects, Tice's cherry-picked case against renaming Bde Maka Ska is profoundly in error. One must never equate the "Great Emancipator" with the Deep South's most sophisticated defender of enslavement.

James Brewer Stewart is James Wallace Professor of History, Emeritus at Macalester College.