The Old South will fall again, with its monuments

In 1869, the president of Washington College was invited to Gettysburg to help erect granite memorials to mark the "positions and movements of the armies" during the great Civil War battle of six years before.

Robert E. Lee declined.

"I think it wiser ... not to keep open the sores of war," he wrote, "but to ... obliterate the marks of civil strife and ... the feelings it engendered."

New Orleans has come around to the general's point of view. The City Council voted in December 2015 to take down three statues of Confederate heroes — Lee, President Jefferson Davis, and Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard — and an obelisk that honored an 1874 uprising by the Crescent City White League against the Reconstruction-era state government. Lee was the last to be removed, plucked by a crane on May 19 from his 68-foot pedestal.

"The Civil War is over; the Confederacy lost, and we are better for it," Mayor Mitch Landrieu was quoted as saying in the New Orleans Advocate. "To literally put the Confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future."

The few who protested argued that the city was trying to erase history or their heritage. But New Orleans is right on the history the statues represent. Whatever the individual virtues of Lee or Confederate soldiers, whatever their sacrifices, they took up arms against their country — to perpetuate slavery. Whether that was why they enlisted, whether or not they owned slaves, that's what they were defending. On this point the Confederacy's founders were unequivocal.

Their vice president, Alexander Stephens, declared in his infamous "Cornerstone" speech of March 1861: "Our new government is founded ..., its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery ... is his natural and normal condition. ..."

"Three overall visions of Civil War memory collided and combined over time: one, the reconciliationist vision, which took root in the process of dealing with the dead from so many battlefields, prisons, and hospitals; two, the white supremacist vision, which took many forms early, including terror and violence, locked arms with reconciliationists of many kinds, and by the turn of the century delivered the country a segregated memory of its Civil War on Southern terms; and three, the emancipationist vision, embodied in African Americans' complex remembrance of their own freedom, in the policies of radical Reconstruction, and in the conceptions of the war as the reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks to citizenship and Constitutional equality.

"In the end this is a story of how the forces of reconciliation overwhelmed the emancipationist vision in the national culture, how the inexorable drive for reunion ... trumped race."

Frederick Douglass remained true to the emancipationist vision, never losing hope despite the setbacks he witnessed. In a Memorial Day speech 140 years removed from this weekend, he said:

"There was a right side and a wrong side in the late war, which no sentiment ought to cause us to forget, and while today we should have malice toward none, charity toward all, it is no part of our duty to confound right with wrong, or loyalty with treason."