continued
The U.S. Constitution is very clear: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” For this reason alone, the very thought of any of them being memorialized in any public place in the United States is a joke – and should be insulting to all Americans.
The same logic goes for the ten Army installations that were named after senior Confederate commanders, including Fort Bragg (named after General Braxton Bragg, who was a total disaster of a general, by the way), Fort Benning (named after Brigadier General Henry Benning, who led troops against the U.S. at Antietam and Gettysburg), and Fort Hood (named after John Bell Hood, who resigned from the Unites States Army to fight against it, and who was also a total disaster of a general).
We'll say it again: As if fighting to keep human beings enslaved wasn’t bad enough, THESE PEOPLE TOOK UP ARMS AGAINST THE UNITED STATES. Really? These people betrayed our country, not to mention the ancestors of our black friends and neighbors. No. Just no. No. No. No.
These guys are no-brainers, but it gets a little more complicated beyond that.
Take men like Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, for example. Washington and Jefferson owned slaves – as twelve of our first eighteen presidents did – and Jackson and Roosevelt were seriously outspoken racists. In fact, Jackson (the U.S. president from 1829 – 1837) oversaw the dreadful Indian Removal Act of 1830 and instigated the Trail of Tears, which is one of the vilest episodes in American history.
Although Woodrow Wilson (the U.S. president from 1913 – 1921) championed the League of Nations, led the nation through World War I, and helped pass the 19th Amendment – which gave women the right to vote – practically his entire government was geared toward white supremacy. His administration segregated the federal work force and forced many black Americans from positions where they had previously supervised white people. President Wilson is who started the process that led to ten military installations being named after Confederate officers. Sure, Theodore Roosevelt (the U.S. president from 1901 – 1909) put tons of land under federal protection, but only after he stole most of it from American Indians.
As we often do, we look to our hero Frederick Douglass for advice at times like these. The Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington, D.C., also known as the Emancipation Memorial, is a monument that depicts Abraham Lincoln standing over a kneeling, shirtless slave and granting him freedom. The fist of the black man is clenched and there are broken shackles at Lincoln’s feet. What many people don’t know is that money to build The Freedmen’s Memorial was raised almost exclusively from black Americans, many former slaves themselves.
The day of the memorial’s dedication, April 14, 1876, was a day of celebration. There was a huge parade, and the day was declared a federal holiday. U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant unveiled the monument right before Frederick Douglass took the stage for one of his most powerful speeches ever.
As always, Mr. Douglass refused to sugarcoat the situation. He started cordial enough: “We are here to express, as best we may, by appropriate forms and ceremonies, our grateful sense of the vast, high, and preeminent services rendered to ourselves, to our race, to our country, and to the whole world by Abraham Lincoln.” But then came this:
We fully comprehend the relation of Abraham Lincoln both to ourselves and to the white people of the United States. Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places, and it is never more proper and beautiful in any case than when speaking of a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continents of eternity.
It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country.
But at the end of his speech, however, he closed with this:
But by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln. It mattered little to us what language he might employ on special occasions; it mattered little to us, when we fully knew him, whether he was swift or slow in his movements; it was enough for us that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States.
In other words, Abraham Lincoln eventually met the moment and forever changed the lives of millions of people – however sloppy and inelegant his process may have been at times. To us, the lesson here is that we must look at these flawed men in their entirety, not simply by their greatest sins in the limitations of their time. Yes, George Washington owned slaves, but he also was a heroic commander-in-chief, who fought heroically for the United States, saved the Union, and helped establish our country around our new Constitution.
Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite of the highest order, but he also authored the Declaration of Independence, establishing our nation’s highest ideals – and putting into words, if not always in practice, the bold and powerful truth that it is “self-evident” that “all men are created equal.”
About this, it was also the brilliant Frederick Douglass who wrote,
The American Government and the American Constitution are spoken of in a manner which would naturally lead the hearer to believe that one is identical with the other; when the truth is, they are distinct in character as is a ship and a compass. The one may point right and the other steer wrong. A chart is one thing, the course of the vessel is another. The Constitution may be right, the Government is wrong. If the Government has been governed by mean, sordid, and wicked passions, it does not follow that the Constitution is mean, sordid, and wicked.
It would be the wildest of absurdities, and lead to endless confusion and mischiefs, if, instead of looking to the written paper itself, for its meaning, it were attempted to make us search it out, in the secret motives, and dishonest intentions, of some of the men who took part in writing it. It was what they said that was adopted by the people, not what they were ashamed or afraid to say, and really omitted to say. Bear in mind, also, and the fact is an important one, that the framers of the Constitution sat with doors closed, and that this was done purposely, that nothing but the result of their labors should be seen, and that that result should be judged of by the people free from any of the bias shown in the debates.