16 Aug 2017 8:35 pm
Actually, Robert E. Lee was against erecting Confederate memorials.
There's been much controversy in Charlottesville and beyond about preserving monuments to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
But if you had a chance to ask the guy, he'd most likely say, no thanks.
Based on his writings, Lee was not a fan of statues honoring Civil War generals, fearing they might "keep open the sores of war."
According to historian Jonathan Horn, Lee was often consulted in his lifetime about proposals to erect monuments to Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson and others.
In a 1866 letter to fellow Confederate Gen. Thomas L. Rosser, Lee wrote, "As regards the erection of such a monument as is contemplated, my conviction is, that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt ... would have the effect of ... continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour."
Three years later, Lee was invited to a meeting of Union and Confederate officers to mark the placing of a memorial honoring those who took part in the battle of Gettysburg.
"I think it wiser not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered," he wrote in a letter declining the invitation.
But that didn't stop civic and heritage groups from erecting numerous monuments to Lee, commander of the Confederate armies during the Civil War, after his death in 1870.
Now, however, most of those memorials are under fire by those who see them as symbols of America's dark legacy of slavery.