Bacon's Rebellion

Some have been banished or destroyed, and others are threatened, while one is slated for reinstallation.

by Catesby Leigh

For a vocal minority, the memory of 2020’s “Summer of Love,” with its orgy of “Black Lives Matter” sloganeering, occupied zones, and statuary vandalism, shines brightly. It’s not hard to see why. The expulsion of Confederate monuments from the streets, squares, and parks of cities across the South, mostly during the disturbances that followed George Floyd’s killing, marks a historic victory for wokedom’s cancel culture.

Though 2020 is a year most Americans would be happy to forget, the theatrics of statuary excommunication still attract politicians on the Left. President Trump may have resurrected Christopher Columbus’s effigy in the nation’s capital, but Capitol Square in Richmond, Virginia, is now in the crosshairs. With three Confederacy-related statues still in place, including an outstanding figure of Stonewall Jackson (1874) by the distinguished Irish sculptor J. H. Foley, the square also includes a Virginia Civil Rights Memorial, a monument to the state’s Indian tribes, and a Virginia Women’s Monument that reflect more recent political concerns and artistic sensibilities. Capitol Square—site of the statehouse, governor’s mansion, and a multi-figure nineteenth-century monument focused on a mounted George Washington—has thus offered a display of the common sense that lost traction during the Summer of Love.

The crusade against Confederate statues, which has enjoyed the unflagging support of the nation’s progressive media, reflects a flattening rather than a broadening of historical and cultural understanding. We’re no longer encouraged to ponder the loyalties or virtues of great commanders like Robert E. Lee and Jackson. We’re supposed to view them as nothing more than “traitors who killed American soldiers to defend slavery”—poster boys for white supremacy. Regarding them as role models, as many a Southern-born warrior now engaged in the campaign against the Iranian mullahs surely does, is unthinkable. All that matters about Confederate monuments is that they stood or stand for the racial oppression that stains the history of the South. Wokedom thus thrives on a perversely simplistic, Manichean outlook. Its impact on the South’s public realm, as a vacuous exhibition of banished Confederate statues in Los Angeles attests, has been disastrous. The sooner Americans—North and South, black and white—see this authoritarian mindset for what it is, the better.