I don’t agree with cancelling historic figures who made mistakes from our historic perspective, as long as the truth about them is balanced and objective. That is, we must acknowledge their virtues, while being honest about their vices.

For example, I have heard the claim “At least George Washington was a ‘good’ slave owner.” I always respond that there is no such thing. Washington’s slaves worked under threat of the lash, even if he didn’t beat them. There is no “good” slave owner...just relatively less bad ones (from our modern perspective).

Washington, arguably the greatest American patriot, reflected the values of his era, including slavery. Even as the Enlightenment meant moral people were recognizing that slavery was inherently evil, Washington only freed his slaves after his death. Meanwhile, Thomas Jefferson, another slave owner who struggled with the inconsistency of his liberty-based values and slavery, honestly asked, “We have the wolf by the ears...now what do we do?”

They and their fellow slave-owning Founders were brilliant men who advanced timeless ideas, but they were imperfect. A healthy society doesn’t let human imperfections distract from those ideas.

Even Abraham Lincoln, the “Great Emancipator,” was ambivalent about slavery. He was unsure how the U.S. could unleash millions of uneducated, lower-skilled people. I would add that those millions of people would also have been pretty angry, and in the eyes of the people at the time, would have represented a potential threat to the stability of the nation as a whole.

However, after the war, while the North controlled the South militarily, it did nothing to control Southern culture. Once Democrats regained political power in D.C., they allowed the South to enact the Jim Crow laws and, significantly, to create a culture that endlessly celebrated the Confederacy, whether through public art, literature, or public mores, even though the Confederacy had lost and was dedicated to a fundamentally un-American idea.

And this is where we get to monuments and their place in American history.  Earlier this month, SECDEF Pete Hegseth announced that he is returning a 110-year-old Confederate monument to Arlington National Cemetery that had recently been removed under “woke” pressure. He refers to it as the “Reconciliation Monument,” which it is not…was not…and was never intended to be.

Hegseth’s decision can be understood as a counteraction to the Democrat party’s wholesale destruction of American monuments in 2020, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. The monument should not be replaced at Arlington Cemetery.

Image (cropped) by Tim1965. CC BY-SA 3.0.

According to researcher Kevin M. Levin, “No one at the time of the monument’s dedication referred to it as such [reconciliation], including the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who offered Moses Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran, the commission to create the monument.” In fact, the opposite was true. The “Daughters” commissioned Ezekiel to create an unapologetic celebration of slavery and the Confederacy.

Let the monument speak for itself. The inscription in Latin on the base states, “Victorious Cause Pleasing to the Gods, But the Lost Cause Pleased Cato.”

That phrase plays on two layers of meaning in classical history and philosophy: “Victorious Cause Pleasing to the Gods” reflects the ancient belief that victory on the battlefield was a sign of divine favor. If you won, it meant the gods were with you, smiling on your cause. Romans often invoked Jupiter, Mars, or Fortuna in this way.

“But the Lost Cause Pleased Cato” points directly to Cato the Younger, the Roman statesman and Stoic philosopher. Cato was famous for his unyielding opposition to Julius Caesar during the Roman civil war. Even when defeat was certain, he refused to compromise his principles or accept Caesar’s rule. For Cato, virtue, integrity, and adherence to principle mattered more than victory. He sided with Pompey’s doomed resistance, and after their loss at Thapsus, he chose suicide rather than submit to Caesar.

So the line implies that the gods (and the world) may reward the side that wins, but the side that loses can still claim moral nobility if its cause is just, and men like Cato would rather fall with principle than live in dishonor.

The figure at the top of the monument representing the South faces south and extends a laurel wreath in her hand, as if acknowledging only the South. There are actual cinerary urns and shields bearing the coat of arms of each Confederate State, but the designers included the boundary states of Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri for good measure (wouldn’t want to forget our Southern Brothers who fought and died for those states). If it were truly designed for reconciliation, it would have all the states depicted upon it, not just the Southern ones.

It gets worse.

The image of the female slave holding up a soldier’s child, ostensibly before going off to war, depicts what can be interpreted as a loyal slave. More likely, any truth in this image is that she is a woman who really had no other choice than to do her job. A slave portrayed in a Confederate uniform has often mistakenly been interpreted as a black Confederate soldier, but in reality, the artist is depicting a Confederate officer’s slave

There is much more to the story that includes attempts at whitewashing Confederate history, following the same old tired argument that the South was fighting for its “Rights.” The fact is that the secession documents for each Confederate State called out slavery as the reason for seceding. Other perceived abuses of their rights were thrown in for good measure.

Obviously, SECDEF Hegseth is not a historian, and no one has pointed out this information about the monument to him. I hope he learns it quickly because this particular monument belongs in a museum that exposes the full truth, both good and bad, for all to see, and not in Arlington Cemetery. Put another way, the justifiable effort to push back against the woke movement’s excesses shouldn’t mean we reinstate an homage to an immoral political system.