TO THE EDITOR:
The Silent Sam controversy illustrates the danger of judging the past by today’s standards. Today it is fashionable to posthumously condemn all Confederates as traitors worthy of eternal damnation because of the South’s association with slavery. It is equally fashionable to ostracize any who attempt to honor Confederate soldiers, but in so doing, we turn history into a weapon of political correctness.
Certainly, a number of Southerners fought to defend slavery. Others detested slavery yet fought for independence because they saw centralization of federal power as both unconstitutional and dangerous. Others still fought simply to protect their homes. If we use today’s sensibilities to condemn all Confederate soldiers, what about their adversaries?
Can we square a war ostensibly fought solely to end slavery and give blacks an equal footing — the ideologically correct view — with the existence of slavery in four union states? What about the Emancipation Proclamation’s exemption of slaves held in occupied Confederate territory — the very places emancipation could be forced? How do we treat Lincoln’s pre-war support of a constitutional amendment to forever protect slavery where it already existed? Certainly it’s odd that states supposedly fighting to destroy the slaveocracy would bar free blacks from immigrating, as Illinois and others did.
The point is not to minimize the horror or injustice of slavery — indeed the one great outcome of the war was slavery’s demise — but rather to illustrate that history is never as “black and white” as we’d like. We forget that at the peril of reasoned discussion and free exchange of ideas.
David Robinette
Research Associate
Molecular Biology
