About a week ago, the War against Statues was confined to those depicting figures from the Confederacy. However, the war soon spread to other people that the left doesn’t like, including Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Christopher Columbus, and even Lord Horatio Nelson across the pond. Now, CBS in New York reports that Grant’s Tomb is now on the list for possible destruction.
Why is Ulysses S. Grant now objectionable?
While New York Mayor Bill de Blasio is mulling getting rid of the statue of Christopher Columbus that stands at Columbus Square, City Council Speaker Melissa Mark Viverito has also suggested that Grant’s Tomb should be destroyed as well.
She suggests that the commanding General of the Army of the Potomac and president of the United States was an anti-Semite. In 1862, Grant signed General Order 11 that expelled all Jews from the newly liberated states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi as a way to suppress the black market cotton trade. It was a bad piece of business, even by 19th Century standards, and therefore Grant must be expunged.
Grant was the hammer of Confederates
The ghosts of Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant may at this point be shaking their heads. Lee may have prolonged the Civil War by declining the command the Union Army, but Grant made sure that it ended with a Union victory. His campaign along the Mississippi River that ended in the siege of Vicksburg was a classic military operation that split the Confederacy in two.
He commanded the Army of the Potomac in the East starting in 1864 and hammered Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to death in the bloodiest fighting ever to take place in North America. If any one man can be given credit for ending the Confederacy and the evils of slavery, things that the antagonists in the War against Statues claim to abhor, it is U.S.
Grant.
At some point, the War against Statues has to reach the point of maximum absurdity. Likely no one human being in history is without some sort of sin that will cause the social justice warriors to conclude that they must be expunged from the public square and from memory.
It may be a good idea to call a halt to the destruction of monuments, all of them until the people who are keen to tear things down can get a grip on reality. Otherwise, commemorating anyone will prove to be impossible in the long run. Any civilization that cannot honor its past will never be able to appreciate it and learn from it.
