The Real Motivation Behind Civil War Monuments

Two old veterans meet at Gettysburg

From Catholics4Trump:

You might then ask a leftist when any Southern town could have erected a Confederate statue or monument in history and not have had an automatic racist intent. As we know, the true answer is never. But in order to not appear unreasonable, the leftist will tell you, “Well, right after the war and before Jim Crow!”

Ah yes. From the war’s end in 1865 until the 1880’s, the South was a smoldering, devastated, defeated, destitute and wrecked former nation, in many places still under the control of the Union army. One can only imagine that after such an obliterating defeat and while suffering anarchical and poverty stricken conditions in many places, the first thing Southerners would do, instead of working to rebuild their homes, societies and lives, would be to raise millions of dollars and take years to build statues in honor of the generals that had just lost the war. Yes, only in the minds of liberal history majors in 2017 does this make sense.

In addition, if one steps back from following the Social Justice Warriors into the fever swamps of historical revisionism, one would begin to realize that their logic actually makes no sense.  For they make the elementary logical error of Post hoc ergo propter hoc. This is a logical fallacy that states “Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X.”

Thus, just because the boom in Confederate memorials took place from 1900-1918 does not prove it was a result of or in any way inspired by Jim Crow laws which began in the 1880’s and ended in the 1960’s. Instead, the leftists would need to show us hard causation evidence linking the two events. They can’t.

Since leftists believe every Southerner in the United States from 1776 to 2017 was and is a frothing at the mouth racist, you’d think they would easily be able to prove a racist motive from historical documents commissioning these statues and memorials, or perhaps racist speeches given at the dedication ceremonies in front of these memorials.

After all, if even one Southerner who took on the project of building monument to a Confederate general had expressed racist motives you’d expect the left to be plastering this document all over cyberspace. But yet, they have produced not one hint of this evidence.

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Of special note is the year 1913, right near the beginning of the Confederate monument spike.  This year marked the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg where veterans of both sides of the war came together in a reunion of grand fashion. There was healing and forgiveness on both sides. Former Union and Confederate soldiers who earlier faced each other in the bloodiest war in American history stood side by side in reconciliation.

It is easy to forget that veterans who fought in that war were still alive at the time. Both sides saw its horrors. To a vast majority of Southern soldiers the motivation to fight was to defend their homeland from invasion and destruction. 98% of Southerners did not own slaves during the war, although plantation owners in the Union states of Kentucky, Delaware, and Maryland did. (Read more.)

Veterans shake hands on the 50th anniversary of Gettysburg

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