2017-08-17 07:00:00
More than 150 years after the last cannon shots, the Civil War remains a wound still far from being completely healed in the United States. The events in Charlottesville were a tragic reminder of this last weekend with the death of a 32-year-old woman. In this small town in the United States, it all started with a gathering of white supremacists who came to protest against the removal of a statue of General Robert E. Lee, one of the most emblematic figures of the Confederate States of the United States. who fought against the States of the Union between 1861 and 1865.
The situation in Charlottesville is not an isolated case. For almost a week, examples of monuments being torn down have multiplied, as reviewed by The New York Times. According to a report released last year by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an association fighting against extremist movements, more than 1,500 Confederate symbols are still visible in public spaces. These may include dedicated monuments, such as the Charlottesville statue, parks or schools. The vast majority of these symbols are unsurprisingly found in the southern United States, particularly Virginia, Texas and Georgia, all three members of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
These symbols sometimes have the right to be cited in much less expected places. For example, there is a Robert E. Lee School in East Wenatchee, Washington. However, this state did not play a leading role during the conflict between the North and the South. And for good reason: it did not yet exist. It was not until 1889 that this territory became an integral part of the Union. In 2015, the local school board chose not to change the name of the establishment, in order to combat a “sanitization” of history. An argument taken up again on Thursday by Donald Trump, who in a tweet compared the removal of statues to the “tearing apart” of American culture.
“Lee embodies the military epic of the Confederacy”
“In the South of the United States, he is almost the equivalent of a Thomas Jefferson or a George Washington,” explains Farid Ameur, historian specializing in the Civil War, interviewed by Le Parisien. Born in 1807, Lee came from an illustrious Virginia family, the son of a Revolutionary War hero. A brilliant student at the West Point military academy, he distinguished himself at the end of the 1840s during the war against Mexico. Very quickly, he was spotted for his military talents. In April 1861, when the Civil War broke out, he faced a case of conscience. He is offered command of the Union troops, that is to say the Northern troops! He finally declined this proposal when Virginia, his native and slave state, in turn seceded.
This disciple of Napoleon had a string of military successes during the first years of the conflict. Lee was still defeated during the largest battle of the war at Gettysburg in 1863. Lee’s surrender came at Appomattox two years later, on April 9, 1865. “Lee would accept defeat, unlike many of his former soldiers,” specifies Farid Ameur. “He called on southerners to rise above all personal resentment and to unite for the needs of national reconstruction” before dying in 1870.
His aura endures. “General Lee then embodies the military epic of the Confederation,” summarizes Farid Ameur. It is the one that made us dream and fantasize an entire literary tradition which contributed to romanticizing the South.” Perhaps the best-known example of this “Lost Cause” movement is “Gone with the Wind,” the novel by Margaret Mitchell made into a film in the late 1930s.
Monuments built as a “provocation”
As the study by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows, a large number of monuments dedicated to the Confederate States also saw the light of day in the first two decades of the 20th century, the time when the “Jim Crow” laws establishing segregation came into force. racial. “In most cases, these monuments were built out of provocation,” notes Farid Ameur. The Charlottesville statue dates back to 1924. General Lee is not the only character to have been placed on a pedestal. Other monuments are, for example, dedicated to Jefferson Davis, the president of the eleven seceding states. Dozens of monuments were also erected in the 1950s and 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement.
Ironically, Robert E. Lee himself was not the most supportive of monuments erected in memory of the Confederacy. “All that needs to be done is to protect the graves and mark the resting place of those who fell on the field of honor,” he wrote in a letter in 1866. “Lee believed that countries that erased the signs of civil war recovered more quickly from conflicts,” explains historian Jonathan Horn, author of a biography of Robert Lee. “Continuing to keep these symbols alive also meant perpetuating divisions.”
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