Recommendations for the removal and renaming of multiple tributes to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at the U.S. Military Academy were not made “with any intention of erasing history,” according to the Naming Commission report submitted to Congress.
“The facts of the past remain and the commissioners are confident the history of the Civil War will continue to be taught at all service academies with all the quality and complex detail our national past deserves,” the report noted. “Rather, they make these recommendations to affirm West Point’s long tradition of educating future generations of America’s military leaders to represent the best of our national ideals.”
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin approved the Naming Commission’s recommendations to take down or alter 13 Confederate assets across the campus, the school announced on Dec. 19.
Modifications on the West Point campus started over the school’s holiday break.
In terms of history, long before he served 32 years in the U.S. Army and turned down a Union Army command from President Abraham Lincoln to instead lead Confederate forces, Robert E. Lee graduated second in his class from West Point and was later appointed superintendent.
Now, as directed by the Department of Defense under recommendations from the Naming Commission, West Point is taking down a portrait of Lee in his Confederate uniform from its library, a stone bust of the general from Reconciliation Plaza, and a bronze triptych from the main entrance of Bartlett Hall.
The academy will also replace a quote from Lee displayed at Honor Plaza and begin refacing select stone markers at Reconciliation Plaza with modified language and images, according to a letter released by Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland, U.S. Military Academy Superintendent.
Multiple buildings, streets, and areas around the academy’s campus are scheduled to be renamed.
Confederate Statues, Displays Under Scrutiny
Since the death of George Floyd after an altercation with Minneapolis police in 2020, hundreds of Confederate statues and displays have been removed from public spaces across the country.Virginia took down a Lee statue from the National Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol in December 2020.
The Statuary Hall collection comprises two statues from each state showcased throughout the Capitol. In 1909, Virginia contributed memorials to George Washington and Lee.
On Dec. 28, President Joe Biden signed a bill that will start the process of removing a Confederate bust of Roger Taney from the Capitol building. Taney was Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who defended slavery throughout the Civil War and his career.
As described in the bill’s language, Taney authored the 1857 Dred Scott decision which “declared that African Americans were not citizens of the United States and could not sue in Federal courts. This decision further declared that Congress did not have the authority to prohibit slavery in the territories.”
In 2017, a statue of Taney was transported from the Maryland General Assembly grounds in Annapolis after Republican Gov. Larry Hogan endorsed the move.
A former legislator and attorney general in Maryland, Taney became the country’s fifth chief justice under President Andrew Jackson and presided from 1836 until 1864. His sculpture in the Old Supreme Court Chamber where the Supreme Court met from 1810 to 1860 will be removed and replaced with a bust of Maryland-born Thurgood Marshall, who lived from 1908 to 1993.
In Jacksonville, Fla., city council president Terrence Freeman said he will encourage his colleagues to address the future of community’s last standing Confederate monuments in 2023.
The subject has generated widespread attention in Jacksonville, where a plane pulling the Confederate flag has made multiple appearances over the city’s skies in recent weeks.
In June 2020, Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry ordered the removal of a bronze statue of a Confederate soldier from a city park. The same day, he pledged he would order all remaining public Confederate monuments in the city to be taken down.
In August, the city council finance committee voted to propose changing a line item in Curry’s capital improvement program to “Confederate Monument removal, relocation, remaining or renaming determined by the council.”
Curry included $500,000 in the program to remove the “Monument to the Women of the Confederacy”
Confederate monuments should not stand on city-owned land, Curry said.
Richmond, Virginia—the former Confederate capital—removed its last Confederate monument on Dec. 12.
Amid protests that followed Floyd’s death, Richmond took down its other Confederate monuments.
The removal of a bronze statue of Confederate General A.P. Hill was more complicated because it sat in the middle of a busy intersection and the general’s remains were interred beneath the monument.
One of Lee’s lieutenant generals, Hill was killed during the Third Battle of Petersburg [Virginia] in 1865.
Robert E. Lee is the Focal Point
West Point was founded in 1802 on the banks of the Hudson River in upstate New York around 50 miles north of New York City. The academy has around 4,600 cadets.Hundreds of graduates from the academy fought for the Union and Confederate armies, including Union Army Commander and future president Ulysses S. Grant, and Lee.
The son of an American Revolution officer, Lee not only graduated second in his class in 1829, but he was also the academy’s superintendent from 1852-55.
Lee’s 32 years of service in the U.S. Army included the Mexican-American War.
It was Lee who was given command of soldiers by President James Buchanan to stop the uprising of a group of abolitionists led by John Brown who seized the federal arsenal and hoped to incite a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Va. in October 1859.
Lee attacked, and the group was captured after a brief battle.
In letters written in early 1861, Lee denounced secession and called it “nothing but revolution.”
Lee objected to secession, but he supported the Crittenden Compromise, proposed legislation in 1860, and felt a duty to defend his native Virginia if the state was attacked.
“I shall never bear arms against the Union, but it may be necessary for me to carry a musket in the defense of my native state, Virginia, in which case I shall not prove recreant to my duty,” Lee told a fellow military officer.
On March 28, 1861, Lee was promoted to Colonel of the U.S. Cavalry’s First Regiment, turning down a Confederate command offer. In April, the same month Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter, Virginia voted to secede, and a referendum scheduled for May would likely ratify the vote.
Heeding advice from U.S. Army commander Winfield Scott, President Abraham Lincoln offered Lee a promotion to Major General to lead the defense of Washington DC.
In response, Lee told presidential adviser Francis Blair, “Mr. Blair, I look upon secession as anarchy. If I owned four million slaves in the South I would sacrifice them all to the Union; but how can I draw my sword upon Virginia, my native state?”
Before he received orders to command troops to fight against Confederate forces in Virginia, Lee resigned and was appointed commander of Virginia’s Confederate forces.
“The consequences of his decisions were wide-ranging and destructive,” the commissioners wrote in their report. “Lee’s armies were responsible for the deaths of more United States Soldiers than practically any other enemy in our nation’s history.”
In June 1862, Lee became commander of the Army of Northern Virginia and then ascended to General in Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States, and established a reputation as one of the greatest Civil War generals. He surrendered to U.S. Army Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865.
Lee Has Not Been Completely Canceled
Lee has not been completely canceled from modern-day society.After his death, Washington College faculty asked that the trustees rename the school in Lee’s honor. The institution became Washington and Lee University.
The school has faced calls to remove Lee, but in June 2021, the board of trustees voted 22 to 6 to retain the school’s name.
The board of trustees did choose to rename and renovate Lee Chapel, and discontinue Founders Day, which was traditionally held on his birthday, Jan. 19.
Lee’s birthday is still recognized in four states.
Alabama and Mississippi commemorate Lee and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on the third Monday of January.
Time Marches on
In a Dec. 27 column for The Epoch Times, Bradley A. Thayer wrote that the Department of Defense’s approval of the Naming Commission’s recommendations for West Point “demonstrates the erosion of the military history of the United States, including the military leadership that both Grant and Lee demonstrated, which is salient for cadets.”“All of America’s military history will be found wanting by progressives and thus in need of elimination,” said Thayer, who is co-author of “Understanding the China Threat” and director of China Policy at the Center for Security Policy. “It will not be long before they discover Grant’s 1862 General Order No. 11 that expelled American Jews from his military district ... during the Vicksburg campaign.
“Once Grant is canceled, they will be on to his replacement before he too is canceled, and then on to Pershing, Marshall, MacArthur, and Eisenhower in an equally absurd and appalling infinite regress worthy of Monty Python,” Thayer added. “For the logic of progressives, the next steps are the cancellation of West Point, the Army, and the United States.”
The Naming Commission was formed under the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2021. It was created to assign, modify, or remove names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia within the Department of Defense that commemorate the Confederacy or those who voluntarily fought for the Confederate Army.
The commission submitted Part II of its final report to Congress on Aug. 29, specifically addressing assets of the U.S. Military Academy and U.S. Naval Academy.
“Throughout the [West Point] grounds, plaques adorn almost every building and entrance, honoring the names and lives of West Point graduates who demonstrated exceptional devotion to the defense of the United States and the advancement of its ideals,” the commissioners wrote in their report. “Commemorating the Confederacy alongside those graduates honors men who fought against the United States of America, and whose cause sought to destroy the nation as we know it.”
