Remembering Jefferson; Forgetting Lee

As monuments to Robert E. Lee have been dismantled, there have been debates about whether we should do the same for monuments to Thomas Jefferson. Wasn't he a slave-owner as well?

Here's why in the United States we should keep statues of Jefferson but not Lee.

Thomas Jefferson owned, and by most accounts, mistreated, his slaves, even by the standards of the antebellum South. However, people revere his memory despite this, and not because of this.

Robert E. Lee invaded the United States in an attempt to destroy the country and to continue the institution of slavery. The people who revere his memory do revere him because of this. Nothing else in his legacy is remotely as important.

Both Jefferson and Lee were imperfect human beings who did immoral things that, thanks to moral progress, are no longer legal or tolerated by decent people today. But only one of the two made it his life's work to actively try to continue slavery and destroy the United States of America, since that had become necessary to continue slavery. We absolutely should not try to forget unpleasant facts about them, any more than we should forget the slaughter of the native people that lived in North America before Europeans arrived, or Germans should forget the Holocaust. Indeed, it's critical that we remember that otherwise decent people somehow looked the other way and did these things or allowed them to happen.

It is important to consider that if moral progress is real, and continuing, then most of us today are certainly doing things that our great grandchildren will find morally abhorrent.

Unfortunately slavery is not yet a historical footnote, and continues in several countries today. Here's how you can help.