To him, they would only “keep open the sores of war” and the ill will war engendered, which he thought should be consigned to “oblivion.”
He said so on several occasions in the years after he surrendered his army to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, at Appomattox, Va., some 70 miles southwest of Charlottesville, which erupted in violence last weekend after white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched in the name of saving a statue of Lee from dismantling.
He expressed his views in two famous letters that are now recirculating widely in the wake of Charlottesville.
[...]
“My conviction is,” Lee wrote, “that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt in the present condition of the Country, would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its accomplishment; & of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour.”
[...]
“All I think that can now be done, is to aid our noble & generous women in their efforts to protect the graves & mark the last resting places of those who have fallen, & wait for better times.”
[...]
[H]e thought it “wiser … not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
WaPo
So there you have it. Lee wouldn't even want his own statue to stand in Charlottesville. If you want to honor Lee, take it down.
Most of the Confederate statues and monuments, as University of North Carolina Charlotte historian Karen L. Cox wrote in The Post, were built between 1895 and World War I at the behest of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
“They were part of a campaign to paint the Southern cause in the Civil War as just and slavery as a benevolent institution,” she wrote, “and their installation came against a backdrop of Jim Crow violence and oppression of African Americans. The monuments were put up as explicit symbols of white supremacy.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
