Confederate Statues Essay

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Recommended: Monuments are a symbol of a significant time in history

Confederate Statues Aren’t all Bad

As you may have heard on the news, there’s a hot topic of debate that’s been raging throughout the south recently. It’s over the morality and meaning of Confederate symbolism, more specifically Confederate statues. This came to rise in New Orleans, when the mayor decided to remove all statutes referencing the Confederacy, explicitly and implied. Many other cities have joined in on the bandwagon, getting rid of their statues as well. However, I disagree with this new movement. I believe that Confederate statues deserve to stay. This paragraph is going to explain why.

To start off, I’m going to look at the removal side first. They tend to focus their argument on the inhumanities associated with slavery, …show more content…

While most people use the terms interchangeably, there’s actually a significant difference between the two. A monument is “a lasting evidence, reminder, or example of someone or something notable or great” while a memorial is something “serving to preserve remembrance.” When put like this, it reveals that this is really a debate over whether these statues are monuments or memorials. While they were certainly built as monuments to the south, I believe they've transformed into memorials. Instead of glorifying confederate heroes and southern nationalism as they originally did, today they are instead they constant reminders of how far Americans can go to protect their social dominance. If you erase history, you’ll never truly understand it. It’s also disrespectful to the men who fought as well. Many people nowadays seem to forget that those who fought for the Confederacy were still Americans, and to say they were all evil racist slave owners would just be a lie. While there were plenty of racist planters who supported the Confederacy, they weren't the ones fighting. The soldiers fighting were often young, adventurous men who had no idea what they were getting into; falling victim to the romantic depictions of war prevalent at the time, only to discover that war isn’t as fun as the papers say it is. They deserve to be memorialized just as much as union soldiers

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