To Great Cheering, He's Down!

     . . . .VIDEO - Removal Of General Robert E. Lee Statue Monument From Lee Circle In New Orleans.

And it is accomplished to the accompaniment of the sort of celebration that can happen only in New Orleans.

What has always puzzled me about this particular New Orleans's CSA monument centers around the facts that Lee had no connection with New Orleans or Louisiana beyond sailing to San Antonio there at the outset of the invasion of Mexico in the Mexican American War. 

In the War of Southern Aggression Lee was all about, and only about. 'defending' Virginia. 

He wasn't even general of the Army of Northern Virginia when New Orleans and Louisiana were defeated and occupied by the Union forces.  He never had anything to do with Louisiana and the western states ever. This was unlike, o say, Sherman, who was superintendent of the Louisiana Military Academy when the War of Southern Aggression was declared.

A large standing bronze of Abraham Lincoln with the Emancipation Proclamation, by sculptor Leonard Wells. Is this not at least as much to historically honored as those who fought and killed for the sake of the expansion of slavery?

Contradicting those who defend these monuments, erected many years after Appomattox, as having nothing to do with slavery, but as preservation of our historical heritage, is there have been no monuments raised to Sherman or Grant in New Orleans. Nor, for that matter, have any been raised to Lincoln, though there was of Jefferson Davis (that one was been removed earlier). 

In other words, these monuments are part of the revisionist history of the United States, another white-wash of our national shame of slavery, telling a false tale of our history, and then glorifying the lies. This is why these monuments to owners of slaves need to be removed.*

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Equestrian statue honoring Andrew Jackson in Jackson Square, New Orleans.

*  I am no defender of Andrew Jackson (see the account of him in our The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry), who was a slave dealer and slave owner, an Indian killer, and hater of the English and anyone who crossed him. 

Nor am I generally a defender of that catastrophic War of 1812 (though the Brits were behaving most thuggishly).

However, the monument honoring Jackson in New Orleans memorializes his defense of the city against the British invaders, not his Indian massacres or slave dealing -- though of course that great Battle of New Orleans was fought after the treaty ending the War of 1812 had officially been signed. Yet the battle was fought, and the Americans under his leadership did soundly defeat the Brits -- helping wipe away the many shameful defeats of US forces elsewhere, including the catastrophe that was the US invasion of Canada.  So yah, I can see logic to having that kind of monument, which carries a very different meaning and significance than the ones honoring those who blatantly, publicly and loudly declared war on the United States in order to preserve and expand slavery everywhere in North America -- and even into Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America -- and even the most rabid of the secessionist fire eaters declared -- into the Pacific.