Toppling Statues?

A recent e-mail exchange on the razing of statues and memorials, for instance, of Columbus and  Robert E. Lee, led to some thinking about history and its figures.  What questions do history and its personalities raise?  How are we to evaluate them?  What lessons can we learn, if any?  Is it "fair" to judge the past and others in the past using today's standards of morality and ethics?  (We'd better be careful with that one!)  Do contributions and "sins" carry the same weight?

Three names immediately come to mind:  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson.  All have come under attack in recent years, if not longer.  All three owned slaves and, to boot, Jackson initiated "The Trail of Tears" aimed at Indians.

Jefferson, of course, wrote the American Creed in the form of the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence.  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  He referred to the young United States as "the Empire of Liberty."  How could the man who wrote these stirring words also have owned, over his lifetime, more than 600 slaves?  And he knew it was wrong, morally if not practically.  He equated slavery with holding a "wolf by the ear...  We can neither hold him nor safely let him go.  Justice is in one scale and self-preservation in the other."  Yet he did own slaves.  Of those hundred, he emancipated but seven, five after his death.  Several others, purportedly of the Sally Hemings family, ran away and he didn't bother to chase them down.  

Slavery was legal and, in many eyes, moral--even in the North.  But there was a great deal of literature that criticized slavery and slave owners.  Jefferson, as noted, knew slavery was morally wrong ("justice in one scale", but a practical necessity for him ("self-preservation").  Yet, the Declaration of Independence is perhaps the greatest document of liberty ever written and Jefferson wrote it.

Do his achievements, great though they are (and I didn't list nearly all of them), atone for being a slaver?  The Jefferson Memorial,  The University of Virginia.  Are they legitimate targets for protests?

Andrew Jackson also owned slaves, destroyed Indian life, and was generally not a nice person.  Yet, if not personally, at least by aura of his personality, Jackson boosted participation in American democracy.  Voting, party politics (much of the work done by Martin Van Buren), the spoils system, and more grew during his two administrations.  Do we, say, take his portrait off the $20 bill, remove his statues, change the names of myriad cities named after him, etc.?  Again, sins v achievements.  I have no crystal ball, but I think I can make the argument that "No Jackson, No Abraham Lincoln" 30 years later.  And where would the US be without Lincoln??????

Washington also owned slaves and is the biggest enigma for me.  Almost certainly, there would have been no USA without Washington.  He was one of the two or three primary reasons the colonists (now Americans) defeated the British in what was undoubtedly "the upset of the 18th Century."  His mere presence and often mere tacit approval of the Constitution gave it immediate legitimacy to a people deeply divided over its ratification.  And without Washington as the first President, it is also likely that the fragile new nation would have collapsed.  Do the protesters topple the Washington Monument and more?  

But more significant to me with Washington, the big enigma, reflects on his character.  There can be no doubt of his physical courage.  Perhaps the wealthiest man in the colonies, he risked his fortune  for his country.  More, in accepting the command of the Continental Army, he was, in effect, signing his own death warrant.  He exhibited great physical and, even in some sense, moral courage.

But he owned slaves and knew that was wrong.  In his will, he decreed that all of his 100+ were to be freed--not after his death, but the death of Martha.  He had wrestled with the problem of owning slaves and talked about ending slavery.  But he never did. Why not?  To maintain his plantation at Mt. Vernon, that is, his fortune?  Was he intimidated by his social and economic standing?  That is, was the peer pressure of his fellow Virginian slave owners too much to overcome for him?  Did he lack the moral courage, in the face of others in his social and economic class, to free his slaves until after his death, when he would not have to encounter what would have been their scathing disapprobation and criticism?  No, Washington was certainly not a physical coward, but morally??????  He stood up to the mightiest army in the world, but he couldn't or wouldn't stand up to his fellow Virginia slave owners.

People are imperfect.  They have flaws.  They are also, mostly, products of their times, of their times, not ours.  We might be wise in remembering that before our almost knee-jerk reactions to raze statues and memorials of the past.