[VAcourier] If the Confederacy is “offensive” then is Robert E. Lee?

[Virginia Division SCV Communication List]

If the Confederacy is “offensive” then is Robert E. Lee?

Recently the Rockbridge County Board of Supervisors and the Lexington 
City Council both voted unanimously to begin formal talks with The 
Museum of the Confederacy about relocating to downtown Lexington.  Of 
the few Supervisors or Council members that have spoken openly about 
issue, only one has been negative.

Council member Mimi Elrod has been a vocal critic of the museum‘s 
purpose and especially of its name.  In a recent newspaper article, 
Elrod was quoted as saying "I have a problem with a museum that 
celebrates that [the Confederacy] being in our city.”  Her solution to 
this “problem” includes the museum capitulating its mission statement 
which reads:   “The Museum of the Confederacy’s mission is to serve as 
the preeminent world center for the display, study, interpretation, 
commemoration, and preservation of the history and artifacts of the 
Confederate States of America.”

Elrod would also have the museum change its name to remove any reference 
to the Confederacy which the museum‘s CEO S. Waite Rawls, III seems 
prepared to do in order to placate such opposition.  The museum 
currently displays a large collection of Confederate flags which Elrod 
said “symbolizes slavery, oppression and denying people their rights.”  
The museum would have to completely remake itself and no longer show any 
deference to the South or its issues during the Civil War.

This leads to some interesting speculations as to how Elrod feels about 
the Southern institution she works for, Washington and Lee University.  
The school is partially named for Robert E. Lee who was a Confederate 
General, who fought under a Confederate Flag, and is probably the most 
recognizable icon of the Confederacy.  If her expectations of the museum 
were applied to the university, Lee’s name would have to be striped from 
the school’s name, the Confederate flags surrounding his famous statue 
in Lee Chapel would have to be removed, the Chapel renamed, perhaps even 
the bodies would have to be removed from the Lee family crypt to avoid 
“offending” someone.    If a museum which displays and interprets the 
relics of the Confederacy are so offensive, then the same must be said 
of Robert E. Lee.  According to Elrod “if one person is offended in that 
way, we should all be offended.” 

For those of us who were not even born by the years of the Civil Rights 
movement, perhaps we fail to understand the knee-jerk reaction of 
Council member Elrod.  For us, both struggles are history.  The worn out 
logic being applied here condemns all those who served the Confederacy 
as hate-mongers despite the overriding evidence that men like Robert E. 
Lee and Thomas J. ‘Stonewall’ Jackson where opposed to the evils of 
slavery and fought primarily to defend the “tree of liberty” as 
Jefferson called it.  This ill-contrived notion further condemns anyone 
alive today who has respect for those men and their struggle as being 
somehow dedicated to denying people their rights .

The officials involved must decide whether the Museum of the Confederacy 
should be allowed to continue to do what it has always done which is to 
educate people about the Confederacy’s existence and struggle.  
Hopefully, the visitors can come to their own conclusions without the 
intervention of revisionist bias.

Brandon Dorsey
Lexington, Virginia

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