The city of New Orleans has begun removing its Confederate monuments. High time.

The Confederacy was committed to human slavery. Is there really a need to keep, on public land, statues commemorating Confederate leaders and soldiers? Public land belongs to everyone, including African-Americans. Most of them have ancestors who were bought and sold like cattle by many of those the memorials honor.

The majority of Confederate soldiers and southern families did not own slaves. That’s true. Yet they fought to retain and expand an institution whose existence was an insult to One Who created all men equal.

Many Confederates fought out of loyalty to their states. They fought bravely and with great sacrifice. Yet in fighting out of loyalty to their states, they fought in support of a wrongful cause.

Preserve History — In Appropriate Places

None of this is about abandoning memory. The South is full of fine museums, some of national importance.

I have visited many of them. I’ve been to the Stonewall Jackson “shrine” (the little house where he died and where part of his arm is buried, as if a sacred relic). I’ve looked at Jeb Stuart’s jaunty cavalry hat in the Museum of the Confederacy. From Chickamauga to Appomattox, Gettysburg to Bull Run, I have spent many hours walking across Civil War battlefields.

However, these are the places where the armies fought in battles that shaped our national soul, or places that preserve those battles’ artifacts. They are not public parks, town squares, or courthouse lawns.

African-Americans continue to struggle with the effects of slavery. Must they have to look continually at memorials to those who wanted to keep them in bondage?

The Confederate Fight to Preserve Slavery

This is the history our African-American brothers and sisters remember:

“With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law,” said Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens at the dawn of the Confederacy in March 1861. “Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.”

It is long past time to end public recognition of the Confederacy. Pretending it was a noble cause is a lie.

Explaining why they were leaving the Union, Mississippi’s rebel leaders wrote, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.” Texas declared it was leaving the Union because slavery “should exist in all future time.”

This reasoning didn’t change during the war. When in 1864 one Confederate general suggested arming black men to fight for the South, another explained that the entire reason for the war “is the inferiority of the negro.” If that principle were compromised, he said, “I take no more interest in the fight.”

It didn’t change even at the end of the way. In early 1865, the Charleston Mercury said that the Union’s “encroachments upon the institution of slavery” had driven South Carolina to leave the Union. A month later, the Richmond Times-Dispatch called slavery “indispensable to the commerce of the world.”

As the brilliant cavalry leader and later Ku Klux Klansman Nathan Bedford Forrest reportedly said, “If we ain’t fighting for slavery, I’d like to know what we’re fighting for.”

Time to Promote Racial Healing

It is long past time to end such public celebration of the Confederacy. Its monuments and relics should be put in museums and university libraries for study and reflection.

Removing these things might promote greater racial healing between whites and African-Americans. Is this not important than the continued recognition of an ancient, failed and wrongful cause?