Confederates Were Not Traitors

 

Confederate statue critics increasingly argue that the monuments should be torn down because they honor traitors. Among such advocates is Christy Coleman, CEO of the Richmond’s American Civil War Museum. While the most common response to her interpretation is to argue that secession was possibly legal, but a more compelling point is that President Andrew Johnson pardoned the soldiers no later than 1868. Moreover, four years later President Ulysses Grant signed a bill that conferred amnesty pertinent to 14th Amendment restrictions on all but about five hundred ex-Confederates thereby enabling them to be elected to Congress and other offices. Given the reconciling attitude of early post-war Northerners, the intolerance of today’s statue enemies seems deliberately invidious.

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