Phil Leigh on the Debate Over Confederate Monuments

Confederate Monuments as Symbols of Memory, Valor, and Southern Heritage

Today, I have a special guest with me, Philip Lee, who's written a number of books on Southern history. One of them I actually have in my hands right now called Southern Reconstruction. I haven't read the whole thing yet.

I look forward to doing so. What led you to write on this subject. Because I mean, this isn't something that someone usually wakes up one day and says, yeah, I'd love to be blacklisted from academia. I'm going to write positive things about Southern history.

And you seem to have done that writing positive but accurate books. What made you interested in this to begin with?

Well, I guess, you know, as I get older, I care less about what people think and more about, you know, what do I want to accomplish and what I felt was with the Confederate monuments that they were getting kind of a bum rap.

Even though the Confederacy was set up to perpetuate slavery, at least for the first seven states, that there was still a lot to admire in the leaders, particularly the military leaders. And there may be a day come again when we'll want the kind of character that some of those leaders provided.

If you look, for example, at World War I and World War II and Vietnam, a number of the soldiers that went there, at least some of them, were inspired by Confederate leaders. One of them was Dwight Eisenhower.

There are a good many of you people here, both photographers and representative of the press, have been going into my office for the past four and a half years, occasionally. No doubt you've noticed that on the walls are the prints of four men, men that I consider in my book are about the four top Americans of the past.

They are Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, and Lee. And anybody who ever tries to put me in any other relationship with respect to General Lee is mistaken.

When you think about the valor of the soldiers in defending their home and heart, which is really the motivation for going to war, the motivation for secession was not the same as the motivation for going to war.

There could have been secession without any war. But the valor of those soldiers is far beyond what most people can contemplate. Our total casualties in World War II, which a lot of your grandparents can probably remember, was about 425 ,000.

In the Civil War, when the population was much lower, the casualties, the deaths, were about 600 ,000 to 700 ,000. If you were to apply that ratio to the current population of the United States, that would be 15 million people killed in the war.

So there was a determination there and a valor that is an inspiring example for future warriors. World War I, the most decorated soldier was Alvin York. He was from Tennessee. World War II, the most decorated soldier was Audie Murphy.

He was from East Texas. The Vietnam War, one of the best examples of the valor there was Carlos Hathcock, who was a sniper. He had more kills than anybody else, and he grew up in Arkansas. All three of those men, as youth, they hunted small game for food, not for sport.

They were born into grinding poverty, which was left over from the Civil War. But despite that, they showed their loyalty to the United States. And even today, 44 percent of the people that volunteer for the military services in America are from the South, whereas it represents only 36 percent of the nation's population.

My father was from Arkansas. My mother was from Ohio. I have relatives on both sides of the Civil War. But kind of like Shelby Foote, I mean, I have an affinity for the lost, the people that lost, because they gave everything and lost.

People who say slavery had nothing to do with the war, just as wrong as the people who say slavery had everything to do with the war. That was a very complicated civic thing. Robert Toombs or somebody once gave the best definition of that war I've ever heard.

He said it was a war of one form of society against another form of society. And because one of those forms of society included chattel slavery and the other side didn't, except to a limited extent, it's always been identified as a war over slavery.

Believe me, no soldier on either side gave a damn about the slaves. They were fighting for other reasons entirely in their minds. Southerners thought they were fighting the Second American Revolution.

Northerners thought they were fighting to hold the Union together. And that held true throughout the whole war, except for some people who were absolute partisans on both sides. Fighters in South Carolina and abolitionists in Massachusetts.

But most of the people were fighting because they were fighting for Southerners. One said, I'm fighting because you're down here. If you want to invade my home, you've got me to fight. Others say you're trying to tear the fabric of the Union.

Therefore, you should be put down and not allowed to do what you claim you want to do. It's a very complex subject, and I'm sorry to see it degenerate into such things as identifying that flag as a symbol of racism.

It is not. It was never intended as such.

To me, the inspiration that they can provide could be crucial to this country again. For example, Robert E. Lee is being criticized because he was a slaveholder. In truth, in his adulthood, he wasn't a slaveholder.

It was his wife and father-in-law. When his father-in-law died, he was given five years to emancipate her, manumit the slaves, which he did. But if you look at the war itself, contemporary to the war, there was no commander that was more respected by his troops, in fact, actually beloved by his troops than Robert E. Lee.

You can look at the North or the South. Grant didn't even come close to having the admiration that Robert E. Lee did amongst his troops. At the Battle of the Wilderness, for example, which was after the peak of the war, the Confederacy was on the downhill.

But still, at the Battle of the Wilderness, as the Northern troops were about to make a breakthrough, Lee was on his horse, Traveler. The Texas Brigade came up and he yelled at them. He said, we've got to stop this attack.

If we don't stop this attack, the whole defense line is going to collapse. Follow me, I will lead you. Well, the soldiers wouldn't let him go. They said, we'll stop this attack, but you need to go to the rear, lead to the rear.

So they actually were ready, spontaneously, to put their lives at risk without letting him risk his. They did not want him to risk. That's how much they respected and admired him. They knew with him, he had a winning record.

There's just a lot to admire about Lee.

I've read a few biographies about him and I've enjoyed learning about him. He's inspired me, not just as an American, someone with a Southern heritage. Like you, I have family on both sides, but also just a Christian.

I admire the way he tried to consistently live out his faith.

The most memorable book that I've read in the last five or six years that has inspired me more than even Robert E. Lee is Company H by Sam Watkins, who was in the 1st Tennessee Regiment. He was a private.

That is a remarkable book. That tells you what it was really like to be in that fight. The Shakespeare Band of Brothers, there's a lot to that.

Evangelical Christianity, Monument Removal, and the Case for New Memorials

So I want to ask you a few questions because I've seen these monuments come down everywhere. And this is also something I spend a great deal of time talking about, evangelical Christianity, the Southern Baptist Convention, especially in kind of the liberalizing tendency going on there.

And one of the first things that I noticed in the liberalizing tendency is this anti-monument.

Craze, really. We finally got the statue of Lee taken down. The gospel of Jesus Christ calls us time and again to test whether we are working with God for a vision of a world that includes everyone or only those in our group.

One of the arguments, and this is, I think, coming from kind of a Christian direction in a way, some of the people who asked this may have good motivations, but they say, you know, if it offends people, then why not just take it down just so it won't offend people?

And I'd like to hear your response to that, since you're someone who thinks they should stay up.

The response is that you should put up new monuments to the people that you want to honor that came later. Despite all the criticism that the Southern states get for these monuments, if you look at the states that have made changes to respect the memory of Martin Luther King, it is far greater in the South than it is in the North.

Mississippi, which has the Confederate battle flag in its state flag, has 16 streets and avenues named after Martin Luther King. Ohio, which has four times the population of Mississippi, has only eight.

I went through an analysis of states that had comparable population like New Jersey and North Carolina. North Carolina has 30 MLK streets, New Jersey, eight. So the South has been respecting these people.

Now what you can see if you put up the new monuments to the people you want to honor is it enables the casual observer to see how things change, how American history changed, how the perception of history changed.

But if they just see, you know, a black spot, they don't know what was there before. They don't know that at one time people did respect Robert E. Lee. And then if President Eisenhower put a picture of Robert E. Lee in the Oval Office, they wouldn't know that if those statues are gone.

Put them both there. Go ahead and add.

And that's my solution. I think people are sort of conditioned into this, into thinking that Confederate symbols and monuments to soldiers just represent slavery. And that's what the South fought for.

And that's why it's offensive. That's why they should come down. And I know one of the things that I've often said is that the monuments themselves usually say right on them what they're about. And usually I've never seen, at least up to this point, a monument that says it was put here for slavery or for those who fought for slavery or for white supremacy or any of those things.

It's usually for honor, for home, for those kinds of things. What was the reason that these Confederate symbols were put up in the first place?

The overwhelming reason was to remember the loved and lost. That's what it was. Now, the Southern Poverty Law Center has come up with a graph that correlates the erection of these statues with the Jim Crow and that sort of thing.

It's a casual correlation and it's not a causal correlation. Obviously, when the Civil War was over, the South was not only defeated, but it was bankrupt. There was no money for putting up statues to remember the soldiers.

But when it came to the 50th anniversary of the war, the old soldiers were dying off and the South began to have enough money to pay for these things. So that's why there was a peak after, say, 1900 until about 1918, or let's say 1900 to 1920.

That's why there was a peak of the statues that were put in at that time. But a monument was put up in Knoxville, Tennessee, and there were a number of speakers. And there was a poem that one of the mothers wrote that I just took out one excerpt from it.

But here's what she said. What need to question now whether he was wrong or right, speaking of the soldiers? We don't need to question whether he was wrong or right. He wields no warlike weapon now. He returns no foeman's thrust.

Who but a coward would revile an honest soldier's dust? Who would but a coward revile an honest soldier's dust? He's doing what he's ordered to do.

Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Character of Southern Heroes

I wanted to ask you about specific heroes, because where I am in Virginia, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson have been monumental figures. And now they are basically being canceled. And I think Thomas Jefferson right behind them.

The argument is that because they fought for a country which promoted slavery, that's enough to cancel them. What do you say to people who make that argument?

There's no denying the connections of slavery, but it's not the whole person. Consider, for example, Robert E. Lee again at Gettysburg. He's throwing the dice because he knows he doesn't have time on his side like the Union armies do.

He's got to win this war as quickly as possible. If he's going to win it at all. So he throws the dice on the third day of Gettysburg with Pickett's charge. It's a failure. The soldiers come back. He rides out to meet them.

And he says, this isn't your fault. Nobody is to blame but me. Now, that is the kind of character that I want in future leaders. Political leaders of America, business leaders of America, citizens of America.

That is an example of the kind of character we need if we're going to survive and prosper over the long term as a country. That merits memorials. Jackson was also deeply religious. He educated slaves.

He had a Bible class for them. And he was the, when the South was, everything was looking grim. McClellan had his army just outside of Richmond, six miles away, with overwhelming numerical advantage against the Confederates.

Stonewall Jackson pulled miracles in the Shenandoah Valley and threatened Washington, even though his army was so small that it really couldn't capture. But it threatened Washington so badly that Lincoln called back the troops.

And he never failed to take on the challenges that might have seemed impossible to others. And again, another example that is inspiring. And these inspiring examples should not be erased. That's what taking down the monuments does.

The respect and everything that people actually felt for the Confederates, all that will be gone. And all those virtues that go with it will be gone. Look at the election. How many people take responsibility for their failures like Lee did?

We don't take like the Corwin Amendment or any of the statements made by Republican Party leaders and state conventions in the North that, you know, wanted free, white, cheap labor in the Western territories, etc.

We don't take those things and say, well, that's just what the North's about. You know, any union monument needs to come down because clearly they were racist white supremacists. But for some reason, people like to do that with the South, and they like to go to really two sources.

And the first is a cornerstone speech. The second are some of the secession ordinances from the lower South. You want to just talk about that a minute?

Secession, the Cornerstone Speech, and the Economic Motive for War

What's your take on that? The typical reaction from the educator, the historians that dominate the conversation now is, well, if you look at the Declaration of Causes for Secession from the Deep South States, the first seven to secede, many of them cite slavery as their reason to secede.

That's like a magician's trick. Look here. Don't look over here because this is where I'm going to pull the rabbit out. What they will not address is why did secession need to lead to war? It didn't. They could have let the seven cotton states go and then see just, you know, what happens next.

In fact, there were a number of leaders that were prepared to do that, including Edwin Stanton, who later became Lincoln's Secretary of War. Rutherford B. Hayes, who became president later. Horace Greeley, who was manager of the largest newspaper in the country.

All of them were prepared to let those seven states go and there wouldn't have been any war. We can't just put a hail around the northerner because he fought the war. There didn't need to be war. Now, let's look at the results of the war.

Before the war, the South was the leading, was the low-cost, single low-cost producer in the world for cotton. Cotton was way on the upstream because before that people make clothes out of wool and rawhide and stuff like that.

You know, buckskin. Not very good. Cotton was a big revolution. Okay, so that was really on the upstream. So before the war, the South was the low-cost producer throughout the world of cotton. The historians will say, well, that was because of slavery.

Okay, after the war, the South remained the low-cost producer of cotton. Because the war impoverished everybody in the South. Even as late as the 1930s and 40s, sharecroppers, tenant farmers in the South, they were working under, using tools that the Russian serfs of the 19th century were using.

They didn't have tractors. They were using mules. And that's the way it was for 75 years or more after the Civil War. So the Northerners crushed the South economically, but they kept the advantage of keeping America the low-cost producer of cotton by treating the South as an internal colony to be exploited, much like Ireland and the Irish felt Great Britain did.

Right after the Civil War, clearly the South needed to rebuild everything, including their railroads. But the North had tariffs on railroad iron. So railroad iron that you could buy for $35 a ton in London cost $80 a ton in the United States because the producers in Pennsylvania and other Northern states did not let British iron into the United States.

Look at the extra cost that the South had to pay. The prices were artificially inflated by the tariff, and the South had to buy all that stuff from the North. That led to monopolization of manufacturing, which further penalized the South.

In fact, if you examine the federal budget, what you find is that the South has already paid reparations. Well, let me explain. For 25 years after the Civil War had ended, over half of the federal budget was devoted to three things.

Interest on the federal debt, retirement of the federal debt, and back in those days, they actually did retire it, and union veterans' pensions. That was over half of the federal budget, cumulatively for 25 years.

Not one of those items benefited an ex-Confederate. In fact, union veterans' pensions by 1893, they represented over 40 of the entire federal budget in 1893. That one item, union veterans' pensions.

That's like telling Japan and Germany they got to pay the veterans' pensions for the GIs. Union veterans' pensions were still being paid as late as 2016. They were? Yes, they liberalized it to the families, and it was used as a bribe to the retired veterans to get them to support tariff legislation.

Whoa, hold on, hold on.

2016, so what are we talking, like great, great, great grandkids are getting?

What happened is they continually liberalized the terms on who got to get paid. Now, there weren't any paid. I mean, there might have been two or three, but I did find that as late as 2016, they were still being paid.

Wow, okay. They actually peaked in 1921. They were going up every year until 1921, then they started to come down. Now, the retirement of the debt. Now, during World War II, the United States, we had war bonds.

That's like going to Germany and Japan, who we defeated, saying, okay, now you got to help us pay off our war bonds. The South had to help pay off the union war bonds. Nobody in the South benefited from that.

Then the third thing was the interest on the war bonds. Finally, they actually, in those days, there was a paper money and a gold. The gold standard was what really counted. Paper money was discounted to gold.

So, the bonds were bought with paper money during the war because they didn't have enough gold during the war because they didn't know they were going to win or lose. So, the bonds were bought with paper money, but they were redeemed in gold.

It was a windfall. It's hard to know the average because the paper money fluctuated at a discount to gold, but it got as steep as 65%, meaning that a paper dollar was worth $0 .35 in July of 1864. So, that's the point I want to make.

If you look at those payments, union veterans' pensions, interest on the union federal debt, retirement of the union federal debt, those three items were of no benefit to ex-Confederates.

I can see why this would be information that some of the elites in academia and even in Washington may not want getting out there because right now, social justice warriors want reparations for slavery.

But if you start thinking through what you are telling me, and we want to compare apples to apples, that means you'd probably be wanting reparations for the region of the South for the what they underwent.

It takes the whole narrative and flips it on its head, honestly.

You got to ask that key question. Why did the North fight? Why did they not just let them succeed? Well, they fought because they wanted to maintain economic dominance.

Yeah. If you read Lincoln's first inaugural, he even seems to admit that. Slavery doesn't really have anything to do with his motivation. We need to keep the union and preserve it. And the Corwin Amendment, of course, I know there's a lot of things we could bring up that prove that there was an economic motive for going in.

What about the cornerstone speech, though? That's probably the biggest thing you see online when people just want to say, it's all about slavery. Read the cornerstone speech.

What do you make of that? Well, the cornerstone speech was a speech made by Alexander Stevens, who was a brilliant politician or statesman. Lincoln respected him when Lincoln was in Congress some 15 years earlier.

And it was basically, there's no word for word transcript of it. But basically, what he said is that, you know, the black race is inferior. And that's why it needs to be, you know, they need masters. They need somebody to take care of them.

They need to be told what to do. So he said that in 61. So that's often cited. But what's not cited is a speech he made in 1866, which was less than a year after the South had been defeated. And in this speech, he was addressing the Georgia General Assembly.

Here's the important point. This Georgia General Assembly was not a reconstruction assembly. It was not a carpetbag. This was all white Southerners he was talking to. Every member of this General Assembly was a white Southerner.

And he's saying, wise and humane provisions should be made for ex-slaves, so that they may stand equal before the law, in the possession and enjoyment of all rights of person, liberty and property. Many considerations claim this at your hands.

Among these may be stated their fidelity in times past. They cultivated your fields, ministered to your personal wants and comfort, nursed and reared your children. And even in the hour of danger and peril, they were, in the main, true to you and yours.

To them, we owe a debt of gratitude as well as kindness. I speak for them as we know them to be, having no longer the protection of a master or a legal guardian. They now need all of the protection which the shield of law can give.

But above all, this protection should be secured because it is right and just.

Reconciliation, Tradition, and the Long Legacy of Southern Poverty

So to kind of wrap things up here, there was a war that killed 600 ,000 people and another million afterward, put a whole region of the country in grinding poverty for 75 years. And there were some heroes that came out of that war.

And there's been really a lot of, I think, a lot of good progress made in reconciling these two parts of the country. And maybe World War II and World War I had a lot to do with that. But now we're in this kind of situation where after reconciliation has occurred, we're in this weird era where we want to just go rip down figures that died over 100 years ago.

What's the explanation for this hatred all of a sudden, and the willingness to blacklist anyone like yourself who will defend these monuments staying up?

Criticizing others is a dishonest way of praising ourselves. I think that's partly what's going on here. The social justice warriors are criticizing others to this virtue segment, right? Isn't that the current?

Yeah, yeah. But I also like what William Egan said, he who marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next. That's a good reason to leave those statues up. If you don't, tradition is important.

Tradition is the wisdom of the ages. And before you cast aside tradition, you better be sure you've got something of value to replace it. Tradition should be there. It's there for a reason. It's there because the accumulated wisdom of all our ancestors are baked into it.

And that wisdom would be in the monument, the markers that talk about the honor and the integrity and sacrifice. I want you to plug your website and your books. I'm holding one of them here. But where can people go if they want to order Southern Reconstruction?

Amazon, Barnes Noble, and most any bookstore can get them. If you think the story of the Civil War is one-sided, you should read Reconstruction. Yes, there was racism. Yes, there was lynching. Yes, there was the KKK.

But that's not the whole story. The whole region was impacted. You know, the longest lasting legacy of Reconstruction or the Civil War was not racism. It was not segregation. It was Southern poverty. Virginia was one of the first to come out of it.

But gosh, in Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Alabama, and South Carolina and Northeastern parts of North Carolina, that poverty lasted a long, long time. And it wasn't just Blacks. There was economic, the economic conditions between Blacks and whites until World War II of those sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

They were almost identical.

Oh, I know. My grandfather's from Mississippi. He was a cotton farmer, one of 10 kids. I mean, you know, their friends down the road were people of color. And they'd go fishing together. They were best friends.

But grinding poverty, you know, for Christmas, maybe he got a piece of fruit or a piece of, you know, shoes, a pair of shoes.

They don't really know that history. They don't, they have that family connection, which is valuable. The Northern historians and a lot of the Southern historians that have been brainwashed just don't seem to understand.

Yeah, real quick, I'll just give a little personal story. And I'm sure you have many of these. But, you know, I grew up in upstate New York. I have family, you know, from the South and the North. And we go down to family reunions every year.

And one time I went down, there was a hurricane that came through. And I remember, you know, on the road that my aunt lived, she had a 300 acre farm. She was elderly. Some trees went down. And I think the neighbors didn't know we were there.

We could have helped her. But they came by with chainsaws and, you know, very respectful, you know, Miss Marianne, you know, we're going to help you out. And, you know, they were black and she was white.

And they seemed to get along. And this was something that I did not know about living in upstate New York. I actually saw, you know, where I lived, my first job, I heard the N word constantly from people who thought that they were morally superior to Southerners.

And so it was just an eye-opening thing to see that, you know, there's exceptions to these characters. And, you know, it's just, I think there's just a lot that's not told. And I think you're, I'm glad that you're telling another side of the story.

So thank you for that.

Thank you for sharing your story. Because that was the other thing I was going to emphasize. If that's one of the greatest evils of the way that historians are telling the story now, is they're ignoring that there was a friendship between black and white.

There was also this underlying racism that sometimes became very ugly and inexcusable. But there was this underlying friendship that never gets told. You don't see the newsreels of that kind of a story because they were just too isolated.

They weren't isolated. They were just too personal. They didn't happen in great groups. Right, right.

Well, yeah, we'll have to get you on again and talk about Reconstruction. Because I know that the prevailing attitude is, you know, the North won the war, but the South won the peace. And I know the North won both of them, the war and the peace.

And, you know, maybe we'll have you come on and talk about that sometime. I appreciate your time.

I'd be delighted to do that. I have, I found a picture, a photo taken during the 1930s, which was about four or five white children standing in a cotton field. And they're holding watermelons. Obviously, they finished working for the day or evidently.

Some of them are holding watermelons. And right next to them are two black children, right next to them. And if you look at them, their clothes are the same. They're all barefoot. There's no difference.

So what I did, I said, the guy that comes up responsible for that, the South won the war. South lost the war, but won Reconstruction. That's a Princeton historian by the name of Goelza. So I sent him a copy of that picture.

I said, would you show me the winners? The winners of Reconstruction, this group or that? Yeah. Oh, man.

Well, hey, we could probably talk all day. I really appreciate your time. And I will let you know when this gets posted. Thank you once again.