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The President of the University of Texas at Austin released a letter regarding the removal of statues on the campus.
[...] The University of Texas at Austin is a public educational and research institution, first and foremost. The historical and cultural significance of the Confederate statues on our campus — and the connections that individuals have with them — are severely compromised by what they symbolize. Erected during the period of Jim Crow laws and segregation, the statues represent the subjugation of African Americans. That remains true today for white supremacists who use them to symbolize hatred and bigotry.
The University of Texas at Austin has a duty to preserve and study history. But our duty also compels us to acknowledge that those parts of our history that run counter to the university's core values, the values of our state and the enduring values of our nation do not belong on pedestals in the heart of the Forty Acres.
The issue isn't a new one, they first looked into the issue in 2015, and had a wide range of options including effectively turning the mall into an open air museum, which they eventually decided against. Should the statues be relocated from their historical context just because of the attitudes and behaviour of noisy minorities? (Your humble editor cannot forget the local riots when a historical but hostile-themed statue was relocated.)
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 22 2017, @09:29PM
Yes it was:
- The Confederate states and leaders were quite clear that they were fighting to preserve slavery, right up until the day after they lost. Just read the original documents provided by each of the seceding states explaining why they were seceding, or the speeches by Jefferson Davis and Alexander Stevens if you have any doubts about that. Robert E Lee, a not-at-all-kindly slaveowner, was clear about why he fought until the day he died.
- The Union position was a bit more complicated. Lincoln's two aims at the beginning of the war were reuniting the United States, and ending the expansion of slavery. He was willing at the start of the war to allow slavery to continue where it already existed for the short term at least. It was in the middle of the war, when Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, and West Virginia were firmly in Union military control and in the aftermath of the Union victory at Antietam, that it became a war to end slavery.
Historians are in wide agreement about this. The reason that the popular imagination has a different view of it has a lot more to do with what happened in the south decades after the Civil War was over.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.