I would like to share an excerpt that was printed in the June 1906 edition of the Confederate Veteran. I found it to be an interesting take on Confederate monuments, and I hope you will too. Thank you, Teresa Roane, for this excerpt.

From General Stephen D. Lee’s speech April 1906

There are three things peculiarly left for our concern. One of these is the erection of public monuments to our Confederate dead; not only to our leaders, but, above all, to those private soldiers who made our leaders immortal.  We must not overtask posterity by expecting those who come after us to build monuments to heroes whom their own generation were unwilling to commemorate.  The South has reached a position of material prosperity which justifies both State and private beneficence to honor the faithful dead.

In all human lot there has nothing better been found for man than to die for his country.  If there be any virtue, if there be any praise, this fate is to be preferred above all others.  We feel it is well with those who have thus fulfilled the highest of all trusts, the duty of a citizen to his native land; and whatever may have been their private faults, their public service on the field of battle has rightly given them a place with the immortals.  Theirs was the martyr’s devotion without the martyr’s hope.  Their generation and their country imposed upon them this high service.  They fulfilled it without flinching.  They felt that the issue of the battle was with God; the issue of their duty was with themselves….

I urge monuments to the Confederate soldier first for the sake of the dead, but most for the sake of the living, that in this busy industrial age these stones to the Confederate soldier may stand like great interrogation marks to the soul of each beholder.