Washington and Lee University Keeps Its Name

As it should, since without its namesakes it wouldn’t exist.

Washington and Lee University has announced that it will keep its name. In normal times that would seem unexceptional. Both Washington and Lee long have been honored as exceptional men.
But both the leading revolutionary general and first president and the Civil War’s finest general, like so many men of their respective generations, were slave owners. The latter also was the national government’s most difficult opponent during the country’s violent break-up; he did more even than Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s president, to keep the secessionist cause alive in its final days. Hence, a campaign, energized by moral fervor and sometimes dubious piety, to strip the historic names from the noted liberal arts school in Lexington, Virginia.
The city also is home to the Virginia Military Institute (VMI), which has been confronting its own Civil War ghosts. Under pressure from Virginia, the state school removed the statue of its onetime mathematics professor, Thomas J. Jackson, who became the famous Stonewall and aggressive corps commander under Lee. The statue ultimately will end up in a museum at the battle of New Market. There, VMI’s student corps famously fought — with 257 cadets organized into a battalion famously charging Union lines — thereby helping give the outnumbered Confederates a desperate victory in the war’s waning days.
If you are located in Virginia’s celebrated Shenandoah Valley, it is difficult to escape the Civil War.
The Washington and Lee controversy grew out of the police killing of George Floyd last year, which triggered protests, riots, and a national movement against virtually any remembrance of an imperfect past. The historical pain is real, though activist motivations differ. After I argued that even Lee likely would support removing his own statue, Scott McKay, columnist at The American Spectator and publisher of Louisiana’s Hayride, responded that my “argument assumes those people attempting to tear down Lee’s statue are acting in good faith...