I mean, really, dudes

[mme_hardy]

The National Cathedral is debating what to do about windows celebrating Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson that were donated by the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1953.

Here are two of the Jackson windows.



That is, without a doubt, the iconography of sainthood. Jackson is being welcomed into Heaven with the words "So he passed over and all the trumpets sounded for him", which is from Pilgrim's Progress.

Stonewall Jackson was a 'kind' slaveowner (yes, sneer quotes) who sold his slaves after the beginning of the civil war because "the excitement of the times proved so demoralizing to them". (A grandson of one of his slaves erected a memorial window to him. People are complicated.) He fought in defense of slavery.

He was not a fucking saint. The Daughters of the Confederacy donated windows depicting him as such. (The National Cathedral removed the Confederate Battle flag from these windows and from the Robert E. Lee windows, which have the same issues, last year.) A cathedral window should not be glorifying him.

Comments

[mme_hardy]

Yeah. The normalization of the Lost Cause among Northerners is amazing. How *did* the South do it?

[sovay]

How *did* the South do it?

I assume many of the Northerners wanted to believe it.

[larryhammer]

Generations of repeating it.

[recessional]

Civil wars can be like that - see also the history of the English civil war, where you end up with "Roundheads: right but repulsive; Cavaliers: Wrong but Romantic".

I think if you're going to find a way to not be ETERNALLY at that civil war, until it's not really a civil war anymore it's just a war over a specific bit of territory, you kinda have to either wipe out the other side completely and persecute all the remnants until the nth generation (see Russian Civil War) or you have to find some way to reconcile, even on a basic level.

That fact makes the victors very succeptable to guilt. Sometimes appropriately! Sometimes not. So.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes, I think that's true.