Statues row is casting Robert E Lee as the villain | Letters

While I admire Jason Wilson’s examination of the origins of the current Confederate statues controversy (G2, 17 August), I feel that the opposing arguments have failed to recognise, or give due credit to, Robert E Lee’s actual military reputation. As a brilliant field commander, he often makes it onto military historians’ “top 20 generals of all time” lists, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Napoleon and Alexander the Great. With very limited resources and ill-trained troops, Lee delivered a succession of stunning victories against better-equipped and numerically superior forces. At Gettysburg he came incredibly close to winning the civil war.

Lee, who was personally unsympathetic to slavery, would not have recognised the term “white supremacist”, which – in the way we interpret it today – could equally be applied to many leading figures on both sides, including Abraham Lincoln. In London, we have a statue of Oliver Cromwell in military uniform in the grounds of our Houses of Parliament. Cromwell could, arguably and by the standards of today, have been indicted for war crimes in Ireland. Lee, by comparison, could not remotely be said to have fallen into that category of generalship.
Geoff Clifton
Solihull, West Midlands

• If statues of Confederate leaders are acting as rallying points for southern far-right movements then, yes, remove them. But the attendant labelling of Robert E Lee as a fervent supporter of slavery does him, at least in part, a disservice. Before the outbreak of the war, Lee was offered a senior position in the union army, which he seriously considered. He would have known that a northern victory (whether lead by him, or by his eventual enemy, General Grant) would have led to the abolition of slavery. In the end he decided to support the south out of loyalty to his home state of Virginia, and not because he was (necessarily) a supporter of slavery. The US civil war was fought over many issues; slavery (abhorrent as it was and is to many both north and south) was only one of many parts of this complex story.
Francis Blake
London

• The current issue of Confederacy-era statues in the US might be at least partially mitigated if the authorities there were to follow the example offered by Hungary. Just outside Budapest lies Memento Park, a site dedicated to the retention of communist-era statues that have been removed from their former prominent positions. This arrangement preserves the historical and artistic value of the works while, ironically, simultaneously allowing a small industry to develop in the satirising of the period via a small shop on the site selling an array of goods, T-shirts, mugs, bric-a-brac etc doing just that.
Barry Butler
Birmingham

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