On Needing To Say Things That Seem Like They Shouldn't Need To Be Said

In 2025, it seems like we should be past the point where we need to point out that the Civil War was about slavery, or more accurately, about the Confederacy committing treason in defense of slavery and the Union fighting the treasonous slavers to hold the country together.

It also seems like we should be past the point where we need to point out that statues venerating the treasonous slavers have no place in a free society, especially when you consider that most of those statutes were erected long after the end of the war when the defeated traitors and their children and grandchildren were engineering a reign of terror across the old Confederacy to keep former slaves from being truly free.

It seems like we should be past these things, but this is where we actually are:

There's plenty to be righteously indignant about in 2025, but this is in its own special category because it's ultimately not about the erasure of history, as the Trump administration argues, but the rewriting of history in a particularly repulsive way. Putting this hunk of metal back on its pedestal is just the latest attempt to ascribe noble motives to a 19th century cause whose goal was to make Americans less free, all in support of a 21st century cause whose goal is also to make Americans less free. It’s worth asking again why these guys are so darn supportive of the Confederacy. Could it be because they are more ideologically aligned with the Confederate generals than the Union ones?

The thing today is that we need to speak plainly about these issues even when – particularly when — it seems like we shouldn’t have to. So let me say this: Albert Pike was a traitor who fought in support of human bondage and misery. The dedication of his statue was a mistake in 1901, and the toppling of it in 2020 was 119 years too late.

If you want to know what Albert Pike fought so honorably for, read some Frederick Douglass. This is from Chapter IV of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, and it’s about a Mr. Gore, one of his overseers:

His savage barbarity was equalled only by the consummate coolness with which he committed the grossest and most savage deeds upon the slaves under his charge. Mr. Gore once undertook to whip one of Colonel Lloyd’s slaves, by the name of Demby. He had given Demby but few stripes, when, to get rid of the scourging, he ran and plunged himself into a creek, and stood there at the depth of his shoulders, refusing to come out. Mr. Gore told him that he would give him three calls, and that, if he did not come out at the third call, he would shoot him. The first call was given. Demby made no response, but stood his ground. The second and third calls were given with the same result. Mr. Gore then, without consultation or deliberation with any one, not even giving Demby an additional call, raised his musket to his face, taking deadly aim at his standing victim, and in an instant poor Demby was no more. His mangled body sank out of sight, and blood and brains marked the water where he had stood.

There isn’t room for ambiguities here. You’re either on the side of Gore or you’re on the side of Demby. Which side are you on?