How the governor of Tennessee is dealing with a bust of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Governor Bill Lee of Tennessee is working to move a bust of Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest from the state capitol to the Tennessee State Museum. He isn’t hiding under his desk while a mob tears the bust from its place. Nor does he intend to bulldoze Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage in Nashville, to cancel the 4th of July, or to replace Tennessee’s state police with loanees from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
Some conservatives look at each and every potential reckoning with the darker chapters of American history as the precipice of a slippery slope sliding ineluctably into the recesses of some totalitarian hellscape. But the way that Governor Lee has handled the issue of the Forrest bust puts paid to that notion. He has worked towards the relocation — rather than the outright removal — of the bust to the place where Confederate monuments belong: museums. He’s done so by working well within the constraints imposed upon his office by the Tennessee state constitution and pursuant to the procedures put in place to arbitrate issues of this kind. Both his policy and his personal comportment have been utterly devoid of the wanton iconoclasm that characterized the riots of last summer that saw so many statues fall across America.
During the last few weeks, Lee has appointed six new members to the Tennessee Historical Commission (as is his responsibility and his prerogative as governor) who are expected to consider and approve the State Capitol Commission’s request for a waiver to move the busts of Forrest to the State Museum. The governor’s appointments were eminently responsible. They include the author of a book on Southern history, the architect who designed Tennessee’s Bicentennial Capitol Mall, and the recently retired executive director of the Tennessee Historical Society. Every step taken in this process has signaled Lee’s intention to handle this sensitive issue in the most civilized and considered manner possible.
The governor himself has been open about his evolution on this issue. During his gubernatorial run in 2018, he told The Tennessean that it was, in his view, “a mistake to whitewash history” by removing monuments like the one in question. But after listening to his constituents and considering the matter further, Governor Lee called for a meeting of the Capitol Commission last summer to vote on the removal of the Forrest bust, explaining that Forrest “represents pain and suffering and brutal crimes committed against African Americans.” (It should be noted that in addition to his wartime generalship on behalf of secessionists, Forrest was also an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.)
The frequent attacks on American history in recent years have persuaded many that the relocation of Confederate monuments should be opposed on principle. “They’ve come for Forrest today,” some will say. “Tomorrow they’ll be back for Washington.” This is undoubtedly true of certain kooks and cranks on the hard left who lack the historical literacy or the moral sensitivity required to draw distinctions between flawed heroes and outright villains. But if conservatives allow this fact to force them into defending public monuments of both Forrest and Washington, for instance, then they reinforce the notion already established in the minds of the iconoclasts that there exists no moral difference between the two.
The proper thing to do is to draw a bright red line between who is worthy of veneration and who isn’t. If the statue or monument under attack is that of an unworthy “hero” of an alien age, then we ought to follow Governor Lee’s example: Calmly, peacefully, and constitutionally move it to a museum, where it can be consigned definitively to the past and insulated from the present. If the figure under attack is someone who deserves our gratitude and our veneration, we should raise unholy hell in their defense. By maintaining this distinction, we unburden ourselves of the moral legacy of the Old South and make the case for honoring real American heroes all the stronger by contrast.
“Thus far and no further” is a harder line to hold than, “Don’t give them an inch!” But in this case, it’s also the right one.