Stone Mountain - Part One

Below are pics taken of the carvings done into the granite face of Stone Mountain. My room which is located just across the road faces the carvings. These pics were taken Saturday afternoon just before I checked in.

Stone Mountain is located just east of Atlanta and is now part of a State Park. The carvings which started in the 1920s were not completed until 1970….two interruptions over the years due to funding.

The carvings are of General Robert E. Lee (main character in the center), Confederate President Jefferson Davis (back and front of Lee) and General Stonewall Jackson. I found to design of these grand figures to be interesting. The three characters are celebrated as heroic figures. With their hats over their hearts these three figures are viewed as the embodiment of a valiant righteous cause.

It is the latter, the righteous cause, for which I have the greatest difficulty. There is little doubt that Lee was a brilliant General and a gracious man. There is little doubt that Davis was a man of passion. And there is little doubt that Jackson was an endocentric general who knew how to get things done (he was a good tactician but I do not see him as the brilliant tactician as many others see him). But the embodiment of righteousness is where I say “lets get a life and stop romanticizing the cause of the South.”

The South argued that they were fighting for States rights. States rights was the presenting issue, the issue politely noted in conversations and put forth in publications. Let us never forget that when we cut through the high rhetoric of States rights, it was the code language for people justifying the ability to abuse and enslave other human beings and finding ways to dehumanize them in spirit, action and function. It was the grounds trying to keep others from exposing an evil system.

While we would wish to root out evil peacefully, evil has a way of bring destruction upon the innocent when righteousness and goodness respond to address and eradicate the evil. We see the suffering of innocents when one looks at the human and economic toll extracted to free tens of thousands from the evil clutches of a few thousand people with economic and political influence.

States rights was neither valiant, nor righteous. Let us recognize that these men who are celebrated upon the mountain face were defenders of not of a righteous cause but of an unrighteous one.