To the Editor:
My grandmother and her lady friends used to carry buckets of water and soap to scrub city grime off the pedestal of the Appomattox Statue, a statue now deemed offensive by the politically correct neighbors with whom we dwell in this city.
As far as I am aware, none of these women's ancestors owned slaves, nor did between 80 to 85 percent of the families of the men who fought for the Confederacy. Their ancestors were shopkeepers, dirt farmers, peddlers, teachers, and ministers, who gathered to defend what they saw as the federal government's intrusion into their homelands.
Over 1.3 million total deaths occurred in the Civil War, with a larger number of civilians dying than Union or Confederate soldiers. Almost all of the civilian deaths occurred in The South, from starvation, disease, cannon fire, and violence. We paid a huge price for attempting to assert our independence, and plenty of our ancestors, military and civilian, died in the effort. The Appomattox statue features a dejected looking unarmed soldier staring at the ground. There is little that can be found offensive about it, unless it is offensive for us to remember our relatives who died in a long-ago conflict. Have the common decency to leave our memorials and statues alone.
Timothy Conway
Alexandria