Last month, officials at Washington & Lee University removed the headstone at the burial site of Traveller, a horse whose famous rider, General Robert E. Lee, served as president of the school after leading Confederate forces in the Civil War. After complaints from alumni and others, another headstone was substituted for it—one without Lee’s name or that of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who dedicated the memorial in 1971.

On social media, some users mocked activists for having gone so far as to target animals deemed “racist,” but the impulse to pick on Lee’s steed signals something dark. Americans are famously sentimental about animals. The easiest way for moviemakers to communicate a character’s cruelty is by showing them mistreating one. Desecrating the grave of a pet verges on pathological evil—and fixating on one associated with the Civil War is like casting a spell to stir spirits that will once again set Americans at each other’s throats.

and this by one of the most thoughtful writers of our time,

Whether Lee was a traitor, too, as the same cohort claims in order to build their case for excising him from American history, is a question best left for historians of the constitution. What’s clear is that, in the wake of the Civil War, if the government of the United States had designated everyone who fought for the cause of secession as traitors, there would have been no peace. Rather than go to the gallows, Confederate officers would have chosen to wage the guerilla war that Lee warned against. Accordingly, the vanquished were largely allowed to melt away and enjoy the record of their valor and the respect of their kinsmen.

Today, many of the people opposed to removing and destroying the remaining Confederate monuments argue that they should stand as permanent reminders of America’s darkest moment, when brother fought brother. But another way to understand them is not as emblems of conflict but rather as the ornaments of our peace, giving form to the formula by which the United States was reunified after nearly being torn apart. Trump’s comments after Charlottesville, despite being decried as a dangerous incitement, merely restated the terms of peace that served to hold the country together after the Civil War: There were bad people, for sure, but there were also very fine people, on both sides. Rejecting those terms by insisting on the absolute evil of everyone on the Confederate side, to the point that no statues to their war dead can be allowed to stand, is the true threat to our peace.

RTWDT.