In July 2015, The Raleigh News & Observer posted an article that included an announcement by then Governor McCrory that he would sign a bill to protect Confederate monuments in North Carolina.

The article reported:

“Our monuments and memorials reminds us of North Carolina’s complete story,” McCrory said in a news release. “The protection of our heritage is a matter of statewide significance to ensure that our rich history will always be preserved and remembered for generations to come.

“I remain committed to ensuring that our past, present and future state monuments tell the complete story of North Carolina.”

The bill had passed the North Carolina Senate unanimously in April, but there was a heated debate in the North Carolina House about the bill.

The article describes the bill:

The bill passed the House Tuesday and would ban state agencies and local governments from taking down any “object of remembrance” on public property that “commemorates an event, a person, or military service that is part of North Carolina’s history.”

That would mean a state law would be needed to remove a monument or relocate one to a site that’s not of “similar prominence.”

The idea behind the bill was to prevent cities or towns from acting abruptly and later regretting their actions regarding various statues.

Fast forward to today.

Channel 12 is reporting that there will be a public hearing next week where the public can address the committee examining the proposal by Governor Roy Cooper‘s administration to move three Confederate monuments from North Carolina’s old Capitol grounds to a Civil War battlefield.

This is trivial pursuit. It changes nothing and costs the state a serious amount of money. Also, according to the law currently in place, a state law would be needed to move the monuments. Why are we wasting the government’s and the public’s time with this? What in the world will moving the monuments change?

As we attack these monuments, we need to remember that Union and Confederate soldiers are considered U.S. veterans under federal law, and that they would be entitled to the same benefits as Union soldiers today. It’s also true that federal law (formerly Public Law 810) makes Confederate soldiers eligible for burial in national cemeteries and for taxpayer-funded headstones, just like Union soldiers. The men who fought for the south were fighting for states’ rights. They are as much to be honored as the men who fought against them.

Moving monuments does not change history–it simply brings up more divisions. We need to put the generally mistold history of the Civil War behind us and move forward. The Civil War was not about slavery–it was an economic war about tariffs and the exploitation of the agricultural south by the industrialized north. To characterize it as anything else is to misunderstand our history. (Just for the record, this is not necessarily a southern perspective–I grew up in New Jersey!)