Robert E. Lee Discouraged Monuments; They 'Keep Open The Sores Of War'

This is immensely important, it seems to me:

   [Lee] expressed his views in two famous letters that are now recirculating widely in the wake of Charlottesville.
   The first was to Thomas Rosser, a former Confederate general who in 1866 queried Lee about a proposed commemorative monument.
   “My conviction is,” Lee wrote, “that however grateful it would be to the feelings of the South, the attempt in the present condition of the Country, would have the effect of retarding, instead of accelerating its accomplishment; & of continuing, if not adding to, the difficulties under which the Southern people labour.”
   Lee thought it better to tend to the graves of the fallen. “All I think that can now be done, is to aid our noble & generous women in their efforts to protect the graves & mark the last resting places of those who have fallen, & wait for better times.”  

   God bless historians. I actually felt a little bit like bursting into tears when I read this. (In a totally masculine way, of course...) There are several non-trivial objections one could obviously make to this appeal to Lee's authority--but, honestly, I think that this is as close as we ever get to a conclusive answer to a question of this kind. And add to this the fact that most such statuary doesn't date from the time of the war, but from the early 20th century...and, seriously, I think the case in favor of doing something up to and including moving the average Confederate statue into a more museum-like setting has gotten very powerful. (Which is not to say that there aren't reasons on the other side that might emerge tomorrow.)
   We're still stuck with some thorny aspects of the problem--e.g. given that the war and its personalities and symbols have become part of Southern culture, how does this alter the question?* (And, remember, the lost cause idea is powerful and common, and doesn't itself have anything to do with slavery.) And, even if we agree that we should defer to Lee's authority and take his advice, what sort of timetable should we think in terms of? Personally, I think that the current spasm of Confederacy "erasure" (to use a term beloved of the left) is a bad idea...but nothing's optimal anywhere in this vicinity.) IMO a lot of what's going on now is motivated by anger and the desire to punish the conservative South...and I can't believe that this is exactly invisible, especially to those who feel as if they're on the receiving end of it. So I suspect that a choice will have to be made. We can have something more like a fast, decisive, punitive wave that sweeps away these monuments and leaves a lot of anger in its wake...or we can try to figure out some way that is more judicious. OTOH, the obvious response is: it's a straightforward question of where the psychological harm is going to be felt: among black Americans or conservative southerners. I want to say, as usual: go slow. But that has its costs, too.
   Well, I'm no good at thinking about stuff like this--this is all kind of just musing.
   For now I'm just going to be something approximating happy about having found that there's someone with a kind of genuine epistemic / moral authority that may be able to decide this issue for us.
   Kinda funny that Lee may end up demonstrating that he's more worthy of admiration than we thought precisely by providing us with reasons for removing statues to him.

*Not to put too fine a point on it, but: deciding whether to remove a statue is different than deciding whether or not to put one up.