Stonewall Jackson and William McKinley

I took this photo at Stonewall Jackson Lake a couple of days ago, on September 16. It is in north-central West Virginia, where Thomas J. Jackson was born and had to endure a very hard childhood -- although West Virginia did not exist at that time. It was actually Virginia where Jackson was born and raised, and to whose flag he rallied in 1861, unlike most of his near neighbors who rejected the Confederacy and welcomed the 1861 victories of George McClellan and William Rosecrans which paved the way for the new state of West Virginia. But the white population was divided in all the border states, Union Kentucky, Maryland and Missouri, as well as Confederate Virginia and Tennessee, with some going north and some south. The divisions remained after the war.
There is controversy now about Confederate memorials, including two statues of Jackson in West Virginia, one of which is outside the state Capitol in Charleston.
While some Confederate memorials are or were obviously problematic, for example the one that endorsed "white supremacy in New Orleans, and while it is odd that one of the great Confederate generals hailed from what became a Union state and is now memorialized at its Capitol, I do not endorse tearing it down. I think Jackson fought for the wrong side, and like the rest of us was a flawed human being, but that does not negate his admirable qualities.

In defense of the Jackson memorials, consider the case of a soldier from the other side, who volunteered as a private in the Union army at the age of 18 soon after the start of the war. William McKinley's first campaign, under Rosecrans, was in Jackson's home territory, helping West Virginia become a state. The next year, his 23rd Ohio regiment took heavy casualties at the battles of South Mountain and Antietam. He served though the rest of the war, ending up a brevet major, and from 1897 until his assassination in 1901 served as president of the United States. The highest mountain in North America was named after him by the US government in 1917, but in 2015 was changed back to Denali, which Alaskan Athabascans had called it. And in 2019, the city of Arcata, California, for no good reason tore down a statue of McKinley.
I think they should have kept McKinley's statue and his name on the mountain, and don't object to memorializing Jackson or Robert E. Lee. By all means add new statues of other people, along with context to old ones if necessary, but avoid heavy-handed propaganda. (See my September 20 follow-up post about Harriet Tubman.) James "Pete" Longstreet, a courageous ally of Grant's in Reconstruction, is one Confederate general who could do with more memorializing.
 If the US government wants to get into the act, they might consider removing the name of a personally obnoxious and militarily incompetent Confederate general from what Wikipedia informs me is, by population "the largest military installation in the world" -- i.e. Fort Bragg in North Carolina. (Its population not long ago included a couple of my grandchildren who were born there.)

But I probably shouldn't encourage them, or we'll have to rename Washington, DC and state, not to mention the United States of America and anywhere else associated with a dead white male who cannot pass the ever expanding purity tests which are ever more comprehensively dictated by the lemon-sucking commissars of woke narcissism.