Editor, Gazette-Journal:

Suddenly, it seems, everything and everyone connected to the Confederate States of America is the devil incarnate. Monuments and statues are defaced, torn down or removed. Names of individuals are being removed from streets, buildings and other landmarks. But is that fair or the right thing to do?

We are judging that time and those people by the standards of 2020. We know now that slavery is wrong but at the time of the Revolution there were slaves in every colony and most of our Founding Fathers owned slaves, including Benjamin Franklin. The 1860s were not that far from the Revolution when every colony considered itself a separate, sovereign little country. We have to remember that the timeframe was about the same as between now and the start of WWII.

The United States was a very young country. People still thought of themselves as Virginians or Pennsylvanians or Vermonters first and Americans second. So when the Commonwealth of Virginia seceded from...