Should statues of anyone involved in the Texas Revolution be torn down?

[Samof94]

Given 1836 was basically 1861 when it came to slavery regarding the cause of the conflict, should these statues also be torn down? The Alamo was fought for the right to own other human beings based on race(after Mexico had banned it).

[Aurelius2]

No, no and hell no. Do you ever get tired of making these utterly boring and predictable threads?

The Alamo was fought for the right to own other human beings

lmao

[BigZuck08]

No

[The Mikado]

Given 1836 was basically 1861 when it came to slavery regarding the cause of the conflict, should these statues also be torn down?

This is a wild comparison given the most important figure of that struggle, Sam Houston, vetoed Texas' secession motion in 1861, gave a passionate speech about how wrong secession from the United States would be and advocating loyalty to the US that he spent his entire career getting Texas into, and was chased out of office and replaced by a governor who actually would take Texas out of the United States. The idea that Sam Houston was some sort of proto-Confederate is ludicrous considering the last phase of his life was opposing secession with all he had and losing his career and power over that opposition.

How on Earth do you get around to the idea that Sam Houston is somehow the moral equivalent of Jefferson Davis, someone Houston personally loathed and whose cause he loathed?

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

There's a snowball's chance in hell that this is a justified idea.

[Vice President Christian Man]

I wouldn't be opposed to moving them to a museum if it created an issue but I oppose removing history.

[HisGrace]

The Texas Revolution had basically nothing to do with slavery, I am so tired of this meme. Just because the US Civil War was caused by slavery when some people say it wasn't doesn't mean we need to say every 19th Century war was caused by slavery in reaction.

[7,052,770]

The answer to these questions is always "It depends on why the statue was put up in the first place."

[Republican Party Stalwart]

The answer to these questions is always "It depends on why the statue was put up in the first place."

The thing is, the answer to the question of "why the statue was put up in the first place" is almost never as clear as one would like.

For example, a statue of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, built in Shanghai within the last seventy years, is obviously a statue of which the clear primary cause for construction was the enforcement and promotion of Marxist-Leninist Communist ideology upon the populace of Mainland China, and not purely a memorialization of those two individuals. But at the same time, such a statue technically does memorialize and commemorate the lives and works of those two individuals in a "neutral"/historical context as well as in an ideological partisan context, and a statue built by the state to socially reinforce communist ideology can indeed be considered a memorialization/commemoration of the historical fact that said country has (or had) become communist.

Similarly (not completely so, but still), in regards to Confederate monuments, the exact line between "built in order to socially reinforce racism and white supremacy" and "built to preserve and memorialize Confederate history" is not exactly unambiguous. For one thing, "commemorating Confederate history" (at least, doing so in such ways as if "Confederate History" is a neutral or "positive" part of Southern history or of ancestral White Southerners' history) inherently necessitates a belief that the Confederates were morally neutral if not morally justified, and ergo necessitates ideological adherence to "racism and white supremacy" on some level. Likewise, ideological adherence to and social reinforcement of "racism and white supremacy" and "Jim Crow," within the context of the American South, naturally calls for the "commemoration of Confederate history" to begin with. Furthermore, while the fact that many Confederate monuments were only built during circa 1890-1900 is certainly "convenient" considering that the last stages of the Jim Crow era's beginning only concluded during that decade, c. 1890-1900 is also when you would expect most Confederate monuments to have been built regardless of the context of Jim Crow and White supremacy, considering: 1) that for a war which was the most important part of the lives of everyone who experienced it during their adulthood or adolescence, there is no real need to build a monument until after about 20 years have passed, when a new generation of people have been born, when most of the hostilities have been fully or partially alleviated, and when the wounds (even if imperfectly closed) are no longer fresh (see also, most of the major World War II monuments in the US weren't put up until the 1970's); and 2) that building monuments to those who, during and immediately after the Civil War, were considered traitors to the nation by the US federal government (and by polite society outside of the south) would have been totally inappropriate until after a "rehabilitation" of those people had taken place, and that the complete absolute end of Reconstruction (i.e., the "rehabilitation" of the South/former Confederacy, its readmission into the Union and into the corpus of the "United States of America not presently in rebellion and treason") only happened in that decade (Union troops were "returned to their barracks" by the Compromise of 1877, but the physical removal of the very last of the federal military personnel, those stationed in any of the former Confederate states other than for reasons completely unrelated to the Civil War and Reconstruction, did not occur until the 1890s); and 3) that most Confederate monuments that exist outside of the South are monuments located in Western frontier communities, specifically those originally or historically populated and settled by White populations disproportionately hailing from the antebellum south or former Confederacy, and most of those Western frontier communities were not fully populated and fully "tamed" until the 1890s or later.

The question of why the statues of Texian Revolutionaries "were put up in the first place" has no clearer answers than do the versions of that question pertaining to both of the aforementioned examples (statues of Marx and Lenin built in Communist states long after both men's deaths and in countries outside of Germany or Russia, and Confederate Statues built long after 1865 or long after 1877). If one accepts the premise that the Texas Revolution was fought to legalize black chattel slavery (a premise which, even if ultimately more false than true, probably does possess some amount of truth to it) then one must therefore accept that erecting monuments to the Texas Revolution and those who fought for it does on some level imply a belief that certain actions, done in order to "fight for slavery," were commendable or justified.

[The Mikado]

The Texas Revolution had basically nothing to do with slavery, I am so tired of this meme. Just because the US Civil War was caused by slavery when some people say it wasn't doesn't mean we need to say every 19th Century war was caused by slavery in reaction.

It had a lot to do with slavery in that slavery was one of several features that really distinguished Texans and Mexicans (along with Catholicism vs Protestantism, language, etc) that made them an awkward fit. Those differences alone weren't enough to cause the revolt: the end of local autonomy under the would be centralizing dictatorship of Santa Anna did that (and sparked similar revolts in northern Mexico and in the Native-heavy Yucatan in the deep south, all regions with strong autonomous traditions). But it's worth establishing what made Texans different enough from Mexicans that when Santa Anna's constitutional vandalism happened Texans were able to rally together against him, and one of those factors was slavery.

[Samof94]

The Texas Revolution had basically nothing to do with slavery, I am so tired of this meme. Just because the US Civil War was caused by slavery when some people say it wasn't doesn't mean we need to say every 19th Century war was caused by slavery in reaction.

It had a lot to do with slavery in that slavery was one of several features that really distinguished Texans and Mexicans (along with Catholicism vs Protestantism, language, etc) that made them an awkward fit. Those differences alone weren't enough to cause the revolt: the end of local autonomy under the would be centralizing dictatorship of Santa Anna did that (and sparked similar revolts in northern Mexico and in the Native-heavy Yucatan in the deep south, all regions with strong autonomous traditions). But it's worth establishing what made Texans different enough from Mexicans that when Santa Anna's constitutional vandalism happened Texans were able to rally together against him, and one of those factors was slavery.

Mexico actually outlawed slavery and had a Black man as President in 1829. The causes of the war look so obvious when you think of it that way.  Yeah, there were non-slavery related revolts too in other states, but they all failed. The only reason this one succeeded was the U.S. was trying to create a new slave state.  The Constitution written banned free Black people from existing and made the idea of freeing an enslaved person impossible. Even S. Houston was a slave holder.

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

The Texas Revolution had basically nothing to do with slavery, I am so tired of this meme. Just because the US Civil War was caused by slavery when some people say it wasn't doesn't mean we need to say every 19th Century war was caused by slavery in reaction.

It had a lot to do with slavery in that slavery was one of several features that really distinguished Texans and Mexicans (along with Catholicism vs Protestantism, language, etc) that made them an awkward fit. Those differences alone weren't enough to cause the revolt: the end of local autonomy under the would be centralizing dictatorship of Santa Anna did that (and sparked similar revolts in northern Mexico and in the Native-heavy Yucatan in the deep south, all regions with strong autonomous traditions). But it's worth establishing what made Texans different enough from Mexicans that when Santa Anna's constitutional vandalism happened Texans were able to rally together against him, and one of those factors was slavery.

Mexico actually outlawed slavery and had a Black man as President in 1829. The causes of the war look so obvious when you think of it that way.  Yeah, there were non-slavery related revolts too in other states, but they all failed. The only reason this one succeeded was the U.S. was trying to create a new slave state.  The Constitution written banned free Black people from existing and made the idea of freeing an enslaved person impossible. Even S. Houston was a slave holder.

In some ways, Houston was similar to General Sherman. Both were white supremacists living in the South at the start of the Civil war who warned that the north would win.