Virginia’s Washington & Lee University has pulled down a commemorative plaque honouring the horse of Confederate General Robert E Lee, whom the school is still partly named after.
The plaque commemorating Traveller, placed over the horse’s gravesite, was removed from its place outside Lee Chapel, which is a National Historic Landmark as part of a sequence of removals.
In July, the school got rid of plaques glorifying the room where Lee took his oath of office as president of the school in 1865 and others denoting his office from 1865-68.
In 2021, the school announced a plan dedicated to concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion that removed much of the general’s mark on the school.
They announced plans to discontinue its Founders Day, which occurred on Lee’s birthday, renaming a chapel dedicated to him, alongside repudiations of racism.
The university’s board of trustees said in the plan that they’d reviewed campus symbols, names and practices, and they were making changes to remove doubt about their separation from the Confederacy and the Lost Cause.
The plaque to Traveller was erected in 1930 by a local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
It said that the last home of Traveller. Through war and peace the faithful, devoted and beloved horse of General Robert E Lee. Placed by the Virginia Division, United Daughters of the Confederacy.
The horse lived in the stables next to the president’s house from 1869 to 1871, a year after Robert E Lee died in the school’s president’s house.
According to The W&L Spectator, every Washington & Lee president has lived in the house since, using the stables as their garage.
The school has also replaced a plaque at the horse’s gravesite that honoured the horse with one deleting all recognition of the Confederacy and General Robert E Lee.
University spokesperson Drewry Sackett told The College Fix the decision was made a year ago.
Kamron Spivey, the president of Students for Historical Preservation, said this was disrespecting campus history.
He said that people like to hear tales about animals because they do no wrong, and that was how Traveller had been immortalised in campus history. He said that he was a faithful horse whose beauty and loyalty Robert E Lee said would inspire poets, and that until recently very few people seemed bothered by the horse.
People would often leave apples, or a favourite treat of the horse, at Traveller’s gravesite.
This is utterly absurd, and now we live in a world where history is being obliterated, and Orwellian history erasure tactics don’t alter what happened, it just soothes the weak-minded magical thinkers.
How dare they destroy those that were part of American history, good or bad? Even more alarming is that they’ve defiled a beautiful animal that had no say in the participation of that history.
The plaque’s removal will offend many Americans and it’s becoming more alarming that George Orwell’s 1984 is drawing disturbingly close to reality, and that dictators control us.
The thing is, if we obliterate history, then we’re bound to repeat it.
Traveller wasn’t just any horse, but even if he was, all animals should be treated with respect, whether dead or alive.
Honestly, did the horse offend the Board of Trustees? And any collective body that tries to obliterate a nation’s past isn’t progressive whatsoever.
This gives a whole new meaning to the old saying ‘F you and the horse you rode in on’.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 