The Civil War monuments have been completely uncontroversial throughout my lifetime but are now seen to have a sinister meaning.  I'd like to suggest something different.  I've heard foreigners marvel at these monuments, at the fact that the leaders of the Confederacy weren't hanged for sedition and rebellion, but were completely forgiven and later, allowed to be honored by their communities.  They said, in their countries, they would all have been exterminated, and not only would no monuments have been raised, they would have been remembered in textbooks as evil people, regardless of the actual facts of their character.  This is a very distinctive thing about America, and one worth preserving: we don't shoot losers, we tell them to do it over.  Few countries, even in the nineteenth century, could boast of anything like that.  Slavery was wrong and had to end, as countless Southerns knew.  But the North had profited grossly from it.  No one would gain by continuing to fight the war.