Efforts to revise commemorations of Americans who owned slaves are getting a boost from a Washington Post “audit” of art in the Capitol that is focusing attention on “141 enslavers and 13 Confederates.” Now, the hard work is what comes next on an issue that can be as divisive as the Civil War itself.

An example of the challenge is that the Post used the term “enslaver” 118 times in its article, whereas the National Archives has a warning explaining that while that’s its “preferred term,” it’s “potentially harmful.” The Archive’s mandate, and that of historians, is to tell a full story of the past.

Were the Archives’ job that of Winston Smith at the “Nineteen Eighty-Four” Ministry of Truth, it’d erase “enslaver” while mouthing the novel’s English Socialist slogan, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Instead, they face that slavery existed in America until 1865 — later, if we count Native tribes — just as “nearly 40 million” are held in bondage worldwide today, according to the New York Times.

Even a century ago, when Virginia sent General Robert E. Lee’s statue to Washington, there were debates over whitewashing the emerging myth of the “Lost Cause.” As the Sun reported on January 18, 1910, “Senator Heyburn of Idaho renewed today his hostility to any movement honoring the memory of Gen. Robert E. Lee … whose statue he would bar from Statuary Hall in the Capitol.”

The Sun added, “He said that Congress had never contemplated ‘for a moment that any state, under any conditions, at any time, would place the statue of Benedict Arnold in that Hall.’” Heyburn’s shout to “take it away” echoed until 2020, when Virginia removed Lee’s likeness.

In January 1910, the Post viewed both men in the same light. “Virginia selected them as her most distinguished sons,” it wrote, “not more for their splendid military records than for the great examples of pure, honorable, and self-sacrificing manhood which they bequeathed to posterity.”

Now, only the Commonwealth’s statue of President Washington remains. Is it because he alone among what author David O. Stewart described to me as the “A-List Founders” emancipated everyone at Mount Vernon in his will, or because of a more sober consideration of why it stands?

What about President Jefferson, whose statue New York’s City Hall ejected in November 2021? He was not only a slaveholder, but undermined President Adams while serving as his vice president, urging the French not to work with the administration.

The author of “Agony and Eloquence: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and a World of Revolution,” Daniel L. Mallock, described this as “treason” in our interview. Yet Jefferson gave us the Declaration of Independence, signed a law as president banning the importation of Africans, and advocated for a path to emancipation.

As a historian of American slavery, Annette Gordon-Reed, told the Harvard Gazette, “No one puts a monument up to Washington or Jefferson to promote slavery. The monuments go up because, without Washington, there likely would not have been an American nation.”

Harder to judge are “possible enslavers.” The Post cites the statue of Ethan Allen — sent by Vermont, the first state to ban slavery — noting he had black servants but “historians have not been able to determine” their status. Do we err on the side of expunging any possible taint even at the risk of slighting a hero of the American Revolution? 

How many other men in Capitol artwork kept no records, like King Kamehameha, one of Hawaii’s statues? Writing for the Hill in 2018, Jared Whitley noted that he “savagely attacked defenseless natives,” “sacrificed” enemies, and “we can assume that he, as a king and conqueror, oversaw mass enslavement, rape, and torture.”

History, like life, offers many hard questions and few easy answers. How we deal with America’s past will decide who controls the future. If we do it right, we can nudge the world closer to a day when “All Men are Created Equal” is a universal truth, honoring the memory of those who endured bondage centuries ago and emancipating those still locked in its shackles today.