It would be a stretch to say the civil war monuments in the American south were only erected to be racist (Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next, 22 August). Many civil war statues were funded by both the north and the south at the turn of the century, up until the 1920s when the vast majority of these veterans were dying off and their families wanted to put something up to remember their fathers and grandfathers. Their heroes and leaders were the natural subjects for these tributes.

It should be noted that the north had the best sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The south wanted more statuary and turned to Beaux-Arts and classical sculptors. North and the south artworks are best represented in Vicksburg over a period of years. None of the articles on statues in the news mention who the sculptors were and their value. It’s easier to trash them if that information is not discussed. Afua Hirsch also ignores the pedigree of Nelson’s column, which had a number of renowned sculptors involved at a cost of £47,000 in 1840 – £4,510,933.74 in today’s money.

Confederate sculptures, including Lee in Charlottesville, were ignored until fairly recently. There are testimonies from city council hearings in Charlottesville from African-Americans saying no one paid attention to the statues until the city council started to activate the town against them. Recently Charles Barkley said: “I’m 54 years old; I’ve never thought about those statues a day in my life.”

Patricia Saffran

New York, USA

• The claims by Geoff Clifton and Francis Blake (Letters, 19 August) that Robert E Lee was “unsympathetic to slavery” and that his support for the southern states in the American civil war was “not because he was (necessarily) a supporter of slavery” rather stick in the throat. In a letter to his wife, written in December 1856, Lee admitted that “slavery is a moral and political evil”, which he then proceeded to justify by claiming that slavery was “a greater evil to the white man than to the black race”. For good measure, he explained to her that the slaves “are immeasurably better off here than in Africa” and that “the painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their instruction as a race”.

Lee may have been a skilful military commander, but that cannot obscure the reality: he owned slaves, he ill-treated slaves and he fought to preserve slavery in the name of a “wise and merciful providence”.

Jacob Ecclestone

Diss, Norfolk

• It seems unlikely that the austere and patrician Lee would have approved of any statues of himself. He would probably have disapproved even more of the sort of people who still fly the stars and bars as a white supremacist symbol. And one can only wonder at what he would have made of the present incumbent of the White House.

David Budgen

Durham

• I believe Afua Hirsch has missed the qualitative difference between Confederate generals and Lord Nelson. The former led a rebel army in a bitter civil war that caused a huge loss of life in the cause of slavery. Their continued presence after the war encouraged the segregation in the south. If you want an equivalent example in this country, it would be better to topple statues of Charles I, who caused a huge loss of life in order to defend the indefensible cause of the divine right of kings.

Richard Ascough

Thames Ditton, Surrey

• Part of Nelson’s work had indeed been policing 1780s Caribbean trade, keeping the way open for the slave trade. Was he responsible for the policy decision authorising this? He married into the fringes of the Nevis slave-owning aristocracy. The widow he married had once personally owned one enslaved person, as Caribbean white girl children often did. Could this be his main qualification as an icon of British slave-ownership?

The slave economy was a major sustaining power of much of Scottish, Irish and English landowning and commercial society in the late 18th and very early 19th centuries, and its tentacles reached down into every domestic sugar bowl or coffee pot. But Nelson, who had voted in the Lords to maintain the slave trade, was a bit player in this, compared to (almost at random) the Rendleshams, Harewoods, Gladstones and others, some of whom never even set foot on a Caribbean island. Or some of the patrons of All Souls, Oxford. Even with barn doors, it helps to select the target carefully.

Jim Brennan

Inverness

• Without Nelson’s victories it would have been very likely that France would have ruled India, and much else, and the slavery which was returned by Napoleon in French colonies – thus outlasting that in the British ones – may have been reinforced. Despite Nelson’s views, the British anti-slavery movement gained strength and the opportunity should now be taken to respect its heroes. It would be a fine gesture and an appropriate completion of the story carried by the existing statues in Trafalgar Square, to provide the fourth plinth with a linked ramp on which such figures as Olaudah Equiano, Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson would take their turns, along with the Scotsman David Livingstone (who spoke forcefully against slavery eastward from Africa), and the Londoner Mary Kingsley, a pioneer of multiculturalism who gave her life as a nurse in the Boer war.

Mallory Wober

London

• Keith Flett (Letters, 23 August) reminds us that London lacks a public reminder of the transported chartist William Cuffay. Neither is there, to this nation’s eternal shame, one to that truly great radical dissenter, chemist and educationalist Joseph Priestley who died in self-imposed exile in America the year before Nelson. Of whom George III remarked, on the burning down of his (Priestley’s) Birmingham home, laboratory and chapels by the mob: “I cannot but feel better pleased that Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled, and that the people see them in their true light.”

Having had the opportunity to see “Gunpowder Joe”, through the legacy of his many works, in a truer light than the intolerant George III, should we not redress this black hole in the nation’s heart? Another statue in Trafalgar Square, this time to the man who confined his use of gunpowder to words in a radical pamphlet would seem highly appropriate.

David Hine

Radstock, Somerset

• When does the furious scrubbing of history cease? When will I be satisfied that the world and, indeed, the past, have been rendered acceptable to me? And am I sure that my own soul is equally shining and new? Such puritanism sets a fearsomely high standard.

Guy Walker

Portsmouth

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