CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- The time has come to take down the Confederate memorial at the State Capitol in Charleston and relegate it to its rightful place in history.

Now is the time because, during this sesquicentennial of the Civil War, there will be resurgence by those who seek to glorify the South's role, and it should not be.

The monument is actually a pedestal for the Stonewall Jackson statue that was erected at a time when revisionist history glamorized the Confederate cause in an attempt to gloss over the horrors of slavery.

The so-called "Lost Cause" school sought to blame the North for provoking the war. Southerners painted the antebellum political climate as a struggle for state's rights and an assault on Southerners' noble way of life.

In actuality, however, the Southern cause was an affront to the basic American value that all people are created equal. Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens supported "the great truth that the negro's... subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition."

West Virginia really is the last place to have a Confederate monument, for plantation life was anathema to the Trans-Allegheny region. Not only did plantation life defend the slave economy, but it also embodied aristocratic suppression of mountain people. Western Virginians were always second-class citizens in the southern patrician society of  Tidewater, Virginia, with negligible political power in Richmond.

That West Virginia was formed during a period of the war when Confederate forces were strongest (pre-Vicksburg) and prosecuting the war in Union territory (pre-Gettysburg) stands as testament to our state's resolve and allegiance to the United States.

The brave souls who met in Wheeling had little tolerance for slavery and saw the Confederate cause as ignoble and culturally depraved. They literally risked their lives for our new state and country.

Southern military leaders like Jackson, who had once sworn to uphold the Constitution and allegiance to the United States, effectively betrayed their nation, took up arms to subjugate loyal Americans and burned their homes.

While invoking the name of God in their bellicose cause, they witnessed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers and systematically hung their own men who deserted. And for what? The Lost Cause school would hold that it was a war for property rights and a gallant way of life.

The monument on our Capitol lawn stands not for honor and nobility but for oppression, brutality, depravation and extreme racial subjugation. 

The South's so-called property rights struggle constituted the enslavement of 4 million people. The plantation economy divided families through the sale of children and utilized the whipping-post.

After West Virginia was formed, there was outright southern hate for the new Mountain State.

Consider southern contributions to the postwar Reconstruction Era after the Union victory: Continued subjugation of African-Americans, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, widespread racial violence and public lynchings.

One hundred years ago when the Confederate monument was dedicated, the South still harbored institutional obstruction to equal opportunity for African Americans, barriers to voter rights, segregation, Jim Crow, and pervasive racial prejudice. It reached its political zenith with George Wallace and its ethical low with James Earl Ray.

No, the southern cause was not one to be glorified. Those who sought southern glory were rewarded with the destruction of their country.

Fredrick Douglass put it best when a statue to Robert E. Lee was unveiled. He said Lee's motivations were tragically wrong, ignoble and dishonorable.

Lee, who turned down command of the Union Army, could have become president had he remained loyal to the nation to which he swore allegiance (and one his father, decorated Lt. Col. Henry "Lighthorse Harry" Lee, fought for during the Revolutionary War).

Lee, who was unwavering in the cause well after the war's end, witnessed the dissolution of his family, the loss of his wife's fortune and good name, and conversion of his Arlington plantation into a national graveyard.

U.S. Grant said the southern cause was "one of the worst for which a people ever fought and one for which there was the least excuse."

Courageous souls in Wheeling righted the wrong of Virginia's secession by forming a great state draped in honor by none other than Abraham Lincoln.

Let's take down the Confederate Memorial and tell the Sons of Confederate Veterans who gather each year in Richmond to come and get the statue of Stonewall Jackson or West Virginians will bury it once and for all, as we did their cause 148 years ago.

Swint is a commercial property broker in Charleston.