One thing I found interesting, which I did not previously know, is that Robert E. Lee himself opposed the erection of confederate monuments after the war.
“I think it wiser,” the retired military leader wrote about a proposed Gettysburg memorial in 1869, “…not to keep open the sores of war but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings engendered.”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/...ate-monuments/