Still battling. (Scan).

In late December, the United States Historical Society dropped a bomb on Richmond, Virginia. It announced plans to erect a statue commemorating Abraham Lincoln's April 5, 1865 visit to the defeated city. The statue, of Lincoln seated on a bench next to his son Tad, would be placed near the National Park Service's Richmond battlefield visitors' center. The design calls for a granite slab bearing the inscription, "To Bind Up the Nation's Wounds"--but instead the idea has ripped the scab off some old ones.

Within roughly two picoseconds of the story appearing in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, e-mails began flooding the newspaper's offices denouncing the idea. Many compared it to placing a statue of Hitler in Jerusalem or one of Osama bin Laden in Manhattan. Brag Bowling, commander of the Virginia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), called the proposed statue a "government-sponsored and -sanctioned act of insensitivity." (Actually, the U.S. Historical Society is a private, non-profit group.)

Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, is never far from a shouting match over its past. The last big uproar occurred in 1999, when city councilman Sa'ad El-Amin demanded and achieved the removal of a mural depicting Robert E. Lee from a canal-walk restoration project by the James River. El-Amin contended that the mural (one of 29 showing scenes and figures from Richmond's history, including Gabriel Prosser, who led a slave insurrection) insulted the sensibilities of African Americans. "If Lee ...