Read the Proclamation. Unconditional pardon is not ambiguous. You are being intentionally misleading in some ridiculous effort to create an alternate fact. The men were pardoned. Some served as mayors and governors or even judges who understood what a pardon is. They were not mostly pardoned or only 99.9% pardoned. Read it.

The irrefutable moral argument, "You're still a traitor, because my mommy says you are!" will always be popular with pre-schoolers. I'll call the 90's so that you and Church Lady can do the superiority dance. Otherwise, thanks for your opinion.

Who can say what people were thinking when they built a statue to a person that had been returned to innocense by a lawful Constitutional process? I don't believe that those who hated and despised the men built the statues, which leaves those who loved and admired them. I don't know why the Almighty did not smite the men down immediately after the armistice, but instead some of them actually lived for decades after, only to die in the last century...when the statues were then built.

Of course, Confederate soldiers owned slaves. Well at least there's an 80% chance that the statues were built for the non-slave owners. As I've already posted, some Union statues might be of slave owners. And even though it's an irrelevancy, statues all over the world may be to men who were involved in the slave trade. Good luck cleansing the world's history. That's the real shame. We stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. For centuries, learned people thought that the Sun revolved around the Earth. Fallacies with this and observation lead to the fact we now know that the opposite is true. For centuries, people thought that one race was superior to another. Fallacies with this and observation lead to the truth we now know. Our mitochondrial DNA proves that the ancestors of every human alive today came out of Africa. There's only one human race and we are all Africans. People a century ago could not actually know this. We know it because people in the last century proved it. That doesn't make someone guilty for being born in an age of ignorance. I'm not the least bit interested in the smug version of historical facts.

However, someone who still thinks the Earth is the center of the universe should be the focus of debate to reveal their stupid claim as ridiculous. That goes doubly for racial supremacists. Learn the actual truth and speak with absolute facts to those who use pompous lies to impress their friends.