I do not accept that it was an 'evil empire'. There was much more good than evil as was also true of the north. Historical markers are usually not intended to 'honor' but rather to commemorate aspects of history.
Our history is what it is. And all of it needs to be acknowledged and taught so each subsequent generation doesn't have to metaphorically invent the wheel before it can move forward.
Both sides had plenty of good, bad and ugly.
The enslaved deserve our understanding and sympathy for what some endured, but where is the 'honor'? They didn't choose their situation and most did nothing to change it. Those who deserve honor are those, black/white/other, who risked their reputations, fortunes, their very lives to change that situation. And it did change.
The North did not fight the Civil War to free the slaves. If that was the issue for the North, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation would have freed all slaves. It didn't. It only freed those in the seceding states and it didn't free those in states that did not secede.
The South did not fight the Civil War because they wanted to have slavery but for the right to determine their own destiny whatever that was to be. Many if not most in the Confederate Army were anti-slavery including General Lee at least according to some sources.
Commemorating important figures in that conflict on both sides, whether good, bad or ugly, is honest history.
en.wikipedia.org
