Right about now, the state plans to remove from Georges Island the memorial to 13 Confederate prisoners who died there during the Civil War. The offending headstone is going to the state archives, away from public view.

After ordering that the grave marker be boarded up this summer, Governor Charlie Baker justified its removal as a “symbol . . . that [does] not support liberty and equality for the people of Massachusetts.’’

I find this decision abhorrent, but I understand why Baker did it. Who needs the headache, and the ferocious headwinds of willful ignorance, naivete and lack of imagination swirling around the debate over Confederate memorials?

It’s now received wisdom that the Civil War was “about’’ slavery from Day One, and that everyone who fought for the South was either a slaveholder, or a racist, or most likely both. But the Civil War became about slavery only in the fullness of time. Abraham Lincoln’s declaration of war against the refractory states never mentions slavery. He disdained slavery, but had no intention of eradicating it in 1861, when he hoped some southern border states would support the Union cause.

It’s odd that the memorial is said to commemorate rebel soldiers, when you can plainly see one of the deceased described as a “citizen’’ of Virginia, one is a ship “passenger,’’ and two are merchant seamen. Do we so hate the mate of the steamer Nita, which was ferrying food and hospital supplies from Havana to Mobile, Alabama, that we have to plow up his gravestone?

To think that every one of those men was a fire-breathing racist is as silly as thinking that every Union soldier was a glorious abolitionist anxious to lay down his life for Americans of African descent. In every war, men enlist for a variety of reasons — patriotic, economic, and social. The guy next door is enlisting; maybe I should, too. Right here in Boston, men enlisted because other men paid them to. These were the famous “substitutes,’’ mercenaries at the service of well-to-do young men seeking to avoid military service.

There is no reason to assume that the Confederates who died in captivity here were any more eager to serve in the Civil War than were the men and women who participated in the notorious Boston Draft Riot of July 1863, when militia commander Stephen Cabot opened fire on a largely Irish crowd of protesters sick of being impressed into Mr. Lincoln’s war.

Cabot’s men, eventually bolstered by two Harvard classes holding reunions in Cambridge — a nice touch — killed several protesters, including a 12-year-old boy. All this to say: It’s hard to know who your dead enemy is. Maybe it’s someone who had no interest in fighting against you at all.

Not far from the Normandy beaches, where 2,500 American soldiers lost their lives on D-Day, there are Canadian, American, and German war cemeteries commemorating the tens of thousands of men who died in the ensuing battle for the liberation of France. A sign at the entrance to the German cemetery reads:

“With its melancholy rigour, it is a graveyard for soldiers not all of whom had chosen either the cause or the fight. They too have found rest in our soil of France.’’

Death is inglorious enough already. Finger-in-the-wind politicians exploiting deaths for political gain is simply disgusting.

Alex Beam’s column appears regularly in the Globe. Follow him on Twitter @imalexbeamyrnot.