One of 32 different figures on Arlington National Cemetery’s Confederate Monument. (Creative Commons User Tim1965)
America is being removed on a daily basis by those who want us to forget our history. Piece by piece little bits and pieces that make up the American experience, history and fabric of this once great land are being eaten away by modern day communist locusts. One of the latest is the removal of all things Confederate across the country. Even those erected with the approval of the United States government.
Case in point is the Confederate Peace Monument in Arlington Cemetery. That monument has stood with Congressional and Presidential approval for more than a century, but now that Red Communism through politically correct “wokeness” and the Democrat Party has come to town very few seem to have a backbone to resist and stand against the enemy among us. Including some of South Carolina’s own Congressmen who voted to remove it in bill H.R. 6395 (116th), the NDAA Fiscal Year 2021 bill. It was vetoed by President Trump, and subsequently overridden by members of the Congress, including, SC Senator and current Presidential candidate Tim Scott, with Sen. Lindsey Graham not voting.
Blake Stillwell wrote in Military.com magazine:
In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson unveiled the Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery. Created by Confederate veteran Moses Jacob Ezekiel, the 32-foot-tall monument features a large bronze statue of a woman holding a laurel wreath, a plow stock and a pruning hook, representing “the South,” atop a granite base.
On that base is the Biblical verse,” And they shall beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.” It also features images from both mythology and those of Southern soldiers and civilians. These include a Black slave woman holding a white soldier’s baby, along with a life-size image of an enslaved man following his owner off to war, among others.
Former Secretary of the Navy & Democrat Senator from Virginia, Jim Webb wrote in the Wall Street Journal:
In 1898, 33 years after the end of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War brought a sudden, unanticipated harmony and unity to a country that had been riven by war and a punitive postwar military occupation, which failed at wholesale societal reconstruction. In the South, American flags flew again as the sons of Confederate soldiers volunteered to fight, even if it meant wearing the once-hated Yankee blue. President William McKinley presciently seized this moment to mend a generation’s sectional divide.
McKinley understood the Civil War as one who had lived it, having served four years in the 23rd Ohio Infantry, enlisting as a private and discharged in 1865 as a brevet major. He knew the steps to take to bring the country fully together again. As an initial signal, he selected three Civil War veterans to command the Cuba campaign. Two, William Rufus Shafter, given overall command of the Cuban operation, and H.W. Lawton, who led the Second Infantry Division, the first soldiers to land in the war, had received the Medal of Honor fighting for the Union. The other, “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, the legendary Confederate cavalry general, led the cavalry units in Cuba, after being elected to Congress in 1880 from Alabama and working hard to bring national reconciliation.
Four days after the Spanish-American war ended, McKinley proclaimed in Atlanta: “In the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of Confederate soldiers.” In that call for national unity the Confederate Memorial was born. It was designed by internationally respected sculptor Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, who asked to be buried at the memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. On one face of the memorial is the finest explanation of wartime service perhaps ever written, by a Confederate veteran who later became a Christian minister: “Not for fame or reward, not for place or for rank; not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity; but in simple obedience to duty as they understood it; these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all, and died.”
But now in this new world of woke, unless measures are taken very soon, by the end of this year the Confederate Memorial will be gone.
With surprising overbroadness, the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, passed in the midst of national racial and political upheaval, empowered a Naming Commission to “remove all names, symbols, displays, monuments and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America . . . or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America from all assets of the Department of Defense.” As part of that provision, Arlington National Cemetery has been ordered by Defense Department officials to remove the memorial by the end of this year, though the order is reportedly under review.
… I cannot imagine that the removal of this memorial, conceived and built with the sole purpose of healing the wounds of the Civil War and restoring national harmony, could be within the intent of a sweeping sentence placed inside a nearly trillion-dollar piece of legislation.
Stillwell wrote:
In 2021, Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which included a provision for the creation of the Naming Commission, which directs the defense secretary to “remove all names, symbols, displays, monuments and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America… or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America from all assets of the Department of Defense.”
As part of that provision, Arlington National Cemetery is preparing to remove the Confederate Memorial, which sits at the center of the cemetery’s Confederate section. Arlington National Cemetery is accepting comments from the public on whether they will remove the Confederate Peace monument until September 2nd, as a part of that process.
Arlington National Cemetery was established during the Civil War, on the land confiscated from Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and where (what used to be) his home still sits today. Just more than a month after Lee joined the Confederate Army, Union troops cleared Confederate soldiers from the land and mansion as Lee and his wife fled.
As the Civil War raged on, the U.S. Soldiers’ Cemetery and Alexandria, Virginia’s Cemetery began to fill up, so Congress released funds to establish a new national cemetery. It just so happened that Lee’s land was the perfect place for it, and the first burials at Arlington National Cemetery began in 1864.
Since then, it has been customary to establish a new section of the cemetery for the dead from a particular war. By 1877, Reconstruction had ended and U.S. troops were withdrawn from the South. By 1898, the Spanish-American War had resparked a feeling of unity among both the North and South.
President William McKinley revised the U.S. government’s policy on maintaining Confederate grave sites, and he approved a petition asking for a Confederate section in the national cemetery. Congress passed a law allowing for Confederate graves scattered in Arlington to be dug up and reinterred in the new section.
The Confederate grave markers have pointed tops, unlike the rounded tops elsewhere in the cemetery. They are also not buried in orderly rows like the other sections. Instead, they are arranged in a ring around the Confederate Monument at the center of Stonewall Jackson Circle. Planning and fundraising for the memorial at the center began in 1904, and permission to build it was granted in 1906.
Now, after standing for more than a century in its position, the Confederate Memorial is set to be removed. Arlington National Cemetery is seeking comments from the public on its congressionally mandated relocation.
Though lawsuits to prevent its relocation are ongoing, the cemetery is already planning for that relocation, but is inviting the public to provide feedback on “alternatives that will avoid, minimize or mitigate adverse effects of the monument’s removal.”
“The removal of the Confederate Memorial must be conducted in a manner that ensures the safety of the people who work at and visit ANC and that protects surrounding graves and monuments,” the removal page on Arlington National Cemetery’s website says. “The entire process, including disposition, must occur according to applicable laws, policies, and regulations.”
The real issue is will Americans do their duty and respond to the coming travesty of removing a national monument offering peace over regional conflicts. To remove the monument sends a signal that peace is no longer wanted nor desired. To submit a comment to Arlington National Cemetery’s Confederate Memorial Removal Environmental Impact Statement, visit the website and fill out the electronic form by 11:59 p.m. on Sept. 2, 2023.
Michael Reed is Publisher of The Standard newspaper, print and online. You may find our videos available on Rumble. The bulk of TheStandardSC video media channel has been censored by dominant social media groups like YouTube. YouTube, owed by Alphabet (Google), removed and destroyed all of our video work without permission or remuneration. That has stopped all potential donations from our many supporters on that venue. If you want to continue to see independent thought and reports please “like”, comment, share with a friend, and donate to support The Standard on this page to assure the continued availability of news that is ignored too often by the dominant media.
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I saw that memorial when I visited there. It represents a part of our history that should not be erased regardless how the leftists feel. History cannot be erased or forgotten. However, we must learn from it. People forget that everyone who fought in the civil war were Americans. This is not about north and south, it is about satisfying the ridiculous agendas of the left. I am so tired of this taking down statues to satisfy a bunch of leftist whiny anarchists. Screw them and there phony hate filled agendas.