How America Reconciled

(August 6, 2021) It is much easier to destroy a country than it is to rebuild it, particularly if it was torn apart by an internecine war. Ultimately reconciliation comes through healing traditions that often began as simple acts or softly spoken voices. 

A year after the war ended the ladies of Columbus, Mississippi strewed flowers on the graves of both the Confederate and Union dead in the town’s Friendship Cemetery. Their gesture started a movement that spread. Northerners selected May 30^th as National Memorial Day in 1868. 

Similarly, when he was confident of victory forty days before his assassination, Abraham Lincoln closed his second presidential inaugural by urging “malice toward none and charity for all.” While touring the evacuated Confederate capital at Richmond ten days before he was shot, Lincoln answered the local army occupation commander who asked how the general should treat the defeated residents: “If I were in your place, I’d let ’em up easy, let ’em up easy.” During his last cabinet meeting the very day of the evening he was shot on April 14, 1865 the President “glowed with approval” when special guest General Ulysses Grant replied to Lincoln’s question about the surrender terms offered to Robert E. Lee’s army: “I told them to go back to their homes and families, and they would not be molested, if they did nothing more,” said Grant. Secretary of State William Seward later wrote that the cabinet discussion that day was pervaded by “Kindly feeling toward the vanquished, and hearty desire to restore peace and safety at the South, with as little harm as possible to the feelings or the property of the inhabitants.” 

The next morning Lincoln belonged to the ages. But his conciliatory spirit became a loadstone for the new President, Andrew Johnson. In accordance with Lincoln’s wishes, Johnson quickly restored non-slave property rights to the common Confederate soldier upon latter’s taking a new loyalty oath. Next, on Christmas Day 1868, he pardoned all former Confederates, although the Fourteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to withhold rights from leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. 

On the other side of the Potomac River, soon after Appomattox Robert E. Lee was already thinking of himself as an American. He called Lincoln’s assassination “a crime previously unknown to the country and one that must be deprecated by every American.” About the same time a reporter who had interviewed him remarked that the former Confederate “talked throughout as a citizen of the United States. He seemed to plant himself on the national platform and take his observations from that standpoint.” In response to an embittered Confederate widow who sought advice about how to raise her sons he replied, “Madam, don’t bring up your sons to detest the United States government. Recollect that we form one country now. Abandon all these local animosities and make your sons Americans.” From such beginnings the legends of Lee and Lincoln gave America a joint future. Without such “mythology” it may have had no future at all. 

For the past ninety years the Arlington Bridge which connects Lee’s former Virginia home to the Lincoln Memorial stands as a symbol of America’s reunification.  Although Arlington House is still known as the Robert E. Lee Memorial, the general’s detractors are urging Congress to rename it. Among them is philanthropist cum mobile home park mogul David Rubinstein who donated $14 million to restore the building. But Rubinstein is a Magna Cum Laude graduate of a university founded by two Confederate veteran volunteers, Julian Carr and Washington Duke. Notwithstanding that Duke was also a slaveholder the school remains his namesake. Based upon his TV interviews Rubinstein has published two books concerning American history. Unfortunately, he gets his Reconstruction history from Louis Gates who focuses on the black experience as if whites had no other experience except to abuse blacks. Similarly, he evidently gets his opinions on Lee indirectly from Ron Chernow’s hagiography of Ulysses Grant.   

Although Robert E. Lee took up arms against the United States in 1861, today it is his attackers who are fighting to divide the country into hostile factions to make it impossible for our nation to continue whole into the future. Ironically, today’s attack on Confederate statues is an attempt to destroy the same Union that Lincoln defended against the Confederate heroes. After the Union and Confederate soldiers reconciled with one another, America went forward from that point free of slavery, but also honoring among themselves the men who fought on both sides. But today, Robert E. Lee’s critics are ripping up that reconciliation. They deplore racial harmony.  They are doing all they can to increase hostility between Americans, black and white.  And unlike their ancestors they depreciate the common Confederate soldier.

They are obsessed with the idea that forgiveness is unacceptable. Instead, they wish to eradicate everything connected to the Confederacy. Last year, for example, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require all Confederate memorials and location markers be removed from National Battlefield Parks. The left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center maintains a map of Confederate statues and markers throughout the United States. They want them all removed so that the nation can start “a conversation about values and beliefs.” But it’s impossible to have a conversation about history that has been dumped into the trash can. That is what their movement became when activists wantonly destroyed statues around the country. 

To defend Lee—or even fail to denounce him—has suddenly become tantamount to being a racist, and possibly pro-slavery. When President Trump’s Chief of Staff, John Kelly, remarked that Lee was “an honorable man,” a CNN reporter actually asked White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders if the administration “thought slavery was wrong.” Is it, therefore, any surprise that a recent YouGov poll showed that two-thirds of Southern Republicans want to secede?