On September 19th, 2022, the Naming Commission issued a final report on the Confederate iconography in the United States military. Created in 2020 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, the 8-member panel was led by Chair Admiral Michelle Howard and Vice Chair, General Ty Seidule. Howard is the highest-ranking woman in Naval history. Seidule gained fame with the publication of an anti-Confederate polemic titled Robert E. Lee and Me and for a widely viewed YouTube video on the Civil War. He taught history at the United States Military Academy for 16 years and is now a visiting professor of history at Hamilton College in New York.
Democrats established the Naming Commission after the 2020 “Summer of Love” riots in response to the death of George Floyd and in unison with other attempts that year to remove or contextualize Confederate monuments across the United States.
President Donald Trump vetoed the legislation that created the commission, arguing that it included language that will require the renaming of certain military installations. Trump emphasized that he had been clear in “my opposition to politically motivated attempts like this to wash away history and to dishonor the immense progress our country has fought for in realizing our founding principles.”
Congress voted to override his veto by crushing the majorities in both the House and the Senate. Only 5 Senate Republicans and 66 House Republicans voted against overriding Trump’s veto. The commission recommended renaming 9 military installations, 4 naval vessels, and dozens of patches, streets, buildings, and memorials.
While predictable, the most egregious recommendation from the commission centers on the Confederate Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. Ty Seidule argued that the monument should be stripped down to its granite base plate. Why? Because Seidule and the other members of the commission thought that the history portrayed on the bronze relief smacked of the Lost Cause myth. But what is the real history of the monument?
President William McKinley, a Union War veteran, who served with distinction in several battles in the Eastern theater suggested the creation of a monument in Arlington National Cemetery to commemorate the over 200,000 Confederate soldiers who died during the war. This was the high point of reconciliation in the United States, and McKinley thought that such a monument would, as Lincoln said in his second inaugural address, “bind up the nation’s wounds.” McKinley said in 1898 that “every soldier’s grave made during our unfortunate Civil War is a tribute to American Valor. A time has now come when in the spirit of fraternity we should share in the care of the graves of Confederate soldiers. Cordial feeling now happily existing between the North and the South prompts this gracious act and if it needed further justification it is found in the gallant loyalty toward the Union, the flag so conspicuously shown in that year just passed by the sons and grandsons of these heroic dead.”
Two years later, the United States Congress followed through on McKinley’s suggestion and crafted legislation which ordered the Secretary of War to have reburied in some suitable spot in the National Cemetery at Arlington and to place proper headstones at their graves. The bodies of about 128 Confederate soldiers now buried in the National Soldiers Home near Washington DC, and the bodies of about 136 Confederate soldiers now buried at the National Cemetery at Arlington, Virginia. Eventually, the remains of over 400 Confederate soldiers will be interred at Arlington. In 1906, Secretary of War, William H. Taft agreed to allow members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy to begin raising funds for a Confederate monument at Arlington. They eventually commissioned Jewish American Moses Ezekiel to design and sculpt the finished product. Ezekiel was the first Jewish cadet at the Virginia Military Institute who fought at the Battle of New Market in 1864. He later studied art and sculpture in Rome and Berlin and became a famous International artist. His work was admired by International leaders and celebrities featured in both Europe and the United States. Ezekiel would eventually be buried at the foot of the only would eventually be buried at the foot of the Arlington Confederate monument, making it his literal headstone.
In 1912, Taft, now president of the United States, presided over the cornerstone dedication ceremony. Taft described the memorial as “a beautiful monument to the heroic dead of the South” and called the ceremony “the benediction and of all true Americans.”
Two years later, President Woodrow Wilson unveiled the monument as an emblem of a reunited people and argued that such a monument was only possible in a democracy. He hoped that such a monument would be a symbol of
our duty and our privilege to be like the country we represent. And speaking no word of malice and no word of criticism even stand shoulder to shoulder to lift the burdens of mankind in the future and show the paths of the freedom to all the world
To these men and to that generation of Americans, the monument represented the best of America, a spirit of reconciliation, democracy, and freedom, of heroism, and patriotism. And like William McKinley, many of them had been targets of actual Confederate bullets. If these men can bury the hatchet, what changed decades later? Not the history of the period nor the meaning of the monument, but the political ideology. In short, America became a much less tolerant place. Historians like Ty Seidule argue that the monument displays an incorrect view of the past by sanitizing and glorifying slavery. The image of an enslaved woman holding the baby of a Confederate soldier going off to war while tears stream down her face has been criticized by modernist historians as a distortion of Southern slavery. But is it? Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up From Slavery, had only recently been published when Ezekiel was designing the monument. Washington was arguably the most respected African American in the United States in 1906. Washington recounts in Up From Slavery, 1900, that
in order to defend and protect the women and children who are left on the plantations when the white males went off to war, the slaves would have laid down their lives. The slave was who was selected to sleep in the big house during the absence of the males was considered to have the place of honor. Anyone attempting to harm young mistress or old mistress during the night, would have had to cross the dead body of the slave to do so.
[Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Eugene D. Genovese, 1976] Until recently, historians studying this often arrived at the same conclusions. The same can be said for the image of the black Southerners marching off to war with white Confederate soldiers. For years, Southerners recognized the contribution of blacks, both free and slave, to the war effort. Many received pensions when the war was over and while the Confederate government did not legally recognize these men as soldiers that did not authorize arming slaves as return for their freedom until 1865, thousands wire Confederate uniforms, provided manual labor, shouldered a rifle, shot at Union soldiers, and even died in Northern prisons and on the battlefield. That made them black Confederates. Of course, historians like high school history teacher, Kevin M. Levin and his Searching for Black Confederates argued that none of these men could qualify as soldiers because they were not legally recognized as such. This is mere semantics. Black Confederates existed regardless of whether history deniers wished to acknowledge their contributions to the Southern cause for Independence. This history does not square with the “Take it down” agenda but with the spirit of reconciliation. Henry Louis Gates, the Harvard professor who sat down with Barack Obama for the famous Beer Summit in 2009 argues black Confederates existed.
The truth remains that the Arlington Confederate Monument is a work of art, sculpted by a world-renowned Jewish American Artist, and seen by two Northern political leaders one of whom was literally engaged in physical combat with the Confederates and dedicated it to the spirit of fraternity and healing. Booker T. Washington thought that the monuments erected in the honor of the best of Southern leaders would lead to better race relations in America. Perhaps it would be better to listen to Washington and McKinley, two men who experience the war first hand than a group of modern historians with a political axe to grind.
If you agree that the monument should remain contact your representative today at congress.gov/contact-us. Time is of the essence.
San Gabriel Tutor 