Study War No More

I hope everyone is having a good holiday season. Undoubtedly, some of you are not and I know from past experience that this can be a very difficult time of year when that’s the case. I had a few lonely holidays in years past, yet my holidays are not lonely now, so try to keep your head up and make next year better.

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Anyway, you have probably noticed that I’ve been on a bit of a holiday vacation lately. It’s only partly true, though. I have allowed myself to relax a bit the last few weeks, but the real reason I’ve neglected my Substack duties is that I have been pounding through material for the next Whose America episode (after having skimped on it for too long in order to keep up with original content here), and the reading I’ve been doing (a lot on labor racketeering, for example) hasn’t lent itself to standalone posts or essays. That will change soon, as I start to dive deeper on organized crime and the Communist Party USA, but in the meantime I thought I’d riff on a topic that wouldn’t require much new reading while I focus on the history episode: slavery and the lead-up to the American Civil War.

The topic presented itself to me in the news this week when the Pentagon announced that it would be removing a monument to the reconciliation of North and South after the US Civil War from Arlington National Cemetery. As of this writing, it seems a federal judge has placed a temporary halt on the removal, citing concerns that graves would be desecrated in the process, but if recent experience is any guide, the forces intent on removing the statue are more determined than those who would see it stay, and I expect they will eventually get their way.

USA Today, Washington Post, New York Times, actually, every example in the first three pages (and probably more, I stopped looking) of Google’s results refer to the statue as a “Confederate monument. This is an example of the subtle bias that regime media gets away with all the time. Calling it a “Confederate monument” suggests that it was erected to memorialize the Confederacy and the principles for which it fought, but nothing could be further from the truth. The monument was not the work of some recalcitrant state in the Deep South, but was put in place in 1914 by the federal government - that is, the government to which the South surrendered at Appomattox - to commemorate reconciliation of former enemies.

Now, to be very clear, I don’t begrudge anyone honoring their dead ancestors and am strongly opposed to the removal of any Confederate monument, but the attack on this one shines some light on the real motives of the iconoclasts. The rush to remove statues is not due to any recent change in our understanding of the war or those who fought for the Confederacy - nothing has changed on that front. Most of the people cheering on the removal know nothing at all about the US Civil War, and in many cases their ancestors would not arrive in America until decades after the war was over. The removal is instead a shot fired in a present day political battle by people using it as an opportunity to outrage and humiliate their contemporary political opponents.

The sculptor was Moses Ezekiel, a Jewish-American veteran of the Civil War who is buried at the foot of his masterpiece. It is a monument to peace and reconciliation, depicting a woman wearing an olive wreath symbolizing peace, with one hand resting on a plow while the other holds a pruning hook - a reference to a Biblical verse (Isaiah 2:4), which reads, “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and never again shall they study war.”

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The year before the monument was placed (1913), tens of thousands of aged veterans of the Union and Confederate armies had converged on Gettysburg to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the battle that took place there. Gettysburg was (and is) a small town lacking the facilities to serve so many people, so the men camped out near the battlefield, as they had all done half a century earlier. In the leadup to the event, some had expressed concern that old resentments might resurface and even lead to violence, but the three-day-long festival was proof of how far the country had come since 1865. The festival’s climax was a reenactment of Pickett’s Charge, the ill-fated Confederate maneuver that turned the tide of the Battle of Gettysburg and the larger war. As the Southern veterans sent up the rebel yell and made their way across the field, gasps and moans reverberated through the Union ranks. One of the participants remembered: “The Yankees, unable to restrain themselves longer, burst from behind the stone wall and flung themselves upon their former enemies, not in mortal combat, but embracing them in brotherly love and affection.”