Make Arlington Great Again: An Open Letter to President Trump

The forthcoming is adapted from a letter which was written to President Donald Trump soon after his reelection. Copies of this letter were also forwarded to Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and many other officials in the administration. The recent renaming of “Fort Liberty” back to “Fort Bragg” augurs well for us.

Dear Mr. President:

Congratulations, sir, on your victory, which henceforth will be known as the greatest political comeback in American history. Although there are technically greater “landslides”—LBJ in 1964, Nixon in ’72, Ronald Reagan in ’80 and ’84—yours is the greatest given the obstacles which you had to overcome. Yet the word “historic” does not fully do justice to your victory; it is not just historic, but mythic, as if the American gods were directly intervening in our affairs. You are now the ultimate underdog American hero!

I voted for you in 2016, first, to regime-change the neo-conservatives out of the Republican Party, and second, to stop Hillary Clinton from out-Merkeling Angela by simultaneously invading Syria and inviting in the Syrians.

The pride that I felt for my vote then is dwarfed by the pride that I feel for my vote now. I believe that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.” The election, therefore, had to be compromised in 2020, an insurrection had to be invented as a pretext to repress political dissent, and you had to be the victim of unprecedented political persecution, all so that the people may at last see the truth and thus be set free.

If you had taken office in 2020, we would have been spared much evil in the short run, including the evil which is, indeed, the subject of this letter, but with less hope for good over the long run. As it is, you are now bestowed with a popular mandate of Jacksonian magnitude, which in the face of a federal judiciary that has come to regard itself as supreme to every other branch of government and a federal legislature that has become a feckless and fossilized farce, is all the more fortuitous. Thus, you may say to your enemies, “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.”

My name is James Rutledge Roesch. I am writing to you not only to offer my sincere congratulations, but also to ask of you a favor. I implore you, Mr. President, to restore the “Reconciliation Monument” in Arlington National Cemetery, an artistic and historic masterpiece by a world-famous Jewish-American sculptor, dismantled by Joe Biden’s Defense Department at the behest of the “Naming Commission.”

You opposed the creation of this “Naming Commission” at the outset. In the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, Elizabeth “high cheekbones” Warren introduced an amendment to rename any military assets named in honor of former Confederates. You vetoed the bill for this provision alone, which you explained was divisive and revisionist. “I have 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,” you said in your official statement.

Alas, your veto was overridden with the votes of many Red-State Congressmen, who as ever cower from doing any politicking unless it is in the service of one of their donors, foreign or domestic. Amazingly, a “slim majority” Americans still, in spite of a decade of agitprop, oppose the removal of Confederate flags and statues, but these ever-dwindling numbers have never availed us, as we are not a top-down and well-funded lobby, but a grassroots “silent majority.”[1]

What an irony it is that you, an archetypal New-York Yankee, have been nearly alone amongst American public figures in defending the monuments to Confederate heroes! Several of our most august historians of the Civil War, such as James McPherson,[2] Gary Gallagher,[3] David Blight,[4] and even the leftist Eric Foner,[5] none of whom are “neo-Confederates” by any means, gave some guarded doubts about this iconoclastic outburst. As the media’s new motto is apparently, “All the news that fits, print,” however, sober voices such as theirs were ignored in favor of know-nothing levelers. Unfortunately, for your integrity you suffered one of the most outrageous slanders and libels of your presidency—the “very fine people” hoax.

Sir, allow me to give you my thanks for what you said that day. I was not present at the Charlottesville protest myself, but I did oppose taking down the monuments of Lee and Jackson, not as a “white nationalist,” but as an American and Southern patriot. For being one of the only Republicans willing to defend people like me and the history that we are defending—our story as a people—you have my gratitude and allegiance. You, sir, are a very fine person yourself, and I give you my thanks you once more.

In the press conference whence the “very fine people” fake news came, you, in Socratic style, exposed the “slippery slope” behind the removal of Confederate monuments:

The President: “You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park to another name.”

The Press: “George Washington and Robert E. Lee are not the same!”

The President: “George Washington was a slave owner. Was George Washington a slave owner? So will George Washington now lose his status? Are we going to take down—excuse me—are we going to take down statues to George Washington? How about Thomas Jefferson? What do you think of Thomas Jefferson? You like him?”

The Press: “I do love Thomas Jefferson.”

The President: “Okay, good. Are we going to take down the statue? Because he was a major slave owner. Now, are we going to take down his statue? So you know what, it’s fine. You’re changing history. You’re changing culture. And you had people—and I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists—because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists. Okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly.”

At the time, your argument went unheeded, and inasmuch as it was answered, it was glibly ridiculed, as in Seth Myers’ and Jimmy Fallon’s SNL skit, where they pretended to be Washington and Jefferson and preposterously mocked Lee. Of course, since then you have been absolutely vindicated, as the destruction of American monuments has only escalated and accelerated, including those to Washington[6] and Jefferson[7] themselves. Who’s laughing now, funny guys?

The fate of the monuments in Charlottesville has been especially grim.[8] Charlottesville’s Lee monument was given to a Soros-backed “Black Lives Matter” and “Democratic Socialist” group, “Swords Into Plowshares,” and—in act of sheer malice—melted down, to be refashioned into woke art.[9] (I shudder to imagine what utter ugliness is in store!) Charlottesville’s Jackson monument was sold to “LAXART” and “MOCA,” along with other Confederate monuments, to be subjected to further vandalism in a woke art exhibition sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts. (Sic ‘em, “DOGE”!) Charlottesville less ceremoniously disposed of monuments to local heroes George Rogers Clark, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark. The latter two, “Lewis & Clark,” courageously explored the country where we now live comfortably, and without the former, what is now Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin would still be a part of Canada. Thomas Jefferson’s hometown has become a proverb and a byword, or in a word that you may appreciate, a S—HOLE.

What is this but a “cultural revolution,” a revolution against our very civilization? Indeed, the only other figure targeted as much as the Confederates has been Christopher Columbus, who symbolizes the colonization of this continent by European civilization and thus the conception of “America” itself. To celebrate, as Kamala Harris and Tim Walz each did, the removal of his statues and the renaming of his holiday, is to effectively admit that you wish that America did not exist.

Worse even than the destruction of these symbols, however, has been the concomitant destruction of what it is the statues of those men symbolized. It is impudent enough to destroy a great work of art that symbolizes a great historical figure because of the sins which belonged to his time. To destroy the virtues which belonged to those men and which they bequeathed to us, however, which I believe was what the destruction of these monuments symbolized on a spiritual level, is not merely impudent, but suicidal.

For example, it is no coincidence that the status in our political culture of the freedom of speech, heretofore absolutely essential in any definition of “our democracy” or “our values,” has collapsed at the same time as statues to the Founders, who enshrined the right of free speech as “the guardian of every other right,” are collapsing. It is also no coincidence that at the same time as our military is suffering chronic recruitment shortfalls, even as it slashes its standards for physical and mental fitness, the memory of heroic martial leaders from our history is being slashed.[10]

A Monument to Postbellum National Reconciliation

In the spring of 2009, the academic activists Edward Sebesta and James Loewen authored a letter to the recently inaugurated president, Barack Obama, exhorting him not to honor the presidential custom, dating back to Woodrow Wilson in 1914, of laying a wreath at the Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. As vituperative as the letter was, it did not actually call for the president to take any action against the monument itself, merely not to lend it his “prestige.” Mr. Obama, to his credit, chose to continue the tradition, acting like the post-racial unifier that Americans had hoped he would be. Joe Biden, conversely, not only discontinued this tradition, but also had the monument destroyed altogether.

It is inconceivable to imagine Mr. Obama doing anything of the kind at the time. The difference is not that Mr. Biden is to the left of Mr. Obama. On the contrary, before he lost his mind Mr. Biden was known as a relatively right-wing Democrat prone to politically incorrect “gaffes,” hence why the “articulate, bright, clean, nice-looking” Mr. Obama chose him as Vice President, to allay those working-class whites clinging “to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.” The difference is explained by the media phenomenon known as “The Great Awokening,” which began in Mr. Obama’s second term, and shifted Democrats far, far to the left.[11]

Although the Naming Commission has sedulously labored to label the Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery with “The Myth of the Lost Cause,” the idea did not even come from the South, but from the North. To be specific, it was the idea of the twenty-fifth president, William McKinley. He is an underrated president whom I have heard you speak about with admiration—“the architect of the American century”—and I agree!

As you make the GOP the party of McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft again, I urge you to remember that to these great men, graciously acceding to a Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery represented the culmination of some of Abraham Lincoln’s last, best words:

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.

My apologies in advance for the extended quotations to come, but given all of the ahistorical calumny to which the Reconciliation Monument and the “Myth of the Lost Cause” have been subjected of late, there is simply no substitute for going directly to the sources.

National reconciliation had begun before McKinley’s presidency, in 1885 under the New Yorker Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat elected president since the Civil War. He invited Southerners into his Cabinet, including former Confederates as Attorney General and Secretary of the Interior. (The latter of whom, Lucius Q.C. Lamar, he later nominated for the Supreme Court.) He also proposed returning captured Confederate battle flags to their respective states, but when the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ fraternity and Republican political lobby, revolted, he rescinded the order.

Ambrose Bierce, a Union veteran and unsentimental satirist, wrote a poem about the controversy which ended with the following stanza:

Give back the foolish flags whose bearers fell,

     Too valiant to forsake them.

Is it presumptuous this counsel? Well,

     I helped to take them.

A little later, Theodore Roosevelt, another New Yorker, although a Republican, ordered the battle flags returned without such resistance from the Grand Army of the Republic.

Returning to McKinley, however, in an address before Georgia’s state legislature in 1898, the president, impressed with the spirit of national unity amidst the Spanish-American War, proposed that the U.S. government contribute to the maintenance of the graves of Confederate soldiers, as a gesture of goodwill:

Sectional lines no longer mar the map of the United States. Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we bear each other. Fraternity is the national anthem, sung by a chorus of forty-five States and Territories at home and beyond the seas. The Union is once more the common altar of our love and loyalty, our devotion and sacrifice. The old flag again waves over us in peace, with new glories which your sons and ours have this year added to its sacred folds…

What an army of silent sentinels we have, and with what loving care their graves are kept! Every soldier’s grave made during our unfortunate Civil War is a tribute to American valor. And while, when those graves were made, we differed widely about the future of this Government, those differences were long ago settled by the arbitrament of arms; and the time has now come, in the evolution of sentiment and feeling under the providence of God, when in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers. [Tremendous applause and long-continued cheering.]

The cordial feeling now existing between the North and the South prompts this gracious act, and if it needed further justification, it is found in the gallant loyalty to the Union and the flag so conspicuously shown in the year just past by the sons and grandsons of these heroic dead. [Thunderous applause.]

What a glorious future awaits us if unitedly, wisely, and bravely we face the new problems now pressing upon us, determined to solve them for right and humanity! [Prolonged applause and repeated cheers.]

Bear in mind that President McKinley was a Union soldier who fought at the battles of South Mountain and Antietam, the latter being single bloodiest battle of the war. Whatever enmity he must have once felt towards the Confederates, he was nonetheless “great-souled” enough, as the ancient Greeks said, to recognize the virtue in his onetime enemies and not to dehumanize his onetime enemies as evil simply because they had been enemies. In sum, “he who shall have borne the battle” was able to forgive his enemies, but we are unable to forgive his enemies.

Two years hence, in 1900, the Congress acted upon President McKinley’s proposal and passed legislation directing the Secretary of War to have Confederate soldiers then buried in the National Soldiers Home in Washington D.C. reburied in the Arlington National Cemetery. Ultimately, over 400 soldiers were moved thither.

In 1906, the Secretary of War, William Taft, an Ohio Republican now serving under President Theodore Roosevelt, who had succeeded McKinley after his assassination in office, gave the United Daughters of the Confederacy permission begin fund-raising for a funerary monument to the Confederate soldiers who had been reburied in Arlington National Cemetery.

Two years hence, in 1908, President Roosevelt, speaking with members of the Arlington Confederate Monument Association, “heartily indorsed the movement for the monument,” in the words of the New York Times:

I wish to express my deepest sympathy with and the most cordial approval of the purpose and importance of what you are going to do. The monument to the Confederate dead which you will raise will commemorate among many scores of thousands…my mother’s half-brother [James Dunwoody Bulloch] and my mother’s whole brother [Irvine Bulloch] went down in the [CSS] Alabama, having fired the last gun from her, but was picked up in the escape and lived for many years afterward.

Not far from the monument, which will to commemorate the Confederate dead, not far from the many monuments commemorating those who died in the Union army at Arlington, now stands the monument to the soldiers of my regiment who died at Santiago, and among those I should say there are about as many whose fathers wore the gray as whose fathers wore the blue.

The Spanish-American War, as President Roosevelt suggested, was a turning point in the progress of postbellum national reconciliation. Yet it was not simply an incidence of the cynical truth that “nothing unites people like a common enemy.” It was also that Northerners, in their quest to “achieve a just and lasting peace” abroad, were impressed by the valor and honor of the Southerners with whom they fought, which in turn inspired them to achieve a more just and lasting peace at home, as Lincoln had once enjoined them.

In 1910, four years after they received permission from the War Department, the UDC commissioned the world-famous artist from Richmond, Virginia, Moses Jacob Ezekiel, to construct their monument, which he would come to consider his crowning achievement.

Ezekiel was the American-born son of first-generation Sephardic Jewish immigrants. He was the first Jewish cadet at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington. There, he served as one of the corporals of guard for the casket of General Stonewall Jackson, who before the war had been a member of the faculty. At the Battle of New Market, where the VMI cadets were mustered to make a last stand, he survived the desperate charge across “The Field of Lost Shoes.” His friend, Thomas Garland Jefferson, a grand-nephew of the third president, was mortally wounded, and it was Ezekiel who recovered his body and read to him from the Bible as he lay dying.

After the war, Robert E. Lee, then the president of Washington College, also located in Lexington, advised Ezekiel to pursue his passion for the arts, whereupon he went abroad. Ezekiel’s first destination was Berlin, where he studied at the Royal Art Academy, and soon thereafter he was the first foreigner to win the Michel-Beer Prix de Rome for a bas relief titled “Israel.” Thence, he traveled to Rome, where he lived out his days in a studio in the Baths of Diocletian. As his career progressed, he was knighted by the king and heaped with other honors by European nobility.

When the UDC approached Ezekiel, he had been back in the States for the unveiling of his monuments to Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia, and Stonewall Jackson in Charleston, W. Va. He enthusiastically accepted their offer and promptly sketched the ladies his design.

Ezekiel’s host, the Virginian author Thomas Nelson Page, introduced him to William Taft, who had succeeded Roosevelt as president, an encounter which Ezekiel described in his memoirs:

The president said he was very glad that the commission had been given to me. He said also that I had done a very good piece of work, politically speaking, with my monument to the Southern soldiers recently unveiled on Johnson’s Island. He had heard that, on that occasion, veteran soldiers from the Northern army and the Southern army were fraternizing together there and had been photographed arm in arm with each other. He said, “You have contributed a great deal towards the peaceful solution of our affairs.”

In their time, then, Confederate monuments such as Ezekiel’s were considered “to the Southern soldiers,” not to slavery or states’ rights, and were celebrated for contributing “towards the peaceful solution of our affairs.”

As soon as Ezekiel returned to his studio in Rome he began work on the Reconciliation Monument, which would occupy him for the next four years of his life. It was one of the last works of his life and the work of which he was most proud.

Two years hence, in 1912, President Taft was invited to preside over the dedication ceremony of the Reconciliation Monument’s cornerstone, where he gave an address:

It fell to my official lot, with universal popular approval, to issue the order which made it possible to erect, in the National Cemetery at Arlington, the beautiful monument to the heroic dead at the South that you founded today. The event in itself speaks volumes as to the oblivion of sectionalism. It gives me not only the great pleasure and honor, but it gives me the greatest satisfaction as a lover of my country to be present, as President of the United States, and pronounce upon this occasion the benediction of all true Americans.

The unreserved language that President Taft used—“universal popular approval,” “heroic dead at the South,” “oblivion of sectionalism,” “greatest satisfaction,” “benediction of all true Americans”—echoes Lincoln’s own language of “malice toward none,” “charity for all,” and “firmness in the right.”

Two years hence, in 1914, the Reconciliation Monument’s bronze superstructure was installed, and Woodrow Wilson, the New-Jersey Democrat who had succeeded Taft as president, was invited to deliver the oration at its unveiling:

I am not going to detain you by trying to repeat any of the eloquent thoughts which have moved us this afternoon, for I rejoice in the simplicity of the task which is assigned to me. My privilege is this, ladies and gentlemen: To declare this chapter in the history of the United States closed and ended, and I bid you turn with me with your faces to the future , quickened by memories of the past, knowing, as we have shed our blood upon opposite sides, we now face and admire one another…

The generosity of our judgments did not begin today. The generosity of our judgment was made up soon after this great struggle was over. Men came and sat together again in the Congress and united in all the efforts of peace and of government, and our solemn duty is to see that each one of us is in his own consciousness and in his own conduct a replica of this great reunited people. It is our duty and our privilege to be like the country we represent and, speaking no word of malice, no word of criticism even, stand shoulder to shoulder to lift the burdens of mankind in the future and show the paths of freedom to all the world.

President Wilson’s first-person voice—“we,” “our,” and so on—evinces the sincerity of his desire to, as Lincoln put it, “bind up the nation’s wounds.”

Three years hence, in 1917, Ezekiel died in Rome. “The death of Moses Ezekiel, the distinguished and greatly beloved American sculptor, who lived in Rome for more than forty years, caused universal regret here,” reported the New York Times. Although he had lived abroad most of his life, he wished to return to Virginia to be buried, and in 1921 his body was reinterred at the site of his masterpiece in Arlington National Cemetery.

At Ezekiel’s reburial, a letter from the president, Warren G. Harding, another Ohio Republican, was read:

Ezekiel will be remembered as one who knew how to translate the glories of his own time and people into that language of art which is common to all peoples and all times. He served his state in the conflict that threatened to divide and that at last served to unify our country. He accepted the verdict of the Civil War’s arbitrament with all that fine generosity that has been characteristic of the North and the South; and the splendid product of his art that here testifies to our nation’s reunion will stand from this day forth as guardian over his ashes.

Ezekiel, the president’s letter concluded, was “a great Virginian, a great artist, a great American, and a great citizen of world fame.”

Thus, in act of authentic “American Exceptionalism,” the rule of vae victis was overturned, a defeated enemy was treated as an equal, and a civil war became a unifying myth. What made national reconciliation possible, an achievement arguably as great of a moral victory as the war was a military victory? Why have we become pettier and nastier with the passage of time?

Whither Reconciliation?

Three changes explain what has happened:[12] First, our core “Anglo-Protestant” identity has dissolved; second, the meaning of “progressive” has transformed; and third, our historical consciousness has regressed.

First, despite the personal and political differences between these presidents, they were united by a cultural and civic identity which transcended party and section.

There was conflict between them, and not just between the three Republicans and the one Democrat. For example, Roosevelt, after leaving office, determined that his successors, Taft and Wilson, were unworthy, and so publicly campaigned against them, even forming a third party, the “Progressive” or “Bull Moose Party,” when he was unable to win the Republican nomination.

Such unity was the outcome of centuries of, in the words of John Jay in The Federalist, “a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manner and customs.” In his famous valediction, George Washington proclaimed, “With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles.” Both of these Founding Fathers extolled the American Revolution as a unifying national experience.

Of course, by the 1890s Americans were no longer Anglo-Protestants united by a common ancestry and historical memory. At that time, America was in the midst of the largest and longest immigration wave in its history, exceeded only by that of the present. These immigrants were under public and private pressure to “assimilate,” however, meaning conform to Anglo-Protestant culture and civics. “The melting pot” became the metaphor for this process, a term taken from the name of a play hailed by Teddy Roosevelt: “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!” “Ethnics” who failed to assimilate were suspected of retaining a foreign allegiance and disparaged as “hyphenated Americans.”

The contrast between the waves of the pre-1924 and post-1965 immigrants is considerable.

Firstly, the former originated almost exclusively from Europe, whereas the latter originates from everywhere but Europe.

Secondly, despite this comparatively more alien origin, assimilation is no longer the norm, and is treated as an embarrassing nativistic and xenophobic episode. Instead, what is called “cultural pluralism” is officially encouraged, where immigrants need only demonstrate a minimal proficiency in American culture and civics to become citizens, but can otherwise identify as hyphenated Americans, if Americans at all. The Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of the country is also denied to have ever existed or is derided as the root of all evil, thereby discouraging assimilation.

Thirdly, the pre-1924 wave was paused in order to assimilate the masses of immigrants, whereas our post-1965 immigration wave remains, “unrelenting, non-stop,” as Joe Biden put it in 2015.[13] “It’s not going to stop. Nor should we want it to stop.”

The dissolution of the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of our country need not have caused the dissolution of the Anglo-Protestant cultural and civic core, so long as it remained the creed of our public and private institutions. Unfortunately, that creed was supplanted by Cultural Marxism and its “long march through the institutions.” Ironically, that creed undermined itself through the gnostic rhetoric of Abraham Lincoln, “a rhetoric for continuing revolution” which lulled liberals and conservatives alike. Just as this was not what Lincoln had intended, so too was Lincoln’s reinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence not what Jefferson had intended. In any event, our core has hollowed out, and in consequence, our monuments are falling down.

Second, the meaning of “progressive” has been transformed.

The “Progressive Era” occurred from the 1890s to the 1920s. (Grover Cleveland, who has been called “the last Jeffersonian president,” was not a progressive.) Progressivism was, in general, a movement to solve the problems caused by unregulated industrialization, urbanization, and immigration, such as economic inequality, the destruction of the environment, unhygienic cities, unsafe workplaces, vice, corruption, dysgenics, “hyphenism,” and more. Progressives modernized the public and private sectors to be more professional, or as we might say today, “technocratic.” The zeitgeist was one of reformism and activism which birthed four constitutional amendments: The income tax, popular election of U.S. Senators, “Prohibition,” and women’s suffrage. A recent documentary by Ken Burns called the national parks, a legacy of the Progressive Era, “America’s Best Idea.” President McKinley’s line in his speech to Georgia’s state legislature about solving problems “for right and humanity,” and President Wilson’s line at the unveiling of the Reconciliation Monument about lifting the burdens of mankind and showing the paths of freedom to the world, were hallmarks of progressivism. To these presidents, national reconciliation was progressive, striving on “to finish the work we are in,” as Lincoln had encouraged.

“Progressivism” has now been transformed into “identity politics,” namely those of race and sex, the working class having proved unreliably reactionary. This ersatz-progressivism has demonstrated that “progress” truly is a value-neutral term.

Our progressives have more in common with the assassin of President McKinley and attempted assassin of President Roosevelt, ideology and mental illness alike, than they do with their victims. Indeed, McKinley had a statue torn down by our progressives for precisely what made him great in the Progressive Era.[14] Roosevelt, too, also had a statue torn down by our progressives, a statue which was progressive in its time, but which is now “problematic” to our progressives.[15]

Unsurprisingly, our progressives now condemn the original progressives for assenting to “Jim Crow” in the South. It was, at that time, coinciding with the semi-centennial anniversary of the Civil War, when most of the Union and Confederate monuments were being raised, including that in Arlington. From this coincidence, modern progressives such as the Southern Poverty Law Center have inferred that these monuments were not, like their Union counterparts, for “cause and comrades,” as they professed to be, but concealed white-supremacist ulterior motives. Although a pseudo-historical argument which is easily refuted with reference to the primary sources, it has spread virally amongst the progressives in the media and academia, as it suits their prejudice against anything traditionally American and especially Southern.[16]

Third, our understanding of the Civil War, thanks to our impulsive and ignorant reductivism and revisionism, has, unnaturally, regressed as we move further away from it in time.

Woodrow Wilson himself, while still a professor at Princeton University, authored a textbook on American history, Division and Reunion, which covered the period 1829 to 1889. “The South was right in law and constitution, but wrong in history,” he argued of the Civil War, whereas the North “was wrong in law and constitution but right in history.”

What Wilson meant was that although it was true that the “legal theory” of states’ rights that justified secession “was one which would hardly have been questioned in the early years of the government,” it was no less true that progressive historical forces of industrialization, westward expansion, and mass-immigration militated for the unification of the government. “The South had not changed her ideas from the first, because she had not changed her condition,” he explained. “She had not experienced, except in a very slight degree,” any of the forces that were changing the rest of the Union, “for they had been shut out from her life by slavery.” The South seceded from the Union not because sectional parties had been formed; sectional parties were formed because the unequal effect of these forces had sectionalized the Union. “There had been nothing active on the part of the South in this process,” he remarked. “She had stood still while the rest of the country had undergone profound changes; and, standing still, she retained the old principles which had once been universal.” Ultimately, “both she and her principles, it turned out, had been caught at last in the great national drift, and were to be overwhelmed.” The South, by staying more or less unchanged from the eighteenth century, had thereby “fallen out of sympathy” with the rapidly changing American nation.

As an example of how our historical understanding has regressed, consider Wilson’s tone. “It was of course a period of misunderstanding and of passion; and I cannot claim to have judged rightly in all cases between parties,” he confessed in the preface. “I can claim, however, impartiality of judgment; for impartiality is a matter of the heart, and I know with what disposition I have written.” Contrast that with the tone of what passes for history today—such as the Naming Commission’s report and recommendations—which is “partial” to say the least.

A modern version of Wilson’s interpretation comes from another Princeton professor, James M. McPherson. “The North hurtled forward eagerly toward a future of industrial capitalism that many Southerners found distasteful if not frightening; the South remained proudly and even defiantly rooted in the past before 1861,” he writes. “The South’s concept of republicanism had not changed in three-quarters of a century; the North’s had,” he continues. “With complete sincerity the South fought to preserve its version of the republic of the Founding Fathers.” As a consequence of the war, McPherson concludes, “The old federal republic in which the national government had rarely touched the average citizen except through the post-office gave way to a more centralized polity that taxed the people directly and created an internal revenue bureau to collect these taxes, drafted men into the army, expanded the jurisdiction of the federal courts, created a national currency and a national banking system, and established the first national agency for social welfare—the Freedmen’s Bureau.”

Mr. McPherson notes how subtle changes in language symbolized the scale of the revolutionary changes in government. The Founders, as did the Confederates, referred to “United States” in the plural, as “these United States are,” but after the war, the United States became singular, as “the United States is.” The Founders had referred to liberty as the “freedom from” the government infringing upon one’s rights, hence why they decentralized the powers of the government. (So, too, did the Confederates, and when they framed their new constitution, they intensified and clarified the language decentralizing government power.) After the war, however, liberty became redefined as the “freedom to” exercise one’s rights, which required the expansion of government power, in particular that of the federal over the states.

In summary, wrote Mr. McPherson, “Union victory in the war destroyed the southern vision of America and ensured that the northern vision would become the American vision.” Wilson understood that the Confederates, although their cause had been lost, were no less American, and were fighting for what they considered to be their rights as Americans, or as he put it what seemed to them to be “rights of self-government as plain and as sacred any that lay at the heart of the history of English liberty.” The war was a tragic conflict between two visions of America, one rooted in an agrarian and aristocratic past, another reaching for an industrialist and egalitarian future. “Even after the southern States had acted upon the old-time theory and seceded, the North for a moment was not sure that they had acted beyond their right,” noted Wilson. “It required the terrible exercise of prolonged war to impart to the national idea diffused vitality and authentic power.” Wilson, as well as McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft, admired the Confederates for the “sheer spirit and devotion” with which they struggled, “in spite of constantly diminishing resources and constantly waning hope.” These progressive presidents looked upon their fellow countrymen not with contempt, but with pity, for they had “exhausted” and “annihilated” themselves “all for a belated principle of government, an outgrown economy, an impossible purpose.”

Make Arlington Great Again!

“Swords Into Plowshares” is the name of the Soros-backed project which melted down Charlottesville’s Lee monument. It is not original; woke linguistics are too laden with leaden jargon for something so poetic. It is a phrase from the book of Isaiah in the Bible, “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruninghooks,” which was overturning an older prophecy from the book of Joel, “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears.” As a matter of fact, Moses Ezekiel not only inscribed this verse upon the Reconciliation Monument, but also gave it form: Atop the monument, a statue of a woman, meant to symbolize the “New South,” was pressing a pruning hook against the stock of a plow with one hand, whilst beckoning to the buried soldiers below. Beneath her was inscribed the verse. What that verse signified was how Southerners, Jews and Gentiles alike, trusting in Providence and perhaps seeing themselves in the stories of the Hebrew captivity, accepted defeat, returned to peacetime, and embraced their place in the new nation. Where “swords into plowshares” then meant clemency and unity, it has now been irreverently redefined to mean humiliation and dissension. They have, perversely, taken the swords and spears which were beaten into plowshares before and beaten them back into swords and spears.

Mr. President, as you undertake the herculean labor of reconciling these United States, I implore you to consider having the Reconciliation Monument reassembled and restored to its rightful place in Arlington National Cemetery. It would be a symbolic act of reconciliation, not only for our past, but also for our present. Just as our ancestors, after the Civil War was over, reunited as Americans, irrespective of whether they wore the blue or the gray, so too we can reunite with one another, irrespective of whether we voted red or blue.

Originally published at Reckonin.com.

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[1] “A Majority of Americans Want to Preserve Confederate History.” The Brion McClanahan Show. Jul. 4, 2024. https://tinyurl.com/yc6666b3

[2] “As a historian, I don’t like the idea of banning statues. I think the better way would be to leave most of these memorials where they are with some kind of explanation of who put them up, and when, why, and what they stand for.”—James M. McPherson, Princeton Alumni Weekly, Nov. 2017

[3] “I don’t believe in destroying parts of our memorial landscape. I believe in interpreting them…I just think it’s better to put them in context, leave them there, and give us the ability, in looking at a memorial in context, to really trace different themes and movements and times in American history.”—Gary Gallagher, WPVC, Apr. 2016

[4] “I am for removal of some Confederate monuments. The time has come. Not all of them, not every single one of them, certainly not in cemeteries. I just want the process to be historical, deliberative, and based on research.”

—David Blight, CBS News, Sept. 2017

[5] “I’m not one of those who says, ‘Tear down every single statue of every Confederate,’ but if you step back and look at the public presentation of history, particularly in the South, where are the black people of the South?…My view is, as well as taking down some statues, I think we need to put up others.”—Eric Foner, RT, Mar. 2018

[6] Campanile, Carl. “NYC Council advances bid that could yank monuments honoring Washington, Jefferson, Columbus.” The New York Post. Sep. 18, 2023. https://tinyurl.com/mpcda98v

[7] Marsh, Julia. “Thomas Jefferson statue removed from City Hall after 187 years.” The New York Post. Nov. 22, 2021. https://tinyurl.com/5da2zmcc

[8] Leigh, Catesby. “Virginia’s Monuments War.” City Journal. Nov. 17, 2022. https://tinyurl.com/3xx9ts69

[9] Leigh, Catesby. “A Monumental Outrage.” City Journal. Jan. 21, 2022. https://tinyurl.com/37fzjaaf

[10] “Biden’s war on Southern war memorials has backfired: Have Southern service members had enough?” Revolver News. September 29, 2022. https://tinyurl.com/37ntbcmz

[11] Sailer, Steve. “The Great Awokening Conspiracy Theory.” Taki’s Magazine. June 12, 2019. https://tinyurl.com/5n84fajp

[12] Livingston, Donald. “The Disintegration of Lincolnian America.” Abbeville Institute 2018 Scholars Conference. https://tinyurl.com/nhe5cfhz

[13] User clip. “Joe Biden unrelenting stream of immigration.” C-Span. February 17, 2015. https://tinyurl.com/2kc6mzsb

[14] Kaleem, Jaweed. “First it was Confederate monuments. Now statues offensive to Native Americans are poised to topple across the U.S.” Los Angeles Times. April 1, 2018. https://tinyurl.com/2mx5fakf

[15] O’Neill, Natalie. “Theodore Roosevelt statue removed from American Museum of Natural History.” New York Post. Jan. 19, 2022. https://tinyurl.com/j7fp9ttx

[16] Leigh, Philip. “Don’t Remove Confederate Statues.” The Abbeville Institute 2019 Summer School. https://tinyurl.com/yuvw96t6

James Rutledge Roesch

James Rutledge Roesch is a businessman and an amateur writer. He lives in Florida with his wife, daughter, and dog.

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