Memorial Day: Lessons from the Civil War

Memorial Day traces its origins to 1866 when a knot of women visited a cemetery to lay flowers on the graves of Confederate soldiers.  These were the mothers, widows and sisters of fallen heroes.  The graves in a patch of Columbus, Mississippi, were a stark reminder of the horrific Civil War.

As the women went about decorating the cemetery, they glimpsed the nearby barren graves of Union soldiers.  These courageous women, whose loved ones may have been killed by those union soldiers, put aside their feelings of grief and began spreading flowers on their graves.

This incident is recorded as one of the first local observances of what officially became known as Decoration Day in 1868, a time for honoring the nation's war dead.  Nearly a century later Decoration Day morphed into America's Memorial Day, established by Congress in 1971.

There is a lesson we can learn those Mississippi women.  Soldiers are remembered and honored for their service and sacrifice.  But the names of mothers, widows and girlfriends are forever lost.  Yet they are heroes too whose sufferings endured beyond the grave. They too deserve a day of respect.   

There are other lessons taught by the Civil War, the bloodiest conflict in American history.  Roughly two percent of the population, an estimated 620,000 men, lost their lives.  The number of Civil War causalities exceeds the combined totals of Americans killed in both world wars and Vietnam.

Historical sources today believe the causalities could have been much higher.  Some put the number at 750,000.  One reason for the estimate is there are no reliable resources to document the number of civilians who died in the conflict.  Lost of property was also catastrophic in the South.

The death and destruction were on a scale the country had never experienced.  The reunited states were ill prepared for the aftermath of the largest human calamity in American history.  There were no national cemeteries, no burial details and no one to deliver the somber news to survivors.

The massive toll forced Americans to deal with the cruel realities of a war fought on its homeland. It was a lesson that made the country's leaders realize that protecting America from invasion from foreign armies should be the top security priority.  That military precedent survives even today.

Today's political correctness crowd has rewritten history of the Civil War citing the moral issue of slavery as the major cause of the conflict.  There is no argument that the preservation of slavery became an economic and political issue for southern states dependent on slave labor for agriculture.

When President Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860 the slave states feared the lost of influence in Washington.  By 1861, eleven of the 34 states had seceded from the union, a political decision that ignited passions on both sides and hastened the bloody conflict that ensued.

Mr. Lincoln famously wrote: "If I could save the union without freeing a slave, I would do it." His sole goal was to keep America one nation.  The country was born of rebellion against its English masters but leaders understood another schism would forever alter the American destiny.

Imagine an Un-United States today.  It may resemble a conflagration such as the Middle East.  Or the patchwork quilted former Soviet Union where grudges and ethnic violence were inflamed after the dismemberment of the Communist state.  America would be a diminished nation.

Unity at all costs, even the lives of hundreds of thousands of young men, was the price Mr. Lincoln was willing to pay.  That should be remembered in these times when some boorish voices, such as those in California, call for the Golden State to resign from the United States in protest of an election.

There have been the similar grumblings in other states, including in Texas when President Obama occupied the White House.  Even if said in jest, cooler heads should demand that the notion of a state seceding from the union is never an acceptable remedy in these United States of America.

That day in a Mississippi cemetery more than 150 years ago is a warning that an intra-country war is indeed hell.  It ripped apart a nation, left hundreds of thousands of grieving people and decimated a generation.  Time heals wounds but it can never repair the needless deaths of fellow Americans.

That's why it is fitting that on this Memorial Day, the nation salute the sacrifice of the 110,100 Union soldiers who were killed on the battlefield fighting to preserve the American ideal of One Nation Under God. 

Fighting the Civil War All Over Again

Some 152 years after America's bloody Civil War ended, tense battles have erupted over Confederate monuments.  Last week's violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, was just the latest skirmish in a noisy campaign to rid America of any remaining symbols of the nation's defining conflict.

A budding list of cities, including Baltimore, New Orleans, Memphis, Lexington and Jacksonville, have declared war on statues of Confederate generals, soldiers and statesmen. Proponents claim the monuments, most prominent in the South, are symbols of lingering racism.

Historical groups and preservation societies have opposed the rush to rip down Civil War memorials. They defend the statues and monuments as an important part of the nation's history, particularly in the South. Members contend the historic markers honor those who fought and died in the war.

Now white supremacy, Klu Klux Klan and Neo-Nazi thugs have usurped the issue to advance their creed of racial hatred and anti-Semitism. The pandering media has turned this into a struggle between Neanderthal whites and oppressed African-Americans, who own the moral high ground.

Instead of treating the issue on its merits, the media has zeroed in on the tiny minority of repugnant bigots associated with fringe groups, giving them a bigger forum than they deserve to spew their malice. Big media has used the issue to paint all whites with the same broad racist brush.

Yet even the liberal Southern Poverty Law Center estimates there are only 5,000-8,000 members of KKK groups.  Neo-Nazi hate-mongers have even less members. But neither one of these groups has cornered the market on extremism.

The opposition has coalesced around an anti-fascist group known as ANtifa, a radical pan-leftist organization whose followers are "predominantly communists, socialists and anarchists." That description was lifted from the pages of The Washington Post, not some conservative website.

What began is an honest debate about Civil War symbols, has been corrupted into a shouting match between a few fanatics on both sides who want to inflame unrest.  Dishonest media and race-baiting activists have conspired to stoke the fires of rebellion to create political upheaval.

Since 2015, city leaders often without public consent have purged at least 60 symbols of the Confederacy.  However, more than 700 monuments remain in 31 states and 109 schools bear the names of Confederate figures.  Those numbers were compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

The capricious removal of statues has emboldened radicals to take matters into their own hands. An angry mob in North Carolina lassoed a rope around a 15-foot bronze statue of a Confederate soldier and toppled it to the ground.  Frenzied vandals repeatedly stomped the downed monument.

This has all the earmarks of becoming an escalating mob hysteria with deadly consequences. Free speech has been sacrificed by those who want to silence dissent over the removals. Those against whitewashing history are branded racists. Where are the messengers of reconciliation? 

Among the voices of sanity is former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, an African-American who grew up with racism and rose to be one of the nation's most eloquent and informed speakers on the topic.  She recently addressed the hostility over Confederate symbols. 

"I'm a firm believer in keeping your history before you," she told an interviewer on a national network. "And so, I don't actually want to rename things that were named for slave owners.  I want us to have to look at the names and recognize what they did and be able to tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of history."

Ridding the country of its past is not a prescription for alleviating racism.  And once the country goes down that path, where will it end? Nine of America's first twelve presidents were slave owners. Should their statues be torn down and defiled?  Should their names be scrubbed from schools?

There are more than 200 Confederate soldiers buried in Arlington National Cemetery.  Should their graves be emptied?  The cemetery is located on 624 acres that once belonged to the estate of the family of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.  Should the cemetery be relocated?

There are lessons to be learned from other countries.  After World War II, Germany wanted to cleanse itself of Hitler's death camps.  The facilities were embarrassing reminders Germans wanted to forget. But sensible people prevailed and the camp's ruins today serve as a warning to future generations.

Removing statues, school names, monuments and the like will never bleach the scars of slavery or the Civil War.  The story of America has been a nation that acknowledges its faults, mends its flaws and moves forward to heal divisions. No country advances by rewriting its past.   

This is the country that survived a dreadful Civil War and emerged united.  That grim conflict would have been fought in vain if Americans once again are so divided that violence and lawlessness become the solution.  Cooler heads on all sides should be able find a peaceful resolution.