List of the 518 Confederate Burials in Arlington National Cemetery–Concentric circles of graves extend out from the magnificent Confederate Monument–If any of these folks are your ancestors, please contact us IMMEDIATELY

List of the 518 Confederate Burials
in Arlington National Cemetery
Concentric circles of graves extend out
from the magnificent Confederate Monument
If any of these folks are your ancestors,
please contact us IMMEDIATELY
List includes all the burials in ANC Section 16,
mostly men, some women
Most have their home state listed; some also have unit
name, number, letter or whether cavalry, infantry
or artillery
Arlington National Cemetery, 109 year old Confederate Memorial to the Reconciliation and Reunification of our great nation after our bloodiest war. It was the brainchild of Union soldier and president, William McKinley, who said "every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor." The sculptor, internationally renowned Jewish artist Moses Jacob Ezekiel, was a VMI Confederate soldier. Art critic Michael Robert Patterson states that "no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art." In a barbaric crime against art and history, the naming commission and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin want the monument demolished.
Arlington National Cemetery, 109 year old Confederate Memorial to the Reconciliation and Reunification of our great nation after our bloodiest war. It was the brainchild of Union soldier and president, William McKinley, who said "every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor." The sculptor, internationally renowned Jewish artist Moses Jacob Ezekiel, was a VMI Confederate soldier. Art critic Michael Robert Patterson states that "no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art." In a barbaric crime against art and history, the naming commission and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin want the monument demolished.
Aerial view of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery with over 500 graves of Confederate military personnel and some family in concentric circles around the monument. Sculptor Moses Ezekiel is buried with two other Confederate soldiers and one Confederate sailor around the base. The monument is literally their headstone but the naming commission and Secretary Austin want the monument destroyed. Respect for Southern dead is not something they care about despite 44% of today's United States military being recruited in the South.
Aerial view of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery with over 500 graves of Confederate military personnel and some family in concentric circles around the monument. Sculptor Moses Ezekiel is buried with two other Confederate soldiers and one Confederate sailor around the base. The monument is literally their headstone but the naming commission and Secretary Austin want the monument destroyed. Respect for Southern dead is not something they care about despite 44% of today's United States military being recruited in the South.
View from the ground at Arlington National Cemetery of the beautiful Confederate Memorial to the reconciliation of North and South. The Woke naming commission and Secretary Austin want it demolished in the cheapest way possible. Photo courtesy Derrick Johnson.
View from the ground at Arlington National Cemetery of the beautiful Confederate Memorial to the reconciliation of North and South. The Woke naming commission and Secretary Austin want it demolished in the cheapest way possible. Photo courtesy Derrick Johnson.

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - The names, below, are a few of the 375,000 Confederate soldiers about whom Union soldier and president of the United States, William McKinley, said:

. . . every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor . . . And the time has now come . . . when in the spirit of fraternity we should share in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers . . . The cordial feeling now happily existing between the North and 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 this year just passed by the sons and grandsons of those heroic dead.

It was President McKinley's idea to construct the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery because the brave always honor the brave.

But the political naming commission and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin have slated the 109 year old Confederate Memorial for demolition.

It appears Austin and company are breaking federal rules and regulations in their haste to destroy the monument before serious public disgust sets in. Every veteran in America should be outraged because this is exactly what could happen to their memory in the future by politicians just as characterless as Elizabeth Warren. Remember what liberals did to our Vietnam veterans after the Vietnam War. Our military should always be above filthy politics.

You don't have to love the South or the Confederacy to know that destroying a 109 year old monument in our nation's most sacred burial ground as symbolic as the Confederate Memorial, after a war in which 750,000 died and over a million were maimed, is WRONG, WRONG, WRONG and is the most dishonorable thing fake Indian Elizabeth Warren has ever done.

Perhaps a hundred million Americans alive today are descended from Confederate soldiers and the women and families who supported the South's great war for independence.

Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America noted that race relations were better in the South than anywhere in the country despite slavery. He said they were worst in New England.

During the antebellum era, five Northern states had laws forbidding blacks from even visiting for more than a few days much less living there including Lincoln's Illinois.

New England had brought all the slaves here chained to decks in the bowels of their stinking hot slave ships where there was no ventilation, suffering for months in urine, feces, vomit and death so Elizabeth Warren's New Englanders could make money.

Historian Bernard Bailyn stated that New England's economic success was unquestionably due to the slave trade.

W. E. B. Du Bois in his famous book The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870, states that Boston and New York were still the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States and 54 years after the slave trade was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution.

Perhaps Elizabeth Warren and the naming commission should begin demolishing New England monuments and changing the name of Faneuil Hall in Boston because Peter Faneuil traded in black flesh, or Brown University because its founder was a slave trader who said there was no more crime in carrying off a cargo of slaves than a cargo of jackasses.

Six slave states fought for the Union the entire war and it took the 13th Amendment in December, 1865, to fully end slavery in the Union slave states.

Southerners would have ended slavery in a much better way than a war that killed 750,000 men and maimed over a million. We lost 400,000 in World War II. It was in the bi-racial South's best interest to end slavery with goodwill and opportunity for all.

Maybe the better question is why didn't the federal government suggest buying freedom for all the slaves in the South out of the federal treasury if they were so worried about slavery? Because Yankees were not worried enough to spend their hard-earned sweatshop money to free the slaves in the South who would then go North and be job competition. Besides, the six slave states that fought for the North would have seceded immediately over federal overreach and fought for the South just as Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Arkansas did. Those four Southern states at first rejected secession and only seceded when Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South.

Also, and importantly, the Northern economy would have collapsed because it was based mostly on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton around the world. The North needed the South but the South did not need the North.

Congress can rectify its error and put an end to Elizabeth Warren's crime against art and history by defunding ALL of the recommendations of the Woke naming commission, which will cost perhaps a hundred million dollars before its all over. We are in a huge budget deficit and don't have a hundred million dollars laying around to throw away on changing things that have a glorious record of victory such as Fort Benning and Fort Bragg and all the others. It is idiotic to be spending money changing street names on military bases and removing monuments and changing uniform patches and such.

We are also in a military recruiting crisis and it is about as stupid as you can get to insult the South, from where 44% of the United States military is recruited.

Here is a quote from last week's blog article entitled "WE WILL SAVE the Magnificent Arlington Confederate Memorial--Woke Ignorance DIES at Arlington":

The naming commission is so inept it does not even mention the reconciliation theme and symbolism of the Confederate Memorial though Arlington National Cemetery itself, does. ANC's own description in its National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for the Historic District received by the National Park Service February 24, 2014 states over and over that the Confederate Memorial symbolizes the reconciliation and reunification of our great country after our country's bloodiest war.1

How could the naming commission ignore that?

The Confederate Memorial was conceived by Union soldier and President William McKinley after enthusiastic Southern participation in the Spanish-American War. President William Howard Taft spoke at the UDC ceremony the evening the cornerstone was laid giving an inspiring well-received speech. President Woodrow Wilson spoke at the dedication June 4, 1914 as did Union and Confederate Veterans. Remember, these were the days of the 50th and 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and the famous handshakes across the wall by the old Union and Confederate gentlemen.

How could the naming commission not care about all that?

The Confederate Memorial is about reconciliation therefore it is not in the Woke naming commission's remit. The Confederate Memorial does not commemorate the Confederacy. It commemorates the reunification of the United States of America after a bloody war. See my white paper "The Reconciliation of North and South After the War Between the States as Symbolized by the Confederate Memorial 'New South' in Arlington National Cemetery" on Defend Arlington's website, 28 pages on the theme of reconciliation.

The 109 year old Confederate Memorial was created in the city of Rome, Italy by internationally acclaimed Jewish sculptor Moses Ezekiel but the naming commission wants to tear it apart in the cheapest way possible and leave a mangled shaft sticking up in Arlington National Cemetery.

The white paper by Ernest E. Blevins, who is the foremost national authority on Union and Confederate monuments, is entitled: "Headstone of the Confederate States: Moses Ezekiel's Arlington Confederate Monument, Symbolism, Meaning, National Register Eligibility, and Potential Adverse Effects to Alternations or Removal." It is 49 pages, detailed, documented and irrefutable.

Blevins discusses the "monument symbology" that "depicts the South's mourning and the war's losses" and he includes a comment from Michael Robert Patterson:

"But no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art.2"

That comment again points out the crime against history and art committed by the Woke naming commission in its desire to destroy the monument as cheaply as possible and leave a mangled shaft in its place in Arlington National Cemetery surrounded by 500 graves of Southern soldiers in concentric circles.

If you are descended from any of the Confederate heroes buried in Arlington National Cemetery, please contact us.

There is more information in the burial database but for conciseness, here are the names, ranks, death dates and states for most of the burials. I will soon have the full database available to download as a .cvs or .xlsx or .html file.

There are several valuable links after the burial list.

PLEASE CONTRIBUTE to our Arlington National Cemetery Memorial Litigation Defense Fund so we can make sure that Woke ignorance DIES at Arlington National Cemetery.]

LAST NAMEFIRST NAMERankDEATH DATEUNIT
ABNEYJOHNGA
AKERSALBERT JCAPT01/14/1914TENN
AMISSFRANCES09/27/1949VA
AMISS GEORGE W08/14/1913VA
AMOSW D09/02/1865GA
ANDERSONE W2/9/1915
ANDERSON JOHNSGT05/29/1864GA
ANGELO FRANCIS M10/15/1928VA
ANGELOSARAH V05/27/1937VA
ARMSWORTHYJOHN W01/15/1864NC
ASHBY JOHN J11/03/1864CIVILIAN
ASHTONCHARLES H03/26/1935VA
ASHTONIDA B12/19/1940VA
AUTRYFRANCIS M07/17/1864GA
AYLOR HENRY L11/4/1922VA
AYRESWILLIAM S09/15/1932VA
BAILEYJOSEPH B06/13/1926MD
BAILEYRICE W2D LIEUT8/4/1915VA
BAILEYSUSAN A2D LIEUTVA
BALLOWE J D06/20/1865
BARBEEROBERT SSGT4/1/1918VA
BARBER H A05/25/1862SC
BARHAMBENJAMIN F11/18/1919VA
BARKLEY JOHN W04/16/1865ALA
BARNESJACOB02/11/1864NC
BARNETT HARVEY05/26/1864MISS
BASSMARCELLUS C12/7/1918VA
BATESNATHANIEL S09/10/1864GA
BAYLESSA JSGT04/29/1865TENN
BEACHMANROBERT09/17/1867
BEAL WILLIAM M01/19/1864NC
BEALLCHATTIE A10/7/1927MISS
BEALL FRED01/30/1929MISS
BEAVERTOBIAS03/27/1864NC
BECK JAMES05/27/1862ARTY
BEDINGFIELDJOHN YCAPT04/05/1864GA
BENNETTJAMES ASGT05/20/1864GA
BERNARD W P07/23/1864GA
BERRYD W11/11/1863NC
BETHUNEANDREW J10/22/1863NC
BETHUNENARCISSA GSGT6/12/1929GA
BIBBROBERT04/07/1864VA
BOOTH JAMES11/03/1863MISS
BORWN or BROWNJ A2 LIUET01/27/192922 VA INF
BOSTIANA ACORP11/14/1863NC
BOUNDSJ D04/20/1864NC
BOYCES JSGT11/11/1863NC
BOYLEPATRICK09/14/1864GA
BRANDWARREN HGA
BROWER LEON08/24/1864ALA
BROWNBENJAMINCAPT05/30/1920VA
BROWNFRANCES E2/5/1917VA
BROWN GEORGE WCAPT03/22/1927VA
BROWN JOHN01/22/1862
BROWN MERIDA04/27/1865GA
BROWNMINNIE R2 LIUET4/12/194222 VA INF
BROWNSARAH PCAPT2/11/1923VA
BROWN WILLIAM06/03/1862NC
BROWNWILLIAM H5/4/1913VA
BROWNWILLIAM L07/17/1864GA
BROXTON HOMERGA
BRYANTNEEDHAM B05/27/1862MISS
BURDICKB B08/21/1865GA
BURKEMARY E06/28/192243 BN VA CAV
BURKETHOMAS T10/26/191643 BN VA CAV
BURNSJOHN06/16/1862NC
BURROWSFRANCIS MMUS8/10/1922VA
BUTLERJOHN F06/28/1865GA
BYASSEETHOMAS WVA INF
CAINWILLIAM B06/12/1862ALA
CALLAGHANJOHN T02/21/1918VA
CANNONC MGA
CANNONH W09/02/1862GA
CANNONJ CALA
CAPPS EDWARD WCAPT02/23/1864VA
CARLTONT R07/14/1862NC
CARROLLD L05/14/1863ALA
CHEWMARGARET HM CHEW07/19/1940MISS
CHEWMONROE GM CHEWMISS
CHISELDINEWILLIAM CMD
CHISMJ R06/21/1862VA
CHRISTOPHERT C05/24/1862SG
CLAGETT EDWARD LSGT4/10/1930MD
CLEMENTSFRANCIS J8/2/1923MD
CLEMENTS JEANNETTE F03/17/1921MD
COLEWILLIAM H05/24/1862VA
COLEMAN DANIEL G05/26/1863NC
COLEMANE RMISS
COLQUITT W H01/08/1863GA
CONAGHANJAMES06/15/1864GA
CONLEYDAN03/25/1863
CONNER ALFRED05/12/1844
COOK ELIAS MLIEUT05/25/1862ALA
COOKENOCH11/14/1910VA
COOPERANDREW JVA
CORDERALEXANDER12/25/1862VA
COWAN THOMASLT10/05/1862NC
COXJ W12/28/1863NC
CRAFTN L01/11/1864NC
CRANDALLLEECOLONEL09/13/192647 ARK CAV
CRANFORD ELIZABETHSGT1/8/1926GA
CRANFORDHORACE LSEPG12/21/1918GA
CRAWFORDWILLIAMGA
CRONANJERRY06/02/1864GA
CRONEH WVA
CROSSCHARLES N 02/19/1908
CROUCH CHARLES C09/29/1919MO
CROUCH JENNIE P7/7/1916MO
CURRY JOHN A08/11/1864GA
DAVIDSONMARTHA E6/2/1939MD
DAVIDSONWILLIAM11/7/1924MD
DAVISJOSHUA01/23/1915ARTY
DAVIS WELDON ECAPTAIN11/22/186330 NC IN
DAWSONROBERTA C02/23/1935VA
DAYMONDGEORGE
DE SHIELDSGEORGE DSGT11/27/1918
DEANJ F01/02/1864NV
DEARINGWILLIAM R
DELEON PERRY M09/17/1922ASST
DONOHOO JAMES05/26/1862ALA
DRAKE GERSHAM6/12/1921VA
DREW JOHNCAPT07/31/1917VA
DUFFEY JEFFERSON W10/11/1929VA
DUFFEY NANNIE T07/29/1941VA
DUNNINGTON CHARLES A02/28/1921VA
DYESSWILLIAM HCORP12/28/1864GA
EARLEYALLEN H04/11/1865GA
EDMONSTONGABRIEL05/16/191841 VA INF
EDMONSTONROBERTAb. 2-12-187103/18/195441 VA INF
ELAMHENRY T05/29/1862VA
ELLENJAMES BSGT12/09/1863NC
EMBREYCHARLES O2/12/1925VA
EMBRY SAMANTHA E06/24/1922VA
EMMARTESTHER N05/13/1935
EMORY JAMES11/16/1867
EPPSJ L04/28/1865
ESTERS WILLIAM06/18/1862SC
ESTESDAVID N2LT5/12/1925TENN
ESTES ELDRA J2LT3/1/1939
EVANSFRANK D1/1/1918VA
EVANSJANE7/6/1937VA
EZEKIELMOSES J03/27/1917
FAIRFAXHENRY M02/14/1928VA
FARMERNOAH05/25/1862VA
FARRELLTHOMAS WCAPT09/28/1864MISS
FEAST LOUDONCO C6/11/1912MD INF
FEASTMARY01/18/1934MD INF
FERNEYHOUGHJENNIE A12/4/1943VA
FERRELLEPHRIAM10/8/1928
FERRELL MARY E05/20/1931VA
FIELDELIJAH K05/18/1865GA
FIELDGEORGE W8/5/1918VA
FINCHJOHN11/26/1863NC
FINDLEY THOMAS9/6/1914VA
FINNEYMARY E07/20/1922VA
FINNEYTHOMAS02/26/1915VA
FINNEYMARY E07/20/1922VA
FINNEYTHOMAS02/26/1915VA
FLANNERYPHIL H05/23/1862ALA
FOLLINJOHN M4TH VA CAV
FONESHENRY R01/27/1863VA
FOREMANJAMES04/01/1865ALA
FURRFRANK N05/29/1862ALA
GARRISONANN ESGT12/13/1922VA
GENRARD JOSEPH06/28/1865GA
GEUSSL G09/26/1863MISS
GLEASE LEWIS
GOLDSMITHTHEODOCIA H10/19/1932ASST SURG
GOLDSMITHWILLIAM T2/5/1918ASST SURG
GOODENER JOHN06/08/1862VA
GRADYPOWELL CCAPT4/12/1922
GRADYSUSAN ACAPT12/17/1928ASST
GRAVESI TGA
GRAYW J
GRAYSONS M2/1/1919MD
GREENROBERT R9/3/1920VA
GREENEJ C11/17/1867GA
GRIGSBYLOVINASGT11/4/1921VA
GRIGSBYW SSGT06/28/1932VA
GROVERALBERT S02/24/1913VA
GUNNELLHENRY L2LT04/19/1917VA
GUSSTONW HNC
HAGANS JOSIAH HGA
HALLG W09/19/1867GA
HARDYJAMES TSGT04/05/1865GA
HARRIS JOHN09/12/1862NC
HARRIS REUBEN T07/17/1864ALA
HARROVERHIRAM CIST SGT01/14/1912VA
HARROVERROBERT M06/26/1917VA
HASKINS ELIZABETH VMUS11/12/1929VA
HASKINS JOHN RMUS8/1/1928VA
HAWKINSMARCUS11/19/1923VA
HAWLEY GEORGE W7/11/1919TEX
HEAVENERW A
HEISTON THORNTON BCAPT3/7/1916
HENDERSON ANDREW03/16/1930SC SS
HENNESSEYD08/27/1862ALA
HERODWILLIAM04/14/1865ALA
HERRELL HENRY A07/22/1913VA
HICKEYFANNIE BCAPT01/14/19336 MO INF
HICKEYJOHN MCAPT1/10/19276 MO INF
HICKMAN BENJAMIN H02/08/1862GA
HICKMAN THOMAS H08/08/1864GA
HILLSAMUEL12/20/1863NC
HODGKINSW06/07/1862VA
HOGANLAFAYETTE01/01/1863TENN
HOLDER WILLIAM05/31/1862VA
HOLMES GEORGE J06/08/1864GA
HOLTG L11/09/1893
HOWARD HARMAN07/23/1864ALA
HOWELLFRANCIS A02/15/1919VA
HUBBARD GEORGE W06/16/1862VA
HUBBARD JOHN D01/22/1863FLA
HUDDLESONJOHNCAPT3/11/1922VA
HUDDLESON MARY ECAPT01/16/1922VA
HUDSONT H06/06/1864VA
HUFFMANJAMESb. 1-31-184004/14/1922VA
HUGHESBIRTIE K2/11/1921VA LT ARTY
HUGHESRYLAND B12/6/1916VA LT ARTY
HUGHES SAMUEL07/08/1865VA
HUNGERFORDTHOMAS W3/9/1923GA
HUNTER ALEXANDER06/30/1914VA
HUNTER FILAH A8/1/1915VA
HUTCHINSONPHILIP AUGUSTUS2/11/1925VA
HUTCHINSON SUSIE L11/5/1928VA
IMBODEN ELIZABETH SSCT MAJ11/11/1919CAV
IMBODENJAMES ASCT MAJ2/4/1928CAV
INKFIELD WILLIAM11/15/1867
JACKSONJOHN AGA
JACKSON WYATT07/06/1862FLA
JARVIS ROBERTA E5/8/1931VA
JARVISWILLIAM5/4/1916VA
JENKINS HORATIO NCAPT03/29/1915LA
JENKINS SARAHCAPT10/24/1927LA
JENKINSW NMISS
JENKINS WILLIAM E12/31/1863SC
JESSUPSGA
JOHNSON GEORGE05/21/1863MISS
JOHNSONOLIVER P10/13/1908VA
JOHNSONRICHARD12/16/1924VA
ARMESJ TSC
JOHNSONROBERT08/25/1863NC
JOHNSTONFANNY11/29/1922
JOHNSTONGEORGE S6/2/1928MARINE CORPS
JONESCHARLES M05/19/1862MISS
JONESWILLIAM B11/15/1865GA
JORDAN FLEMMING08/02/1864
JORDAN JOHN FCAPT08/29/1862VA
JOYCEG08/07/1863VA
KENNEMANWILLIS06/05/1864ALA
KEPHARTJOHN A11/18/1929VA
KEPHARTMARY E2/4/1940VA
KEYJOHN F4/10/1904FORREST SCO
KEY MINTER P05/16/1916TENN
KEYES WILLIAM01/24/1864
KIMPLE FRITZ08/31/1864MISS
KINGA02/02/186455 NC INF
KINGJ FLT COL8/5/1915VA
KINGTHOMAS DSGT01/09/1864LA
KINGWILLIAM G05/19/1862VA
KINKINGNC
KIRBY BENJAMIN FSGT01/12/1864VA
KIRK JOHN05/21/1862VA
KIRKRollin H7/7/1922SC
KIRKLAND JOSHUAGA
KNOWLESB01/03/1863GA
KRICKLAND JOSHUAGA
LT J12/20/1862CSA
LASHADASGT09/17/1939GRMIS PRTY
LASHGEORGE WSGT10/11/1908GRMIS PRTY
LAWHORNEHENRY EVA
LAYTHELDRED S04/22/1865GA
LEACOCKJOHN
LEWIS SAMUEL ECAPT11/17/1917ASST SURG
LITTLEPAGEBETTIE H06/17/1937VA
LITTLEPAGEJ C10/27/1933VA
LLOYDG F06/09/1864GA
LOCKER JACOB M03/19/1934VLA LT ARTY
LOONEYT J05/23/1862LA
LOOPGEORGE W05/19/1862
LOOPNOT CAPTURED05/23/1862VA
LOVELESS WILLIAM
LOVING PIERCE04/24/1932VA
LOWRANCEC E11/07/186357 NC INF
LYDDANEJAMES08/17/1913VA
LYDDANEMARY10/15/1940VA
LYNNJAMES11/22/1864MISS
MANYROBERT PCORP
MARCHANT HENRY MCAPT02/24/1907
MARMADUKEHENRY HIST LT11/15/1924PRO NAVY
MARSHALL JESSE E06/12/1862NC
MATHEWS JOHN W1/12/1909VA
MCALLISTER ALBERT L02/13/1931VA
MCALLISTER ANDREW07/03/1862MISS
MCCLAINW L05/16/1863GA
MCCLENDONJAMESGA
MCCORDJAMESSGT06/09/1864GA
MCCULLENJAMES06/25/1863
MCCUMMINGSAMANDA11/29/1920MD
MCDONALLJALA
MCELVEEN ELIAS08/16/1864GA
MCFARLAND ELLEN11/15/1931VA
MCFARLANDHENRY D1/10/1918VA
MCGEETHOMASALA
MCLENDONW J06/15/1862GA
MCMEEKIN THOMAS05/20/1864
MEAD JOHN05/13/1863ALA
MEARS WILLIAM S10/8/1938 CO B 19 BN VA HVY ARTY
MEEKSMARTHA A10/7/1935VA
MERCHANT EMMA6/3/1934VA
MERCHANTISAAC N10/19/1933VA
MEREDITHWINSTONCORPJONE'S PRTY
MEULINM03/25/1863
MILLERFRED W10/7/1916VA
MILLERJOHN S05/15/1921VA
MILLERMINNIE I04/30/1936VA
MILSTEAD JOSEPH H1/6/1924MD
MOHLERD JPVT1/6/192443RD VA CAV
MOHLERLAURAPVT7/6/192543RD VA CAV
MONROEG01/14/1864
MOOMAWSAMUEL09/18/1863VA
MOOREJULIAN GCAPT02/28/1929NC
MOOREWILLIAM E11/27/1920NC
MORGANTIMOTHY F04/06/1865ALA
MORRISAARON06/13/1864GA
 VIRGINIA VIRGINIA01/16/1916VA
MOSS PETER05/30/1862VA
MULLINS JAMES RMISS
MURPHY JOHN A06/20/1862VA
MUSEJOHN A08/31/1843VA CAV
MUSE ROSE LEEb. 4-27-187103/15/1934VA CAV
MUSTAIN ANDREW J05/11/186321 VA INF
NAIL JAMES04/10/1864GA
NAUCKJOHN D2/2/1925VA
NAUCKMARTHA A04/22/1927VA
NEILLISAAC04/19/1865MISS
NEWCOMBJOHN J04/16/191656 VA INF
NEWCOMBMARGARET A11/18/192556 VA INF
NICHOLSWILLIAM HCAPT05/18/1925TEX
NICKENSJONATHAN05/21/1862NC
NICKSW L07/19/1864ALA
NORTONROSA B08/28/1939MISS
NORWOODJAMES WALA
NOWELLARTHUR FPVT05/29/186431 GA INF
ORCHARDFRANCES BCROP05/25/1920SC
OVERCASH H W12/10/1863NC
OWENSALFRED7/12/1918SC
PAGEJOHN M09/17/1864GA
PAGEWILLIAM4/4/1914CO B 2 MD INF
PALMERHEZEKIAH S10/10/1863MISS
PANNILLJOHN B2/4/1929VA
PARRY ELLA H5/2/1931COD 53 VA INE
PARRYRICHARD LSGT03/22/1914CO D 53 VA INE
PARSONSW G
PAXTONJOSEPH MCORP08/16/1921VA
PAYNEAMOS P5/1/1929VA
PENDLETONC M02/19/1919VA
PERKINSW J06/29/1864CAV
PERRYJESSE M06/13/1864GA
PERSONSBENJAMIN F07/03/1864GA
PETTYHENRY S08/17/1918VA
PETTYJAMES T3/5/1929VA
PFAFFANDREW12/29/1862NC
PHILLIPSWILLIAM A07/25/1864GA
PLUMHENRY L2/4/1921ALA
PLUMMARGARET4/8/1937ALA
POERJOHN A08/23/1863GA
POLLARDW O05/19/1863NC
POOLMILES06/05/1864GA
POWELLJAMES P07/16/19113 CO A HOWITZWRS
POWELLLAURA W01/24/19533 CO A HOWITZERS
PRICEIDA11/18/1942VA
PRICEJAMES B04/28/1920VA
PRICE LUCY AI LIEUT06/16/1925VA
PRICEMARTIN LI LIEUT04/17/1921VA
PROTHISPINCKNEY08/03/1863GA
PURSEJ W05/29/1864
QUINNMICHAEL05/18/1864MISS
RALPHJ B06/14/1862NC
RANEYJ S02/15/1864ALA
RASHURIAH12/29/1863NC
RAYNERGEORGE W05/07/1865ALA
REA A T05/22/1862VA
REEPOBED02/02/1864NC
REESEMARTIN08/11/1863MISS
REHILLANNIE11/15/1914VA
REHILLEDWARD09/25/1914VA
REIDJULIA C08/30/1918VA
REIDSAMUEL D11/7/1914VA
RENFRALWILLIAM SLIEUT08/12/1864GA
REYNOLDSW FLA
RICEGEORGE W06/28/1862VA
RIELG WCROP11/14/1863NC
RILEY J L06/03/1865MISS
ROBERTSH H09/05/1865MISS
ROBERTSJOHNCO D 15 ALA INF
RODGERSTHOMASGA
ROGERSJOHN H04/18/1865GA
ROGERSN A12/07/1863NC
ROYEMILY H11/2/1932VA
ROYRICHARD B01/31/1921VA
ROYSTONC BALA
RUDD J E05/18/1917ALA
RUSSELLJ S05/05/1865ALA
RUSSELLJAMESGA
SANDLINJAMES09/19/1867ALA
SAXONJAMES M12/04/1863CO D 9 LA INF
SAYLESGREENCORP12/01/1863LA
SCAGGSEDWARD O04/27/1933MD
SCAGGSMARION F12/20/1937MD
SCAGGSROBERT8/5/1931MD
SCALESJAMES04/25/1865ALA
SCOTTW A2 LT12/27/1914GA
SCROGGINPEYTON R06/23/1862VA
SEAYRICHARD B7/2/1937VA
SHAWHENRY M06/10/1865ALA
SHILBYMARY Vb. 12-25-187805/18/1963CO C 21 REGT VA INF
SHOLLETTEC B06/14/1863WHITE'S BTRY
SINCLAIRARTHUR G1/8/1916CO R 17 RFGT VA INF
SINCLAIRCARRIE L05/14/1916CO K 17 REGT VA INF
SINCLAIR WALLACE W06/25/1917VA
SINKW A02/19/1864CO F 15 NO INF
SIZERLUCIEN DCORP02/23/1918VA
SIZERMARY ECORP9/4/1923VA
SMITHCATHARINE M4/3/1924VA
SMITHCROMONIO02/29/1920VA
SMITHEDWARD T7/8/1918VA
SMITHGEORGE HALA
SMITH J AGA
SMITHMARGARET MCAPT1/3/1917VA
SMITHNATHANIEL JCAPT12/13/1912VA
SMITHORLANDO F01/16/1916VA
SNYDERCHARLES A09/20/1915VA
SNYDERWILLIAM08/31/1865GA
SOMMERSMARGARET M01/29/1923
SOMMERSSIMON L11/13/1913
SPANNHENRY10/06/1864FLA
SPRYJAMES12/2/1924NC
SPRYMARY I04/14/1921NC
STANLEYE B07/18/1864GA
STEEVERWESTLT COL09/14/1907LA
STONEWILLIAM01/17/1863SC
STONEBURNERMARTHA VSGT1/5/1940CO I S VA INF
STONEBURNERSAMUEL GSGT11/16/1919CO I S VA INF
STRAYHORNEWILLIAM01/20/1864NC
SUMRALLJOSEPH G12/29/1862MISS
SWANSONSIMEONCORP01/12/1864NC
TAYLORC WCORP12/28/1862GA
TAYLORDAVID L06/25/1864GA
TAYLORWILSON04/22/1865ALA
TENNENTJOHN CASST ENGR11/7/1913
THOMAS J P02/06/1864
THOMPSONGEORGE CMUS02/21/1920VA
THOMPSONGEORGE E6/12/1921VA
THOMPSONLOUISA02/21/1920VA
THOMPSONMARY T8/11/1915WIFE OF PVT M S THOMPSON
THOMPSONT BALA
THOMPSONWILLIAM TCAPT03/30/1920MO
THRELKELDFRANCIS M10/01/1864GA
THRIFTBENJAMIN03/27/1921VA
TODDSOPHIA6/7/1935IA
TODDWILHAM E05/25/1925IA
TRIPPWILLIAM C06/25/1865TENN
TUCKERW05/21/1863CO C 34 NO INF
TURNERTHOMAS CCORPGA
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN
UNKNOWN06/01/1862
UTTERBACKJOHN4/2/1929VA
WALDRIPANDREW J06/09/1864GA
WALKERALEXANDER1/11/1914VA
WALKERCORA H12/24/1918VA
WALLACE J H09/25/1865GA
WALLACEMICHAEL04/27/1920VA
WALLERELIZABETH D02/22/1933CO K 20 TENN CAV
WALSH ALICE M9/1/1911FAYETTE ARTY
WALSH JOHN H2/12/1918FAYETTE ARTY
WALSTONRUFUS06/10/1862NC
WATERSHUGH11/3/1927VA
WESTJAMES
WESTWILLIAM C05/04/1865ALA
WHALEYGEORGE
WILKERSONCOLUMBIA T08/27/1884VA
WILKERSONFANNIE M03/03/1882VA
WILKERSON THOS J10/22/1899VA
WILKERSONW L07/25/1934VA
WILKERSONWILLIAM08/11/1865ALA
WILLIAMSASACORP02/20/1864NC
WILLIAMSJAMES BSGT04/19/1927VA
WILLIAMSJAMES HI LIEUT05/16/1909GA
WILSONJ W01/09/1864NC
WILSONROBERT02/27/1939CO D I MD CAV
WOLFETHURSTON09/26/1918VA
WOLFEVIRGINIA ASHBY09/25/1925VA
WOODROBERT07/05/1862VA
WOODSONCECELIA A6/9/1940VA
WOODSONWALTER N01/21/1920VA
WOODWARDCOLUMBUS O02/23/1920MD
WOODWARDDANIEL3/10/1930VA
WOODWARDEMMETSURG05/14/1909
WOODWARDEMMETTSURG05/14/1909
WOODWARD LAURA VIRGINIA01/27/1938MD
WORLEYWILLIAMDAV VILLE BTRY
WORTHAMJAMES A04/21/1913VA
WORTHAMSARAH F10/3/1925VA
WRIGHTMARCUS JBRIG GEN12/26/1922GHEATHAM S DIVISION
WYATTJOHN W12/5/1924VA
YEATMAN CHARLOTTE E4/4/1939VA
YONTPETER11/10/1863NC

 


1 That registration was approved for the property's entry onto the National Register of Historic Places April 11, 2014.

2 Patterson, https://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/history-of-the-csa-memorial-at-anc-1914.htm.

Please forward and share this email with as many people as you can!
Links to Important Resources

 

Here is a link to Defend Arlington's donation page that states:

CHIP IN FOR THE ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY MEMORIAL LITIGATION DEFENSE FUND

Please Donate Money -- THANK YOU!

 

Here is a link to an informative nine minute video, "The Arlington Confederate Monument," produced by the Abbeville Institute.

The Arlington Confederate Monument

 

Here is a link to the outstanding scholarly PDF white papers written for Defend Arlington. You can download them all with one click. Please share them far and wide, especially the letter from Defend Arlington's attorney, Karen C. Bennett, to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

PDF White Papers from Defend Arlington

 

Here is link to an excellent video refuting point by point a historically false Prager University video by Ty Seidule, who is on the naming commission. This one is produced by Bode Lang and entitled "The Civil War Was Not for Slavery."

Click Here for Bode Lang's excellent video,

 

Here is a link to an excellent video of a Georgia lady calling out Elizabeth Warren and her Massachusetts hypocrisy.

Click Here for Georgia Lady Teaching Elizabeth Warren a Lesson

 

Take action TODAY!

We WILL Save the Magnificent Arlington Confederate Memorial–Woke Ignorance DIES at Arlington–Letter from Our Attorney to Secretary of Defense Austin and Others–Several “serious regulatory violations” by the Federal Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery

We WILL Save the Magnificent Arlington Confederate Memorial

Woke Ignorance DIES at Arlington

Letter from Our Attorney to Secretary of Defense Austin and Others

Several "serious regulatory violations" by the Federal Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery

Arlington National Cemetery, 109 year old Confederate Memorial to the Reconciliation and Reunification of our great nation after our bloodiest war. It was the brainchild of Union soldier and president, William McKinley, who said "every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor." The sculptor, internationally renowned Jewish artist Moses Jacob Ezekiel, was a VMI Confederate soldier. Art critic Michael Robert Patterson states that "no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art." In a barbaric crime against art and history, the naming commission and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin want the monument demolished.
Arlington National Cemetery, 109 year old Confederate Memorial to the Reconciliation and Reunification of our great nation after our bloodiest war. It was the brainchild of Union soldier and president, William McKinley, who said "every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor." The sculptor, internationally renowned Jewish artist Moses Jacob Ezekiel, was a VMI Confederate soldier. Art critic Michael Robert Patterson states that "no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art." In a barbaric crime against art and history, the naming commission and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin want the monument demolished.
Aerial view of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery with over 500 graves of Confederate military personnel and some family in concentric circles around the monument. Sculptor Moses Ezekiel is buried with two other Confederate soldiers and one Confederate sailor around the base. The monument is literally their headstone but the naming commission and Secretary Austin want the monument destroyed. Respect for Southern dead is not something they care about despite 44% of today's United States military being recruited in the South.
Aerial view of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery with over 500 graves of Confederate military personnel and some family in concentric circles around the monument. Sculptor Moses Ezekiel is buried with two other Confederate soldiers and one Confederate sailor around the base. The monument is literally their headstone but the naming commission and Secretary Austin want the monument destroyed. Respect for Southern dead is not something they care about despite 44% of today's United States military being recruited in the South.

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - We will not allow the Woke naming commission to desecrate Arlington National Cemetery. We all love ANC. It belongs to all Americans.

The naming commission came about because of Elizabeth Warren's legislation mandating destruction of Southern history in our military - as she interprets it - from the Confederate era. This is not peer-reviewed history that is openly debated by both sides but filthy politics. This is EXACTLY what Orwell warned about in his great novel 1984 when he wrote:

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

In fairness to Warren, Republican Jim Inhofe was head of the Senate Armed Services Committee at the time and Republicans had a majority. He could have stopped Warren as President Trump wanted but Inhofe is as characterless as Warren. He promised President Trump he would stop Warren's hate legislation but he lied. It is UNBELIEVABLY frustrating when Republicans prove they are the Stupid Party and go against their own voters to give the likes of Elizabeth Warren a political victory.

Without a doubt, this wokeness and Woke naming commission has made our military weaker and more divided for no reason. Changing base names and the names of streets, patches, destroying monuments, etc. is a waste of millions of dollars of taxpayer money at a time when we are running huge budget deficits. The changes do nothing but divide us just like Austin's standdown and search for extremists in the military who don't exist, and his promotion of Critical Race Theory and other racist fads.

The Woke naming commission sends a clear message to Southerners that they can bleed and die but they are not welcome unless they denounce their own families as traitors, which is not true. New England threatened to secede multiple times in the antebellum days such as in the War of 1812 and with the admission of Texas. Anything that reduced New England political power caused them to threaten secession, the right of which nobody questioned at the time. West Point made it clear and taught the right of secession in the antebellum days. Our country was founded on secession from the British Empire. Our Declaration of Independence is the greatest ordinance of secession ever written.

Southerners were correct with everything they did. They were fed up with  Yankees sending terrorists into the South to murder them and their families so they called conventions, such as the Founding Fathers established with the Constitutional Convention and state ratification conventions, they debated the issue of secession then voted on it. It was pure democracy such as the Founding Fathers envisioned.

Southerners expected to live in peace but the North with four times the white population of the South and perhaps 200 times the arms decided they were not going to allow a free trade nation with warm water ports and 100% control of the most demanded commodity on the planet, cotton, to rise up on their Southern border.

Lincoln knew that the moment Southerners signed trade and military treaties with Great Britain and other Europeans powers, the North would not be able to beat the South in a war, so he sent five military missions into the South in March and April, 1861 to get one started as quickly as he could. He announced his blockade before the smoke cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter, which was his purpose all along. He knew that would chill European support for the South and make Europe take a wait-and-see attitude.

Lincoln made it crystal clear through 1) the War Aims Resolution, 2) his support for the Corwin Amendment that left black people in slavery forever where slavery already existed, 3) the fact that six slave states fought for the Union the entire war, 4) etc. etc., that the North did not go to war to end slavery. They went to war to continue the economic domination of the country and eliminate a powerful Southern competitor.

That's why Abraham Lincoln said over and over that the war was fought for the preservation of the Union, which guaranteed the North's political domination due to its much larger population. Still, in 1860, 61% of the country voted against Abraham Lincoln.

Republicans in Congress should immediately defund all the worthless recommendations of the Woke naming commission.

I am not against some of the names suggested for military bases but put them on new bases and new weapons and such. Do not destroy the old. It is not necessary to destroy the old. We are supposed to be inclusionary. Remember the "inclusion" part of diversity, equity and inclusion? Destroying the old using the idiotic, goofy standards of today tears at the fabric of our country. It is false history, it costs enormous amounts of money and divides us for no reason other than to allow Elizabeth Warren to signal her "virtue"1 and for the benefit of evil politicians who think hate and anarchy will somehow benefit them.

Our military in the not too distant past looked up to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee because they were brilliant military leaders. We had nuclear submarines named for Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson during the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. President Dwight D. Eisenhower kept a picture of Lee in his White House office the whole time he was president. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander of World War II, when important bases in the South like Fort Bragg and Fort Benning trained our men and women to go fight and win and if need be, die, certainly knew more than Elizabeth Warren and the Woke political naming commission.

Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and all other presidents until the rise of the Communist-style division of today, admired Gen. Lee, not just as a military leader but as a man of great character who worked hard to reconcile North and South and bring our great nation back together after a war in which 750,000 died and over a million were maimed. In World War II we lost 400,000 out of a population nearly five times larger.

The naming commission is so inept it does not even mention the reconciliation theme and symbolism of the Confederate Memorial though Arlington National Cemetery itself, does. ANC's own description in its National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for the Historic District received by the National Park Service February 24, 2014 states over and over that the Confederate Memorial symbolizes the reconciliation and reunification of our great country after our country's bloodiest war.2

How could the naming commission ignore that?

The Confederate Memorial was conceived by Union soldier and President William McKinley after enthusiastic Southern participation in the Spanish-American War. President William Howard Taft spoke at the UDC ceremony the evening the cornerstone was laid giving an inspiring well-received speech. President Woodrow Wilson spoke at the dedication June 4, 1914 as did Union and Confederate Veterans. Remember, these were the days of the 50th and 75th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and the famous handshakes across the wall by the old Union and Confederate gentlemen.

How could the naming commission not care about all that?

It proves that the Confederate Memorial is about reconciliation therefore it is not in the Woke naming commission's remit. The Confederate Memorial does not commemorate the Confederacy. It commemorates the reunification of the United States of America after a bloody war. See my white paper The Reconciliation of North and South After the War Between the States as Symbolized by the Confederate Memorial "New South" in Arlington National Cemetery on Defend Arlington's website, 28 pages on the theme of reconciliation.

The 109 year old Confederate Memorial was created in the city of Rome, Italy by internationally acclaimed Jewish sculptor Moses Ezekiel but the naming commission wants to tear it apart in the cheapest way possible and leave a mangled shaft sticking up in Arlington National Cemetery.

The white paper by Ernest E. Blevins, who is the foremost national expert on Union and Confederate monuments, is entitled: "Headstone of the Confederate States: Moses Ezekiel's Arlington Confederate Monument, Symbolism, Meaning, National Register Eligibility, and Potential Adverse Effects to Alternations or Removal." It is 49 pages, detailed, documented and irrefutable.

Blevins discusses the "monument symbology" that "depicts the South's mourning and the war's losses" and he includes a comment from Michael Robert Patterson:

But no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art.3

That comment again points out the crime against history and art committed by the Woke naming commission in its desire to destroy the monument as cheaply as possible and leave a mangled shaft in its place in Arlington National Cemetery surrounded by 500 graves of Southern soldiers in concentric circles.

Esteemed British art critic and historian, Alexander Adams, writes that "four soldiers are buried at its base" and "include Civil War Soldier and sculptor Corporal Moses Ezekiel . . . " therefore "The Memorial is an actual grave marker, marking the burial site of dead soldiers, and is located in the National Cemetery, making it a functional or symbolic grave marker. It is therefore outside the remit of the Naming Commission."4

About its artistic significance, Adams writes:

Having viewed a large amount of public statuary from the beaux-arts era (1850-1914), it is my professional opinion that the Memorial is a serious, iconographically complex and technically accomplished piece of art. It my view, it is a handsome sculpture and an entirely appropriate funerary monument. I consider it an internationally significant piece of art of its type and era. Any nation should be proud to host such a magnanimous and dignified monument."5

Adams also notes that:

[I]t is rare for a nation to mark the sacrifices and loses of the losing side in a civil war. This makes the Memorial internationally significant, as an example of the exceptional history of the USA and the efforts to reconcile the sides after the Civil War. It shows black and white soldiers working together, overturning expectations and putting [on] the record the complexity of historical fact, which it is not our generation's place to suppress.6

The naming commission prefers a mangled shaft created in the cheapest way possible marking the graves of hundreds of Southerners, which would desecrate Arlington National Cemetery for eternity.

To allow a mangled shaft to mark Southern graves in our nation's most sacred burial ground dishonors every Southern state and all the Southerners who fought with great valor and died in defense of our country in every later war, many of whom are buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

It is pretty stupid during a military recruiting crisis caused by Woke policies to insult the region from where 44% of our military is recruited.

But then, intelligence is not a Woke virtue.

Below, is a powerful letter from Defend Arlington's attorney and partner in her Washington, D.C. law firm, Karen C. Bennett. She is one of the best in the country on litigation involving historic properties and federal rules and regulations.

We can win this fight and save the magnificent Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery and strike a hard blow against Woke ignorance and iconoclasm once and for all but WE NEED MONEY and time is of the essence.

Below, there are links to where you can donate.

EVERY SCV CAMP and UDC CHAPTER and all organizations that care about American history must give NOW to the utmost. We are in a war that we can win but we must act now.

Below, are also links to all the PDF white papers gathered together by Defend Arlington including Karen Bennett's letter below. Send Bennett's letter to your Congressional representatives ASAP.

It is powerful to send a note with a PDF of Alexander Adams's testimonial since he is an international expert and his testimonial is just a few pages. Send it with Karen Bennett's letter.

Remember what President William McKinley, a former Union soldier who came up with the idea for the Confederate Memorial, said about those Southern graves surrounding the monument:

. . . every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor . . . And the time has now come . . . when in the spirit of fraternity we should share in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers . . . The cordial feeling now happily existing between the North and 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 this year just passed by the sons and grandsons of those heroic dead.

If you are descended from any of the 500 people buried in the graves in the concentric circles around the monument please contact us. Please forward this email and encourage people to get on our mailing list. We have the names, ranks, units, etc. of the 500 Southerners buried in concentric circles around the monument. We have it in a data file but I will publish all of them in the next few days.]

Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith LLP

Karen C. Bennett
2112 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Suite 500
Washington, DC 20037

December 27, 2022

Lloyd J. Austin, III
Secretary of Defense
1000 Defense Pentagon
Washington, DC 20301-1000

Christine E. Wormuth
Secretary of the Army
101 Army Pentagon
Washington, DC 20310-0101

Re: Federal Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery

We write to express our concerns with serious regulatory violations occurring at the November 7-8, 2022, meeting of the Federal Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery (FACANC). The Department of Defense, through the Department of the Army, is charged with ensuring the FACANC's compliance with the requirement of the Federal Advisory Committee Act.7 The Department of the Army, to whom the Committee reports, shall take steps to remedy these serious regulatory violations as set forth below.

Defend Arlington Cemetery is a coalition of stakeholders interested in the protection of the Reconciliation Memorial in the Arlington National Cemetery (ANC). Coalition members participated in the Nov. 7-8 FACANC meeting, submitted written comments, and obtained permission to address the Committee during the public comment period.

We write to express our concern with the Department of the Army's, Designated Federal Officer's interference with FACANC deliberations as the Department of Defense prepares to remove a significant historical Memorial from our nation's most sacred military cemetery. On November 7-8, 2022, the FACANC met to discuss, among other things, implementation of the Naming Commission's recommendations, specifically, the removal of the Memorial honoring the Confederate dead.8 The public meeting was announced on October 21, 2022, consistent with procedures under the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972 (5 U.S.C. 552b) (FACA).9 Members of Defenders of Arlington Cemetery provided written comments to the FACANC and other members registered, consistent with procedures outlined in the notice, to provide verbal comment at the open meeting.10 Notwithstanding over 320 pages objecting to removal11, the FACANC decided not to respond or provide any advice regarding the Naming Commission recommendation. Even worse, without any explanation, the FACANC refused to allow those members of the public that had properly registered to appear before the FACANC, denying them their right to speak and ensuring their opposition would not be included in the official meeting record. The FACANC's silence is disappointing and fails to meet congressional expectations under the FACANC's Charter. The FACANC's decision to prohibit public speech is a violation of the federal law that governs how Congressionally established advisory committees exercise their functions.12 Congress charged the Department of Defense, through the Secretary of the Army, with ensuring the FACANC's actions are consistent with the FACA. The Secretary of the Army should reconvene the FACANC for the purpose of providing the public with an opportunity to address the Committee consistent with expectations established in the October 21, 2022 meeting announcement.

Congress established the FACANC to provide the Secretary of Defense with independent advice or recommendations on matters including the erection of memorials in ANC.13 The Secretary's approval of the Naming Commission recommendation to remove the Memorial honoring our national great reconciliation following the Civil War falls squarely within the FACANC's purpose. During the November 8 meeting, FACANC members raised concerns with the decision to remove the Memorial. The Designated Federal Officer (DFO) responded that the decision to remove the Memorial had already been made and that there was no opportunity for the FACANC's input to the Secretary. We were shocked to hear the DFO provide the Committee with such substantive direction. DoD regulations are clear that a DFO's responsibility is purely administrative, limited calling meeting, approving agendas, adjourning where the public interest requires and, if directed, assuming the role of Chair14. We strongly believe that without the strong direction of the DFO that "this is already decided" the FACANC would have continued its deliberations and may very likely have decided an advisory report responding to the Secretary's approval of the Naming Commission's recommendation was warranted. The DFO's inappropriate actions shut down further discussion and influenced the outcome, causing the FACANC to erroneously conclude that there was no opportunity to perform its congressionally assigned advisory role.

The FACANC's decision not to allow properly registered members of the public speak at the meeting is a violation of DoD's regulations at 41 C.F.R. 102-3.140(d) that provide "any member of the public may speak, if an agency's guidelines so permit." In this case, procedures for registration to address the FACANC were provided in the Oct. 21, 2022 meeting announcement. Members of Defenders of Arlington Cemetery, among others, submitted and received confirmation of the request to speak. However, without explanation, Committee Co-Chairs, Peake and Edwards, decided not to allow any registrants to speak. Not only did the Committee act in violation of the governing regulations, but the public was denied its right to be heard and have its voice registered in the meeting record. Department of the Army legal counsel in attendance at the meeting failed to raise concerns that the Committee's decision violated the regulations governing FACA obligations.

The Department of the Army, to whom the Committee reports, shall take immediate steps to remedy the foregoing serious regulatory violations.

Sincerely,

/s/ Karen C. Bennett

Karen C. Bennett of
LEWIS BRISBOIS BISGAARD & SMITH LLP

cc:

Lt. General James Peake
Chair, Federal Advisory Committee on
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington National Cemetery
1 Memorial Avenue
Arlington, VA 22211

Mr. Thomas Edwards
Chair, Federal Advisory Committee on
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington National Cemetery
1 Memorial Avenue
Arlington, VA 22211

Mark Takano, Chairman (CA-D)
House Committee on Veterans' Affairs
364 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Mike Bost, Ranking Member (IL-R)
House Committee on Veterans' Affairs
364 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Jon Tester, Chairman (MT)
US Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs
412 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-6050

Jerry Moran, Ranking Member (IL)
US Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs
412 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510-6050

Capt. Thomas Kelley
Arlington National Cemetery
1 Memorial Ave.
Arlington, Virginia 22211

Col. Gene E. Castagnetti
Arlington National Cemetery
1 Memorial Ave.
Arlington, Virginia 22211

Maj. Gen. Elizabeth A. Harrell
Arlington National Cemetery
1 Memorial Ave.
Arlington, Virginia 22211

Lt. Col. Gerald Torrence
Arlington National Cemetery
1 Memorial Ave.
Arlington, Virginia 22211

Vice Adm. Ann Rondeau
Arlington National Cemetery
1 Memorial Ave.
Arlington, Virginia 22211

Please forward and share this email with as many people as you can!
Links to Important Resources

Here is a link to Defend Arlington's donation page that states:

CHIP IN FOR THE ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY MEMORIAL LITIGATION DEFENSE FUND

Please Donate Money -- THANK YOU!

 

Here is a link to an informative nine minute video, "The Arlington Confederate Monument," produced by the Abbeville Institute.

The Arlington Confederate Monument

 

Here is a link to the outstanding scholarly PDF white papers written for Defend Arlington. You can download them all with one click. Please share them far and wide, especially the letter from Defend Arlington's attorney, Karen C. Bennett, to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

PDF White Papers from Defend Arlington

 

Here is link to an excellent video refuting point by point a historically false Prager University video by Ty Seidule, who is on the naming commission. This one is produced by Bode Lang and entitled "The Civil War Was Not for Slavery."

Click Here for Bode Lang's excellent video,

 

Take action TODAY!

1 Elizabeth Warren has no virtue. She knows nothing about Southern history and perhaps even less about her own: ". . . Warren held herself out as Native American, allowing Harvard Law School to use her as cover for its impotent diversity efforts" and:

According to a much-cited investigation by the Boston Globe, Warren consistently checked "white" on personnel forms throughout her career, including in 1981, 1985, and 1998 while employed at the University of Texas. But in the 1986-1987 edition of the Association of American Law School's directory and eight subsequent editions, Warren listed herself as a minority. She began identifying as Native American on personnel forms three years into her post at the University of Pennsylvania. And while multiple professors have attested to the fact that Warren was considered white during the hiring process at Harvard University, in 1995 she self-identified as Native American, and the school's statistics were updated to reflect as much. Harvard recorded Warren as Native American from 1995 to 2004. [https://theintercept.com/2018/10/16/elizabeth-warren-dna-video-native-american-harvard/, accessed 12-3-22]

2 That registration was approved for the property's entry onto the National Register of Historic Places April 11, 2014.

3 Patterson, https://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/history-of-the-csa-memorial-at-anc-1914.htm.

4 Alexander Adams, "Testimony regarding Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Memorial submitted to the Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery Open Secession, 7-8 November 2022." Adams's source is Arlington National Cemetery's National Register of Historic Places Registration Form for the Historic District received by the National Park Service February 24, 2014, mentioned above. It was approved for the property's entry onto the National Register of Historic Places April 11, 2014.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Charter Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery, 6, The Department of Defense (DoD), through the Department of the Army, . . . and will ensure compliance with the requirements of the FACA, the Government in the Sunshine Act of 1976 (5 U.S.C. Section 552b, as amended, "the Sunshine Act"), Federal statutes and regulations and DoD policies and procedures.

8 September 2022, The Naming Commission Final Report to the United States Congress Part III: Remaining Department of Defense Assets, p. 15.

9 87 Federal Register 64019 (Oct. 21, 2022).

10 Id. at 64020.

11 Written Statements to the ACANC Nov. 7-8, 2022 meeting.

12 Charter Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery, 6, The Department of Defense (DoD), through the Department of the Army, . . . and will ensure compliance with the requirements of the FACA, the Government in the Sunshine Act of 1976 (5. U.S.C. Section 552b, as amended, "the Sunshine Act"), government Federal statutes and regulations and DoD policies and procedures.

13 Charter, Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery available at:

Charter (arlingtoncemetery.mil).

14 41 C.F.R. 102-3. 120.

Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Memorial: Testimony of British Art Critic and Historian, Alexander Adams

Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Memorial:
Testimony of British Art Critic and Historian,
Alexander Adams
Arlington National Cemetery, 109 year old Confederate Memorial to the Reconciliation and Reunification of our great nation after our bloodiest war. It was the brainchild of Union soldier and president, William McKinley, who said "every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor." The sculptor, internationally renowned Jewish artist Moses Jacob Ezekiel, was a VMI Confederate soldier. Art critic Michael Robert Patterson states that "no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art." In a barbaric crime against art and history, the naming commission and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin want the monument demolished.
Arlington National Cemetery, 109 year old Confederate Memorial to the Reconciliation and Reunification of our great nation after our bloodiest war. It was the brainchild of Union soldier and president, William McKinley, who said "every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor." The sculptor, internationally renowned Jewish artist Moses Jacob Ezekiel, was a VMI Confederate soldier. Art critic Michael Robert Patterson states that "no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art." In a barbaric crime against art and history, the naming commission and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin want the monument demolished.

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - Alexander Adams is one of the finest art critics and historians alive today. His testimony, below, is also available as a PDF along with the many scholarly white papers written for Defend Arlington. There is a link, following this post, to PDFs of all the white papers and other materials including a recent strong letter from Defend Arlington's attorney, Karen C. Bennett, to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and others.

Bennett points out numerous deliberate violations of federal regulations by the Federal Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery in its haste to support the destruction of the 109 year old Confederate Memorial before the public and lawmakers can stop them.

When you read Adams's testimonial about the enormous artistic and historic value of the Confederate Memorial, you will realize how barbaric and UNAMERICAN the destruction of this magnificent memorial in our nation's most sacred burial ground really is.

Aerial view of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery with over 500 graves of Confederate military personnel and some family in concentric circles around the monument. Sculptor Moses Ezekiel is buried with two other Confederate soldiers and one Confederate sailor around the base. The monument is literally their headstone but the naming commission and Secretary Austin want the monument destroyed. Respect for Southern dead is not something they care about despite 44% of today's United States military being recruited in the South.
Aerial view of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery with over 500 graves of Confederate military personnel and some family in concentric circles around the monument. Sculptor Moses Ezekiel is buried with two other Confederate soldiers and one Confederate sailor around the base. The monument is literally their headstone but the naming commission and Secretary Austin want the monument destroyed. Respect for Southern dead is not something they care about despite 44% of today's United States military being recruited in the South.
View from the ground at Arlington National Cemetery of the beautiful Confederate Memorial to the reconciliation of North and South. The Woke naming commission and Secretary Austin want it demolished in the cheapest way possible. Photo courtesy Derrick Johnson.
View from the ground at Arlington National Cemetery of the beautiful Confederate Memorial to the reconciliation of North and South. The Woke naming commission and Secretary Austin want it demolished in the cheapest way possible. Photo courtesy Derrick Johnson.

This is the most symbolic monument in American history because it involves the central event in American history, our War Between the States. Before the war, states were sovereign and supreme over the federal government.

After the war, the federal government was supreme over the states.

To gaze on the Confederate monument is to contemplate battlefields drenched in blood and strewn with dead and dying men, who back home had grieving families, widows and children, parents who got the horrifying news that their young man, their little boy, was killed and buried in a place they will never know or be able to visit and grieve.

Around 750,000 died in the War Between the States and over a million were maimed out of a national population of 31 million. In World War II, we lost around 400,000 out of a national population of 132 million.

President William McKinley, a former Union soldier, came up with the idea for a Confederate memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. He said after the Spanish-American war in 1898:

. . . every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor . . . And the time has now come . . . when in the spirit of fraternity we should share in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers . . . The cordial feeling now happily existing between the North and 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 this year just passed by the sons and grandsons of those heroic dead.

The memorial was enthusiastically endorsed by Congress and Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson. Taft gave an eloquent speech at the UDC ceremony the evening of the laying of the cornerstone. Wilson spoke at the June 4, 1914 dedication as did Union and Confederate veterans and others who all supported reconciliation, binding up the nation's wounds and moving forward. Other presidents including Barack Obama sent wreaths of commemoration or flowers each year.

But to the Woke naming commission and current commissioners on the Federal Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery, none of that matters.

Any commissioner who supports the destruction of a 109 year old monument symbolizing the reconciliation of our great country is unfit to walk the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery much less serve on its advisory board.

All of this came about so one of the most historically ignorant people in American history, Elizabeth Warren, could crow about her "virtue." Warren knows nothing about Southern history and even less about her own: ". . . Warren held herself out as Native American, allowing Harvard Law School to use her as cover for its impotent diversity efforts" and:

According to a much-cited investigation by the Boston Globe, Warren consistently checked "white" on personnel forms throughout her career, including in 1981, 1985, and 1998 while employed at the University of Texas. But in the 1986-1987 edition of the Association of American Law School's directory and eight subsequent editions, Warren listed herself as a minority. She began identifying as Native American on personnel forms three years into her post at the University of Pennsylvania. And while multiple professors have attested to the fact that Warren was considered white during the hiring process at Harvard University, in 1995 she self-identified as Native American, and the school's statistics were updated to reflect as much. Harvard recorded Warren as Native American from 1995 to 2004. [https://theintercept.com/2018/10/16/elizabeth-warren-dna-video-native-american-harvard/, accessed 12-3-22]

Warren was supported by Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee led by Jim Inhofe when Republicans controlled it. Inhofe told President Trump repeatedly that he would remove the part of the NDAA FY2021 that would change United States Army base names in the South, but he is a liar and his lies have now led to the imminent desecration of Arlington National Cemetery unless we stop it.

At a time when we are in a recruiting crisis in the United States Military, it is absurd to insult the region from where 44% of military personnel are recruited. Military service has always been revered in the South and part of that comes from admiration for the valor of our Confederate ancestors fighting for independence and defending their homes and families from an invasion 1861 to 1865.

We are damn proud of our Confederate ancestors and proud of their descendants like Medal of Honor winners and legends Audie Murphy of Texas and Alvin York of Tennessee.

We are damn proud of the Southerners who won the War of 1812 in New Orleans when Elizabeth Warren's slave-trading New Englanders were committing treason with the Hartford Convention.

It is important to write your Congressional representatives and tell them that the demolition of the 109 year old Confederate Memorial to reconciliation would be a stain on Arlington National Cemetery for all time and simply must be stopped now.

The Confederate Memorial is a grave marker as shown by the pictures above. It was designed and constructed by internationally renowned Jewish sculptor Moses Ezekiel, himself a Confederate veteran, a graduate of VMI. He is buried with three other Southerners at the base of his beautiful monument thus making it their headstone but also the grave marker for 462 other Confederate graves arranged in concentric circles around the monument and an integral part of the memorial as intended by Congress, several presidents and veterans North and South.

There are important links at the end of this outstanding testimonial by Alexander Adams.

Download the PDFs of Defend Arlington's white papers. You can download all of them with one click. Share them far and wide.

Send the PDF letter from Defend Arlington's attorney, Karen C. Bennett, to your Congressional representatives. Email it or print it and mail it with a note.

Bureaucrats on the Federal Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery MUST be held accountable and forced to obey the law and federal regulations.]

Testimony regarding Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Memorial submitted to the Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery Open Session 

by Alexander Adams (British art critic, historian, author)

7-8 November 2022

Standing of submitter

I am a British cultural critic and art historian, who has written six books and over 1,000 articles over the course of a 20-year career. I have frequently written on the areas of free speech and historical preservation. In the course of researching my book Iconoclasm, Identity Politics and the Erasure of History (2020, Imprint Academic) I encountered many examples of politically motivated intolerance that manifested itself in the historical suppression of defeated groups. In that book, I extensively discussed and catalogued the recent destruction of Confederate heritage. Although I have not seen the Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Memorial in person – I am rarely able to visit Washington DC, sadly – I have seen photographs and read descriptions. I have often reviewed sculpture of the same period and style as this memorial.

General response to the Final Report of the Naming Commission

I was alarmed by the Naming Commission’s Final Report, particularly with regard to Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Memorial (the Memorial). The Memorial marks a reconciliation of sorts between the sides, both the few living veterans and their descendants. Such serious and dignified memorial work, consecrated by the nation as a whole, is a tribute to American and Christian virtues of charity and hope. By removing such a symbol of reconciliation, the implication is that there can be no end to the Civil War, that the future must see that eradication of a historical legacy and that includes unending humiliation of the legatees of the defeated side.

When I consider the Naming Commission’s recommendations, I am reminded of the words of your President Lincoln: “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.” That is, it is the duty of the victors to extend charity and compassion to the defeated side’s veterans, widows and orphans – and their descendants – by allowing them to honour their dead as they see fit and (incidentally) as the Union victors saw fit to allow them.

Legal objections

On legal grounds, it seems that the Naming Commission has exceeded its authority by making a recommendation about the destruction of the Memorial, as it is a grave marker. According the page 4 of the Final Report (part III), one of the renaming criteria given to the commission (as stipulated in Section 370) is “Asset is not a grave marker.” According to the National Register of Historic Places Registration Form (dated 24 February 2014, pp. 25-6) four soldiers are buried at its base. These include Civil War soldier and sculptor Corporal Moses Ezekiel, whose work the memorial is. The Memorial it is an actual grave marker, marking the burial site of dead soldiers, and is located in the National Cemetery, making it a functional or symbolic grave marker. It is therefore outside the remit of the Naming Commission.

Artistic significance

Having viewed a large amount of public statuary from the beaux-arts era (1850-1914), it is my professional opinion that the Memorial is a serious, iconographically complex and technically accomplished piece of art. In my view, it is a handsome sculpture and an entirely appropriate funerary monument. I consider it an internationally significant piece of art of its type and era. Any nation should be proud to host such a magnanimous and dignified monument.

The inscription “And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.” provides a Biblical guidance to turning from war to peace. This is echoed by the personification of the South, which holds the wreath of glory and touches the plough of peaceful prosperity. The frieze below depicts the contributions of those who supported the war effort.

It was made for its specific site with a specific purpose in mind by the artist and commissioners, so that relocating it would do its meaning great damage. Relocating it would remove a major part of the effect and distort its integrity as surely as cutting away a figure or effacing an inscription would.

Historical significance

It is worth noting that it is rare for a nation to mark the sacrifices and loses of the losing side in a civil war. This makes the Memorial internationally significant, as an example of the exceptional history of the USA and the efforts to reconcile the sides after the Civil War. It shows black and white soldiers working together, overturning expectations and putting the record the complexity of historical fact, which it is not our generation’s place to suppress.

The fact that Presidents McKinley, Taft, Theodore Roosevelt and Wilson (of both Democrat and Republican Parties) supported the erection and dedication of the Memorial gives former presidential support a non-partisan character. On 4 June 1914, President Wilson dedicated the Memorial with these words: “And, now, it has fallen to my lot to accept in the name of the great Government which I am privileged for the time to represent this emblem of a reunited people. I am not so much happy as proud to participate in this capacity on such an occasion,—proud that I should represent such a people. Am I mistaken, ladies and gentlemen, in supposing that nothing of this sort could have occurred in anything but a democracy? The people of democracy are not related to their rulers as subjects are related to a government. They are themselves the sovereign authority, and as they are neighbors of each other, quickened by the same influences and moved by the same motives, they can understand each other. They are shot through with some of the deepest and profoundest instincts of human sympathy. They choose their governments; they select their rulers; they live their own life, and they will not have that life disturbed and discolored by fraternal misunderstandings.”

Wilson’s consideration of democracy healing wounds and allowing fractured populations to express fraternal sympathy is a lesson to those who seek to maintain democracy as an American civic value. When we look at other countries, we do not find similar generosity extended to the defeated. This makes the Memorial rare. Regardless of one’s own views on the Civil War, it is a duty to preserve monuments constructed by those who had direct first-hand experience of the war and its veterans.

Response of Jewish groups

The fact that commissioners chose a sculptor who was Jewish is significant, as it shows generosity towards a group considered marginal at the time. The artist recognised the seriousness of his task and considered it an honour, as witnessed by his letter of 11 February 1911 (Exhibit A). The destruction of the Memorial – which is what any removal would amount to – would be an insult to the artist and reduce the cultural breadth of the nation. A Jewish writer has explained his objects eloquently in a letter I received, submitted as Exhibit B. The author concludes, “We would urge you to leave the Arlington Confederate Memorial exactly as our forefathers intended it.”

Recommendation of submitter

My professional advice is that I strongly recommend that the Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Memorial remains unaltered, for reasons of historical and artistic integrity.

Alexander Adams

7/8 November 2022

Publisher's Note: Please download the PDF of Mr. Adams' Testimony, which includes his Exhibits A and B. They are not included here because it would make this post too long. They are well-worth reading. Just click the link below, or here: PDF White Papers from Defend Arlington.

Links to Important Resources

Here is a link to an informative nine minute video, "The Arlington Confederate Monument," produced by the Abbeville Institute.

The Arlington Confederate Monument

Here is a link to the outstanding scholarly PDF white papers written for Defend Arlington. You can download them all with one click. Please share them far and wide, especially the letter from Defend Arlington's attorney, Karen C. Bennett, to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

PDF White Papers from Defend Arlington

Here is link to an excellent video refuting point by point a historically false Prager University video by Ty Seidule, who is on the naming commission. This one is produced by Bode Lang and entitled "The Civil War Was Not for Slavery."

Click Here for Bode Lang's excellent video,
Take action TODAY!

Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule, Part Two, Conclusion, of the Review, by Gene Kizer, Jr.-UPDATE 12-12-22

Part Two, Conclusion, of the Review of

Robert E. Lee and Me

A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause
by Ty Seidule, Professor Emeritus of History at West Point

By Gene Kizer, Jr.

53K

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - Original post was March 25, 2021. Update December 12, 2022:

Many thanks to Col. Jerry D. Morelock who wrote Part One last week of this two-part review of Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me.

As stated last week, Seidule is on the naming commission, which came about because of Sen. Pocahontas Warren of Massachusetts who knows nothing about Southern history and perhaps even less about her own: ". . . Warren held herself out as Native American, allowing Harvard Law School to use her as cover for its impotent diversity efforts" and:

According to a much-cited investigation by the Boston Globe, Warren consistently checked "white" on personnel forms throughout her career, including in 1981, 1985, and 1998 while employed at the University of Texas. But in the 1986-1987 edition of the Association of American Law School's directory and eight subsequent editions, Warren listed herself as a minority. She began identifying as Native American on personnel forms three years into her post at the University of Pennsylvania. And while multiple professors have attested to the fact that Warren was considered white during the hiring process at Harvard University, in 1995 she self-identified as Native American, and the school's statistics were updated to reflect as much. Harvard recorded Warren as Native American from 1995 to 2004. [https://theintercept.com/2018/10/16/elizabeth-warren-dna-video-native-american-harvard/, accessed 12-3-22]

People such as Elizabeth Warren who have to remind you all the time how virtuous they are, have no virtue at all.

For example, Warren won't talk about her ancestors in Massachusetts and especially Boston who were America's slave traders. They sailed to Africa's west coast and chained poor Africans to decks inside the bowels of their scorching hot New England and New York slave ships. Poor slaves had to endure the stench of vomit, urine, feces and death cooked in oven-like heat with no ventilation for months through the Middle Passage so Elizabeth Warren's ancestors could make money.

Boston and New York were the largest slave trading ports on earth 54 years after the slave trade was outlawed by the U.S. Constitution. W. E. B. Du Bois in his famous book, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870, writes that Boston, New York and Portland, Maine were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States. They had been slave trading illegally since 1808.

Elizabeth Warren wants to hold her money-grubbing, slave-trading New England ancestors above Southerners defending their homes and families from a barbaric, unconstitutional, immoral invasion.

Elizabeth Warren is not good enough to lick the sweat off the hind quarters of a Confederate cavalry horse.

Confederate soldiers, who were outnumbered four to one and outgunned 200 to one, wrote the book on American valor, then came back together into our great country and became the best Americans. That's why 44% of the United States Military today is recruited in the South.

This will continue unless Seidule's naming commission succeeds with its plan to demolish Moses Ezekiel's magnificent 108 year old Confederate Memorial to reconciliation in Arlington National Cemetery.

That memorial is an incredible work of art sculpted in Rome, Italy, by Ezekiel, who was a Confederate soldier and is buried with three others at the base of the monument.

The monument is in the center of 482 Confederate graves in concentric circles around it, that Congress and four presidents including President William McKinley, a Union soldier, who came up with the idea, wanted to honor in ANC to show the good feelings and true reunification of our country after Southerners flocked to the flag in the Spanish-American War.

President William Howard Taft spoke at a UDC reception the evening of the laying of the cornerstone with other dignitaries including Confederate and Union veterans.

President Woodrow Wilson spoke at the monument's dedication two years later, June 4, 1914, again, with Confederate and Union veterans and other dignitaries.

Scroll down for a link to an excellent video by Bode Lang entitled "The Civil War Was Not for Slavery," which tears apart Seidule and the Prager University video he made.

Lang makes Seidule look foolish by showing one clip after another of Seidule's cherry-picked "history" then thoroughly refuting each with equal, and in most cases, better, sources.

Lang proves Seidule's dishonesty, presentism, politicization, and falsification of history.

Here is Part Two, by Gene Kizer, Jr., of the review of Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule.]

A number of good historians have written reviews recently of Ty Seidule's book, Robert E. Lee and Me, including historian Phil Leigh who produced the video, Robert E. Lee and (Woke General) Please Like Me.

All of these reviews note that the tone of Robert E. Lee and Me is a desperate plea by Seidule for academia to "please PLEASE like me!" Academia is Seidule's new home. He has gone from the United States Military Academy at West Point, to Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.1

For Seidule to write such an embarrassing screed on his way into academia is understandable. Most of academia looks down on the military and military personnel. One of my professors at the College of Charleston in 1999, when I was a middle-age student, was Dr. Clark G. Reynolds. We became close friends. He told me on several occasions about the condescension of other faculty members toward military historians and the military itself.

Dr. Reynolds would know because he was a very fine naval historian who had written several important books and served on the faculty of the United States Naval Academy, and as Chair of the Department of Humanities at the United States Merchant Marine Academy.2

Robert E. Lee and Me is a non-history book that is so historically irrelevant it doesn't even have an index.

It was written by a virtue-signaling narcissist whose obvious goal is to make sure academia knows that he is woke and correct on all the leftist political issues of today that resonate in academia. They are the focus of way too many history departments that have hired social justice warriors instead of historians.

It is extremely propagandistic. It is peppered with leftist talking points, references to white supremacy, fights over Confederate monuments, the Emanuel AME Church murders in Charleston, Charlottesville, George Floyd's death, and other current issues that Seiudule uses to tar Robert E. Lee and Southern history.

Seidule is going from the most successful colorblind meritocracy in all of history --- the United States Military --- into academia, much of which is a racist, non-diversified, America-hating, free-speech hating, Marxist-loving indoctrination mill.

Academia has also given us the racist identity politics of Critical Theory, and the anti-white hate and racism of Critical Race Theory that now pollutes much of the country.

The problem with academia is that it is 100% liberal and aggressively politically correct meaning there is no real debate on anything. I know the actual percentage of liberal professors and administrators is closer to only 90%, but the other 10 are not going to speak up. Even the professors who disagree with leftist dogma don't dare say anything and risk losing tenure or having the mob show up at their office. The whole environment is sick, but Seidue's book will fit him right in.

My apologies to the open-minded folks still in academia who are appalled by racist identity politics, Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory, attacks on free speech and all the rest of it. I know there are some good people in academia, but you know I am right about my description of most of it.

On the very first page of Robert E. Lee and Me, Seidule talks about a PragerU video he did in 2015 entitled "Was the Civil War About Slavery?". He states that he answers that question in the first 30 seconds:

Many people don't want to believe that the citizens of the southern states were willing to fight and die to preserve the morally repugnant institution of slavery. There has to be another reason, we are told. Well, there isn't. The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Slavery was, by a wide margin, the single most important cause of the Civil War.3

No it wasn't.

In Seidule's entire book, he does not even mention, once, the economic interconnectedness of the North and South in 1860, yet that was the underlying factor in causing the war, not slavery.

Southerners seceded to govern themselves. They expected to live in peace, but Lincoln could not allow that and the reason was 100% economic.

If it wasn't, Northerners like The Chicago Times would not have said things like:

In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system, or that of a tariff for revenue,4 and these results would likely follow. If protection be wholly withdrawn from our labor, it could not compete, with all the prejudices against it, with the labor of Europe. We should be driven from the market, and millions of our people would be compelled to go out of employment.5 (Emphasis added.)

The Northern economy was largely based on manufacturing for the South and shipping Southern cotton. See Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery by Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank of the Hartford Courant (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005).

Without the South, the North was dead economically.

Without the North, the South, with 100% control of King Cotton, would ascend to dominance in North America, and Lincoln knew it.

Southerners were already paying 85% of the taxes yet 75% of the tax money was being spent in the North. Secession meant turning all that money inward, back on the South.6

Southerners wanted desperately to manufacture for themselves to get out from under the North's inferior goods that were greatly overpriced because of tariffs. In the meantime Southerners could buy from Europe at much lower prices than they had been paying.

The Morrill Tariff, passed by greedy, economically ignorant Northerners in the U.S. Congress after the Cotton States seceded, raised the rate for entry into the North to as high as 60%, as compared to the South's low 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a States Rights nation. This threatened to shift the entire Northern shipping industry into the South overnight as Northern ship captains beat a path to the South where free trade reigned and protective tariffs were unconstitutional.

The loss to the North of their captive Southern manufacturing market, together with the damage to their shipping industry by the Morrill Tariff, was a one-two punch they would not be able to recover from. That's before even considering the loss of the 85% of tax revenue the South had been paying.

But the biggest thing driving Lincoln was the threat of European military aid. It would be for the South like French aid in the American Revolution was to the Colonists. The North would not be able to beat the South in that situation and, again, Lincoln knew it.

He needed to get his war started as quickly as he could so he could set up his blockade and chill European recognition of the South, because, with European recognition of Southern independence, it was game over for Lincoln.

So, Lincoln sent his hostile navy into the South to start the war, five different missions in April, 1861, to Fort Sumter in Charleston and Fort Pickens in Pensacola.7 The Charlestonians tried up to the last minute to avoid war and get Major Anderson to evacuate Fort Sumter but he did not feel like he could. He did, however, realize what Lincoln was doing and he answered a letter to Secretary of War Cameron and Lincoln stating:

. . . a movement made now when the South has been erroneously informed that none such will be attempted, would produce most disastrous results throughout our country. . . . We shall strive to do our duty, though I frankly say that my heart is not in the war which I see is to be thus commenced. . . . (Emphasis added.)

Anderson sees that the war "is to be thus commenced" by Abraham Lincoln, who had to hurry up and get it started or soon the South with European trade and military alliances would be unbeatable.

Abraham Lincoln announced his blockade before the smoke had cleared from the bombardment of Fort Sumter. Just before the Fort Sumter drama, Lincoln had committed his act of war in Pensacola by secretly landing troops in Fort Pickens and breaking a long-time armistice with the Confederates down there.

Lincoln was determined to get his war started as noted by several Northern newspapers including the Providence (R.I.) Daily Post which wrote, April 13, 1861, the day after the commencement of the bombardment of Fort Sumter:

We are to have civil war, if at all, because Abraham Lincoln loves a party better than he loves his country. . . . Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.

"WHY?"
Providence (R.I.) Daily Post
April 13, 1861

It is immoral that Seidule completely ignores this overwhelming evidence in pushing his propaganda but that is the tactic of the left: Do like Goebbels said and repeat the big lie over and over, while ignoring everything else.

With everything Southerners had to gain economically by independence, it is absurd to say they seceded to protect slavery. That takes a lot of nerve anyway, since there were nine slave states in the Union when the guns of Fort Sumter sounded, soon to be increased by one with the admission of West Virginia.

There were only seven in the Confederacy.

On page 9, Seidule writes:

Eleven southern states seceded to protect and expand an African American slave labor system.

Again, Seidule is dead wrong.

As stated, there were nine slave states in the Union when the war started and only seven in the Confederacy. Four of the Union slave states had rejected secession at first: Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina. And in those four states lived 52.4% of white Southerners, a majority.

But those states immediately seceded when Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to invade the South, and their reason was obviously federal coercion, not slavery. They believed, and rightfully so, that Lincoln's call to invade peaceful fellow states was unconstitutional and unconscionable. There was nothing in the Constitution in 1861 that required or allowed Lincoln and the Federal Government to force a sovereign state to do anything much less stay in a union they did not want. The Federal Government had no right to invade an American state, kill its citizens, and destroy its property.

The most widely quoted phrase in the secession debate in the South in the year prior to states calling conventions and actually voting to secede came from the Declaration of Independence:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Of the seven Cotton States that first seceded and formed the Confederacy, only four issued declarations of causes for their secession. In fact, those four declarations of causes were the only four issued by any of the 13 states represented in the Confederate Government.

Missouri and Kentucky were represented in the Confederate Government though they did not officially secede. They remained as two of the six Union slave states the entire war; and Kentucky had slavery well after the war, until the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery kicked in, in December, 1865.

The four declarations of causes do mention slavery along with numerous other grievances including economic, constitutional, and the hatred used by the North to rally its votes in the election of 1860.

That hatred was the primary reason for Southern secession. Northerners had supported murder and terrorism against the South. They had financed John Brown and sent him into the South to murder Southerners. He had hacked pro-South settlers to death in front of their families in Kansas.

Lincoln's party also used Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis as a campaign document. They had hundreds of thousands of them printed and distributed coast to coast. It called for slave insurrection and the throats of Southerners to be cut in the night.

Would you allow people who hated your guts and were already at war with you to rule over you? What kind of stupid, cowardly people would do that? Certainly not Southerners.

But the simplistic Seidule characterizes Southern secession like the fake news media characterizes those who have serious concerns about the integrity of the 2020 election. Seidule writes:

Unwilling to accept the results of a fair, democratic election, they illegally seized U. S. territory, violently.

The truth of the 2020 election will come out eventually but there are certainly an enormous number of legitimate concerns that call into account Seidule's description of a "fair, democratic election" in 2020. The Texas law suit which was joined by 20 other states, lays out legion legitimate issues of corruption and constitutional violations that have never been adjudicated by a court. The Navarro Report also goes into great detail. Anybody with a brain knows that when mail in voting jumps from 5% to 35% at the same time that signature verification standards are lowered or dropped, it is a formula for disaster.

For over a year, Southerners debated seceding from the Union. After all, five times in U.S. history Northerners had threatened to secede from the Union so nobody questioned the right of secession, not even Horace Greeley, until he realize Southern secession would affect his money. Then he wanted war like the rest of them. Before that, he believe "Let our erring sisters go" and he editorialized in favor of the right of secession.

Three states had formally reserved the right of secession before acceding to the Constitution. They were New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia. Because all the other states accepted the reserved right of secession of New York, Rhode Island and Virginia, those states had it too, because all the states entered the Union as equals with the exact same rights.

The Stetson Law Review, a publication of the Stetson University College of Law, did a good article on the right of secession entitled "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession" by H. Newcomb Morse. He writes that the War Between the States did not prove that secession was illegal because:

[M]any incidents both preceding and following the War support the proposition that the Southern States did have the right to secede from the Union. Instances of nullification prior to the War Between the States, contingencies under which certain states acceded to the Union, and the fact that the Southern States were made to surrender the right to secession all affirm the existence of a right to secede . . .8

He adds that the Constitution's "failure to forbid secession" and amendments dealing with secession that were proposed in Congress as Southern states were seceding strengthened his argument that:

[T]he Southern States had an absolute right to secede from the Union prior to the War Between the States.9

Of course they did.

How can you believe in the Declaration of Independence and governments deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed and not believe a people can leave a government that has become tyrannical and oppressive. That was the essence of the Revolutionary War and the foundation of our country.

Northern hate, not unlike the hate we have in America today, drove the South from the Union, that and supporting terrorists and murderers like John Brown and encouraging mass murder in the South like Republicans did with Hinton Helper's book.

The one thing about American history that you can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt is that the North did not go to war to end slavery. They went to war because they faced economic annihilation when the Southern States seceded and took their captive manufacturing market and their tariff revenue with them.

The Corwin Amendment which passed the Northern Congress and was ratified by several states would have left black people in slavery forever, even beyond the reach of Congress. That was the true feeling of the North and Abraham Lincoln in 1861 and it proves the North's motive was not to end slavery. And there is much much more irrefutable proof.

A near-unanimous resolution entitled the War Aims Resolution established early-on what the North was fighting for. It was passed by the Northern Congress in July, 1861, three months after the bombardment of Fort Sumter:

. . . That this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or institutions [slavery] of the States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution [which allowed and protected slavery], and to preserve the Union. . . .10

It is unquestionable and irrefutable that the North did not go to war to end slavery.

They went to war because they wanted to dominate the country economically. Northern wealth and power were all dependent on the Union. That's why Lincoln said over and over it was about preserving the Union, not ending slavery.

That puts Seidule's Union Army in a pretty bad light. Lincoln's troops were down here in the South. Southern troops were not up there in the North menacing any Northern city.

Why didn't Lincoln just remove his troops who were on sovereign South Carolina and Florida soil? If he had done that there would have been no war, no 750,000 deaths and over a million maimed.

The hateful Seidule argued against memorializing West Point graduates who fought for the Confederacy. He writes:

I believed we should exclude them. After all, they died fighting against the United States. I argued stridently that West Point should honor only those who fought for the Constitution we swear to support and defend. West Point's mottos of "Duty, Honor, Country" (especially country) would seem to argue forcefully for exclusion of those dedicated to the country's destruction.11

Southerners were certainly not dedicated to the destruction of the Union. No Confederate EVER said any such absurdity. The United States could have easily continued into the future as a major power on this earth but with just a few less states.

Seidule talks about support of the Constitution but Northern violations of the Constitution are one of the many legitimate grievances Southerners had and so stated many times. Many Northerners believed there was a higher power than the U.S. Constitution they should adhere to (and it always just happened to increase their political power).

Other Northerners like William Lloyd Garrison believed the Constitution was a "covenant with death" and "an agreement with Hell."

William H. Seward, Sr., Lincoln's secretary of state, asserted in 1850 that “[…] there is a Higher Law than the Constitution.”

None of these self-righteous Northerners in the antebellum era ever proposed a plan to end slavery such as they had used in the North with compensated, gradual emancipation. That is how all nations ended slavery and it would have been easy to do but Northerners were not about to spend their hard-earned sweatshop money to free the slaves in the South who would then go North and be job competition.

Lincoln did talk about it time to time but Lincoln's primary idea for dealing with slavery was to send black people back to Africa or into a place where they could survive. This was Lincoln's plan his entire life. See Colonization after Emancipation, Lincoln and the Movement for Black Resettlement by Phillip W. Magness and Sebastian N. Page (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).

In Chapter 7, page 238, Seidule writes:

Lee acknowledged defeat but felt neither he nor the white South had done anything wrong. In his famous General Orders No. 9, Lee bid his soldiers farewell. He stated his version of what the war meant and why it ended, initiating the Lost Cause myth. The Army of Northern Virginia "succumbed to overwhelming numbers and resources," a kind of code criticizing the immigrant army of the United States supported by unsavory businessmen and ruthless politicians.

To prove how utterly disingenuous Seidule is, below is Gen. Lee's General Orders, No. 9. Compare what Lee actually said with what Seidule wrote above. See if you can find "a kind of code criticizing the immigrant army of the United States supported by unsavory businessmen and ruthless politicians" in Gen. Lee's short, heartfelt address. This, alone, proves what a fraud Seidule's entire book is.

General Orders, No. 9
Robert E. Lee's Farewell Address to
The Army of Northern Virginia

Hd. Qrs. Army of N. Va.
General Orders
No. 9

After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.

I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to this result from no distrust of them; but feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that could compensate for the loss that must have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen.

By the terms of the agreement, officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed; and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extend to you His blessing and protection. With an unceasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your Country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration for myself, I bid you all an affectionate farewell.

R.E. Lee, Genl.12

Lee was almost always outnumbered and outgunned.

Grant himself admitted this when he wrote Secretary of War Edwin Stanton July 22, 1865 to explain how he won the war:

The resources of the enemy, and his numerical strength, were far inferior to ours. . . I therefore determined . . . to hammer continuously against the armed force of the enemy and his resources, until by mere attrition, if in no other way, there should be nothing left to him but . . . submission. . . "13

The numbers showing the Union advantage over Lee are startling. Here's one example. Phil Leigh writes:

Grant began his forty-day campaign with an approximate two-to-one numerical advantage. He had 124,000 troops compared to 66,000 for Lee. At the end, Grant had suffered 55,000 casualties, which was also about twice those of Lee. Losses for the two sides during the battles at the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and Cold Harbor correspond closely to the federal disasters at Second Bull Run, Chancellorsville, and Fredericksburg.14

The North had four times the white population of the South. While slaves helped the Southern economy, and many served as Confederate soldiers, they were not a big source of manpower.

The North had a functioning government, an army, navy, merchant marine, sound financial system. They had a pipeline to the retched refuse of the world who came here often with only the shirts on their backs to find the Union Army recruiter with bonuses in hand, food and clothing.

Over 25% of the Union Army was foreign born but as James McPherson points out, over 30% of the North was foreign born. The North was a wild busting-at-the-seams society. The scenes in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York are historically accurate.

Some speculate that because of the wildness caused by massive immigration during the 1850s that the North would have had a revolution if not for the western lands where they could send their surplus population. "Go west, young man, and grow up with the country!" said Horace Greeley.

So Lincoln starting a war knowing he had four times the white population of the South plus unlimited numbers of people verses the South's impossibility of adding more people because of the Union blockade, is despicable but understandable. The Republican Party was new, and what is better than a war to give it power, money and solidify it in the political life of a nation.

Lincoln certainly figured it would be a short war but he found otherwise, that a people fighting for independence will fight until there are oceans of blood covering their sacred soil, and until their society is completely destroyed.

The Northern manufacturing for armaments, ammunition, guns and uniforms was unlimited while it was non-existent in the South. Seidule's Union soldiers were always well-fed and had the latest weaponry but Confederates were always hungry, cold and often barefoot.

There were 19 marine engine factories in the North. There were zero in the South.

Northern society throughout the war barely noticed a difference in their day to day lives while Southerners suffered at the hands of Seidule's barbaric animals in the South raping, pillaging, murdering. All of that did go on and has been well-documented, as in every war. The great British historian, Antony Beevor, estimates that 2,000,000 German women were raped by the Russian army at the end of World War II as it conquered Germany. Union soldiers raping black women is especially documented in the Official Records.

Gen. Lee often could not do things on the battlefield because he did not have the resources. That was never a problem for the North.

The Federal ration of grain for their horses was ten pounds a day per horse. Lee wrote this to President Davis August 24, 1863:

Nothing prevents my advancing now [against Mead] but the fear of killing our artillery horses. They are a much reduced, and the hot weather and scarce forage keeps them so. The cavalry also suffer and I fear to set them at work. Some days we get a pound of corn per horse and some days more; some none. Our limit is five per day per horse. You can judge of our prospects. . . . Everything is being done by me that can be to recruit the horses. I have been obliged to diminish the number of guns in the artillery, and fear I shall have to lose more.15

The South faced the same problem with railroads. Of the 30,000-plus miles that existed nationwide in 1861, 70% was in the North. There were 21,300 miles of track in the North and Midwest with 45,000 miles of telegraph wire while in the South there was only 9,022 miles with 5,000 miles of telegraph wire. The South had a much larger territory to cover with much smaller resources.16

Ramsdell writes:

For more than a year before the end came the railroads were in such a wretched condition that a complete breakdown seemed always imminent. As the tracks wore out on the main lines they were replenished by despoiling the branch lines; but while the expedient of feeding the weak roads to the more important afforded the latter some temporary sustenance, it seriously weakened the armies, since it steadily reduced the area from which supplies could be drawn.17

So, again, Gen. Lee's "overwhelming resources" of the North is correct and Seidule is wrong. The Lost Cause Myth is not a myth. It is simply the Southern view of what happened, and it is both accurate and truthful.

On the other hand, the Righteous Cause Myth of the North is truly a myth --- no, not myth, LIE. Their "righteous cause" was their money, power, and the lust to rule the country.

Lysander Spooner, who was an abolitionist in Massachusetts, agreed:

On the part of the North, the war was carried on, not to liberate the slaves, but by a government that had always perverted and violated the Constitution, to keep the slaves in bondage; and was still willing to do so, if the slaveholders could be thereby induced to stay in the Union.

The principle, on which the war was waged by the North, was simply this: That men may rightfully be compelled to submit to, and support, a government that they do not want; and that resistance, on their part, makes them traitors and criminals.18

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, a West Point graduate and true American hero, is a much better representative of West Point and the United States Army than the virtue-signaling "please, academia, like me!" of Ty Seidule. Eisenhower is a much better judge of honor and character.

Gen. Eisenhower, 1st Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, in World War II, later president of the United States for eight years, had a picture of Gen. Robert E. Lee on his wall in the White House his entire time there.

Eisenhower speaks with some of the 101st Airborne Division June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day invasion.
Eisenhower speaks with some of the 101st Airborne Division June 5, 1944, the day before the D-Day invasion.

Like President John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower had great respect for Gen. Lee and his cause, and he appreciated Lee's efforts to bind up the nation's wounds after our bloodiest war.

On August 1, 1960, a New York dentist, Dr. Leon W. Scott, wrote an angry letter to President Eisenhower excoriating him for having that picture of Lee in his White House office.

Scott wrote: "I do not understand  how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, and why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me. / The most outstanding thing that Robert E. Lee did, was to devote his best efforts to the destruction of the United States Government, and I am sure that you do not say that a person who tries to destroy our Government is worthy of being held as one of our heroes."19

President Eisenhower wrote back on the 9th:

Dear Dr. Scott:

Respecting your August 1 inquiry calling attention to my often expressed admiration for General Robert E. Lee, I would say, first, that we need to understand that at the time of the War between the States the issue of secession had remained unresolved for more than 70 years. Men of probity, character, public standing and unquestioned loyalty, both North and South, had disagreed over this issue as a matter of principle from the day our Constitution was adopted.

General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.

From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee's caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation's wounds once the bitter struggle was over, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.

Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.

Sincerely,
Dwight D. Eisenhower20

Robert E. Lee, oil on canvas, by Edward Calledon Bruce, 1865.
Robert E. Lee, oil on canvas, by Edward Calledon Bruce, 1865.

Seidule favors the term "civil war" for our conflict of 1861 to '65. He writes:

When I hear 'the War of Northern Aggression' or 'the War Between the States,' I know a Confederate sympathizer or argument against equal rights will soon follow.

Gen. Eisenhower used "War Between the States" in his letter, above, and in that one letter is more truthful, accurate American history than in Seidule's entire book.

Seidule's book, as many who have reviewed it conclude, is nothing but a desperate supplication for academia to please like him.

Can you imagine Gen. Eisenhower or Gen. Lee lowering himself to the level needed to write such a book?

Seidule is a writer of woke, politically correct propaganda, which means he will fit into academia like a glove.

Click Here for Bode Lang's excellent video,
"The Civil War Was Not for Slavery."

Click Here for a short video by the Abbeville Institute on the
Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

Here is the caption beneath Abbeville's video:

Nov 9, 2022

The Naming Commission has recommended the removal of the Arlington Confederate Monument. This would not only be a historical travesty and a barbaric leveling of art, it would lay waste to the very message the monument was intended to convey: fraternity, healing, and reconciliation. Tell your Representative you want to stop this heinous act of cultural destruction.

NOTES:

1 Hamilton College appears to be a charming, small liberal arts college founded in 1793 and named for Alexander Hamilton who was on the first Board of Trustees when it was Hamilton-Oneida Academy. Hamilton.edu, accessed 3-22-21.

2 Dr. Reynolds also taught at the University of Maine, and was History Departmental Chair at the College of Charleston (SC). Among his books are Command of the Sea: The History and Strategy of Maritime Empires; Navies in History; History and the Sea; The Fast Carriers: The Forging of an Air Navy; and On the Warpath in the Pacific: Admiral Jocko Clark and the Fast Carrier. His complete bio is at www.WorldHistory101-102.com. Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clark_G._Reynolds.

3 Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me, A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2020), 1. Seidule did not capitalize "southern" in his quotation. I always capitalize it and Northern, as well as North and South, which are obviously proper names that should be capitalized.

4 See also Footnote #47 on page 44 of Gene Kizer, Jr., Slavery Was Not the Cause of the War Between the States, The Irrefutable Argument. (Charleston, SC: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2014) for the difference between tariff for revenue and protective tariff. What is meant by "a tariff for revenue" is a small tariff to raise a small amount of revenue to pay for the operation of a small federal government such as the government of the Confederate States of America. Southerners had always wanted free trade with the world. They believed in as small a tariff as possible. Contrast a small tariff for revenue with the huge protective tariffs the North loved that were punitive and meant to deter free trade so that one would be forced to buy from the North at jacked-up rates that were not determined by market competition but were jacked-up to the level of the tariff. The tariff is the perfect thing to contrast the differences in North and South. The moment the South was out of the Union, they made protective tariffs unconstitutional while the North passed the astronomical Morrill Tariff. The Morrill Tariff prevented the recovery of the Northern economy and made war Abraham Lincoln's only choice to save the North from economic annihilation. Of course, Lincoln's choice resulted in 800,000 deaths and over a million wounded out of a population of approximately 31 million.

5 Daily Chicago Times, "The Value of the Union," December 10, 1860, in Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession, Vol. II, 573-574.

6 Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr., It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History,  2020), 103.

7 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 142.

8 Morse, "The Foundations and Meaning of Secession," 420.

9 Ibid.

10 The War Aims Resolution is also known by the names of its sponsors, Representative John J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee: the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, or just the Crittenden Resolution. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives July 22, 1861, and the Senate July 25, 1861. There were only two dissenting votes in the House and five in the Senate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crittenden-Johnson_Resolution, accessed March 29, 2014.

11 Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me, 4.

12 Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), Vol. 4, 154-55.

13 Phil Leigh, Civil War Chat, "Ty Seidule's Falsehoods About Grant and Lee", https://civilwarchat.wordpress.com/2021/02/24/ty-seidules-falsehoods-about-grant-and-lee/, accessed 3-25-21.

14 Ibid.

15 Charles W. Ramsdell, "General Robert E. Lee's Horse Supply, 1862-1865" in Gene Kizer, Jr., compiler, Charles W. Ramsdell, Dean of Southern Historians (Charleston: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2017), 250. The quotation is from the OR, ser. I, v XXIX, pt. 2, 664-665.

16 "Railroads In The Civil War: Facts and Statistics (North vs South)," https://www.american-rails.com/civil.html, accessed 3-23-21.

17 Charles W. Ramsdell, "The Confederate Government and the Railroads," in Gene Kizer, Jr., compiler, Charles W. Ramsdell, Dean of Southern Historians, 300.

18 Lysander Spooner, "No Treason. No. 1, Introductory," Boston, by "the Author, No. 14 Bromfield Street. 1867".

19 Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee, August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20.

20 Dwight D. Eisenhower letter, August 9, 1960, to Leon W. Scott, in "Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee," August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20.

Robert E. Lee and Me by Ty Seidule, Part One of a Two-Part Review-UPDATE 12-5-22

Part One of a Two-Part Review of

Robert E. Lee and Me
A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule, Professor Emeritus of History at West Point
53K

[Publisher's Note, by Gene Kizer, Jr. - Original post was March 17, 2021. Update December 5, 2022:

I am honored to present Col. Jerry D. Morelock's review, below, as Part One of a two-part review of Ty Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me. Next week will be Part Two, by me.

Seidule is on the naming commission which came about because of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who introduced an amendment in 2021 to the FY2022 NDAA in the Senate Armed Services Committee to change the names of the military bases in the South named for Confederates. We won two World Wars from those bases, which are around a century old. They were named for Confederates as part of the reconciliation of our country and most, such as Fort Bragg and Fort Benning, are legendary.

Warren's legislation has morphed into the changing of over a thousand historically inspired names of streets, monuments, and patches making it an unbelievable waste of taxpayer money at a time when some of our servicemen and women are on foodstamps because they can't make ends meet.

Now, Seidule and the naming commission have concluded that they need to demolish the 108 year old Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, which symbolizes the reconciliation and reunification of North and South after the War Between the States.

The memorial, entitled "New South," was created by internationally renowned Jewish sculptor, Moses Ezekiel, who was a Confederate soldier and is buried at the base of his monument.

The idea for a Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery came from Union soldier and later president, William McKinley.

McKinley said that every grave, Union and Confederate, was a testament to American valor.

Congress and two other presidents, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, as well as veterans North and South supported the Confederate Memorial but what difference does history and tradition make to a Woke political commission out to erase history. Their standard is "presentism," the application of the goofy standards of today rather than peer-reviewed and debated scholarly history.

Scroll down for a link to an excellent video by Bode Lang entitled "The Civil War Was Not for Slavery," which tears apart Seidule and the Prager University video he made.

Frankly, I have lost all respect for Prager University. They might present some aspects of American history well, but they are false and unhistorical to promote Seidule as a truthful expert on Southern history.

Lang makes Seidule look foolish by showing one clip after another of Seidule's cherry-picked "history" then thoroughly refuting each with equal, and in most cases, better, sources.

Lang proves Seidule's dishonesty, politicization and falsification of history.

Below, is Col. Morelock's bio followed by his excellent assessment of Seidule's Robert E. Lee and Me.]

JERRY D. MORELOCK, PhD, Colonel, U.S. Army, ret., is a 1969 West Point graduate who served 36 years in uniform. A decorated Vietnam War combat veteran, his assignments included Pentagon tours on the Department of the Army staff and in the Strategic Plans and Policy Directorate, Joint Chiefs of Staff. His final active duty assignment was head of the history department of the US Army Command & General Staff College. An award-winning author, he has published several books and hundreds of journal and magazine articles. His books include Generals of the Bulge: Leadership in the U.S. Army’s Greatest Battle (Stackpole, 2015) and (as a contributing author) Pershing’s Lieutenants: American Military Leadership in World War I edited by David Zabecki and Douglas Mastriano (Osprey, 2020).

After Army retirement, he was Executive Director of the Winston Churchill Memorial & Library at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri (2000-2004) and is adjunct faculty professor of history and political science at Westminster. He was Editor in Chief of Armchair General magazine (2004-2015), and currently is Senior Editor/Senior Historian for three military history magazines.

Don’t Be Fooled by Ty Seidule's "West Point Professor/Brigadier General" Misleading Credentials

by Jerry D. Morelock

Lest any potential buyer/reader of this book be swayed by the seemingly "impressive military credentials" of the author, please let me explain what those credentials really comprise and represent when the author acquired them by being a former 'permanent professor' and 'department head' in the academic department of the US Military Academy at West Point.

First of all, Ty Seidule did not earn his rank of 'Brigadier General' by being competitively selected by a Department of the Army promotion selection board from among his peers, but, per standard procedure for retiring USMA academic department heads, was merely given that general officer1 rank upon his retirement from military service (that is, as he exited military service, he was 'awarded' that rank -- essentially like a long-serving corporate executive would get a 'gold watch' as he walked out the door).

Seidule never served on active duty as a 'general officer' commanding a tactical unit (apparently, based on his bio, he commanded a tank platoon – a Lieutenant’s command – and his highest unit command appears to be an armored battalion – a Lieutenant Colonel’s command); so some of the reviews on this book asking, "Was he a warrior general or was he not?" sadly miss the point because they are simply unaware of where Seidule's 'general' rank came from, and not their fault -- Seidule was never a general until he retired.

Second, Seidule's author bio emphasizes that he served on active duty for "36 years" (coincidentally, the same as I did) but also notes that he spent "two decades" teaching history at West Point – so, immediately, that means Seidule had, at most, 16 years of 'real' military service in the 'real' Army -- serving on the staff & faculty at West Point is hardly 'real' military service, as it is a completely artificial environment in every possible way (how do I know? my own 36 years of service included eight years at USMA, four as a cadet, graduating in 1969, and four more years later serving on the USMA staff & faculty).

Being a 'permanent professor/department head' at West Point means serving in the artificial, hermetically-sealed environment that exists at the Military Academy, completely separate and distinct from the day-to-day, rough and tumble 'real' Army.

The bottom line is that the title 'Brig. Gen.' given to a former USMA permanent professor/department head does NOT carry the same weight and prestige as an Army officer EARNING that rank on his own military merits -- it was merely given to Seidule for 'staying the course' for 20 years as a West Point professor.

And his claimed '36 years' of military service is really only, at best, 16 years in the REAL ARMY when his 20 years in an academic department at USMA is factored into his overall service.

I only present this information to alert readers that there is a profound difference between 'real' US Army brigadier generals and those who, like Seidule, are simply awarded that rank upon retirement; plus when his claimed 36 years of military service has the 20 years serving at West Point removed, Seidule's actual military service is about the same as that of an Army Major.

His book on Lee is nothing more than his revisionist 'sucking up' to his new civilian academic buddies, ingratiating himself into the camaraderie of his new 'Woke' buds and has nothing of any historical revelation to share in this so-called 'book.'

It's not a researched, thoughtful book based on new information or new evaluation of previous information. In fact, it ignores Lee’s significant post-Civil War efforts to bring the divided nation back together – which was Lee’s “finest hour” as, for only one example, historian Charles Bracelen Flood revealed in his book Lee: The Final Years.

Seidule's book seems merely to be his own 'Hey! I'm so, so WOKE now!' confessional, but disingenuously using his 'BG' rank, his misleading ’36 years’ service, and touting his 'so what?' West Point service to try to trick potential readers/buyers into spending actual money on his worthless book based on his misleading ‘military credentials.’

Don't waste your money.

 

Click Here for Bode Lang's excellent video,
"The Civil War Was Not for Slavery."
Click Here for a short video by the Abbeville Institute on the
Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

Here is the caption beneath Abbeville's video:

Nov 9, 2022

The Naming Commission has recommended the removal of the Arlington Confederate Monument. This would not only be a historical travesty and a barbaric leveling of art, it would lay waste to the very message the monument was intended to convey: fraternity, healing, and reconciliation. Tell your Representative you want to stop this heinous act of cultural destruction.

 

Next Week:

Part Two of a Two-Part Review of

Robert E. Lee and Me, A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule, Professor Emeritus of History at West Point     

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

NOTES:

1 The term “general officer” means an officer of the Army, Air Force, or Marine Corps serving in or having the grade of general, lieutenant general, major general, or brigadier general. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/10/101#b_4, Accessed 3-17-21.

Arlington National Cemetery’s 108 Year Old Confederate Memorial Is Slated for Demolition

We MUST NOT ALLOW the Desecration of
Arlington National Cemetery
Arlington National Cemetery, 109 year old Confederate Memorial to the Reconciliation and Reunification of our great nation after our bloodiest war. It was the brainchild of Union soldier and president, William McKinley, who said "every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor." The sculptor, internationally renowned Jewish artist Moses Jacob Ezekiel, was a VMI Confederate soldier. Art critic Michael Robert Patterson states that "no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art." In a barbaric crime against art and history, the naming commission and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin want the monument demolished.
Arlington National Cemetery, 109 year old Confederate Memorial to the Reconciliation and Reunification of our great nation after our bloodiest war. It was the brainchild of Union soldier and president, William McKinley, who said "every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor." The sculptor, internationally renowned Jewish artist Moses Jacob Ezekiel, was a VMI Confederate soldier. Art critic Michael Robert Patterson states that "no sculptor, as far as known, has ever, in any one memorial told as much history as has Ezekiel in his monument at Arlington; and every human figure in it, as well as every symbol, is in and of itself a work of art." In a barbaric crime against art and history, the naming commission and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin want the monument demolished.

The magnificent 108 year old Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery is slated for demolition thanks to Ty Seidule and the politicized Woke naming commission whose mission is to erase Southern history from the Confederate era.

The Confederate Memorial was enthusiastically promoted by Congress, three presidents and veterans North and South to signify the RECONCILIATION and REUNIFICATION of our great nation after the War Between the States.

Educate yourself on this abomination and take action! Time is short!

Here is a link to an informative nine minute video, "The Arlington Confederate Monument," produced by the Abbeville Institute.

The Arlington Confederate Monument

Please link to this blog article and share it far and wide!

We can not allow our nation's most sacred burial ground to be dishonored and stained by a Woke political commission. Remember, the Confederate Memorial was the idea of Union veteran and President of the United States, William McKinley. It was enthusiastically approved by Congress. Another president, William Howard Taft, spoke at the laying of the cornerstone. A third president, Woodrow Wilson, spoke at the dedication ceremony June 4, 1914 as did Union and Confederate veterans.

In the War Between the States, 750,000 died and over a million were maimed.

The Confederate Memorial was designed and constructed by internationally renowned Jewish sculptor Moses Ezekiel, himself a Confederate veteran, a graduate of VMI. He is buried with three other Southerners at the base of his beautiful monument thus making it their headstone but also the grave markers for 462 other Confederate graves arranged in concentric circles around the monument and an intergral part of the memorial as was intended by Congress, three presidents, and veterans North and South.

Aerial view of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery with over 500 graves of Confederate military personnel and some family in concentric circles around the monument. Sculptor Moses Ezekiel is buried with two other Confederate soldiers and one Confederate sailor around the base. The monument is literally their headstone but the naming commission and Secretary Austin want the monument destroyed. Respect for Southern dead is not something they care about despite 44% of today's United States military being recruited in the South.
Aerial view of the Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery with over 500 graves of Confederate military personnel and some family in concentric circles around the monument. Sculptor Moses Ezekiel is buried with two other Confederate soldiers and one Confederate sailor around the base. The monument is literally their headstone but the naming commission and Secretary Austin want the monument destroyed. Respect for Southern dead is not something they care about despite 44% of today's United States military being recruited in the South.
View from the ground at Arlington National Cemetery of the beautiful Confederate Memorial to the reconciliation of North and South. The Woke naming commission and Secretary Austin want it demolished in the cheapest way possible. Photo courtesy Derrick Johnson.
View from the ground at Arlington National Cemetery of the beautiful Confederate Memorial to the reconciliation of North and South. The Woke naming commission and Secretary Austin want it demolished in the cheapest way possible. Photo courtesy Derrick Johnson.
Every American, no matter one's politics, should be OUTRAGED

Here are two good articles from Chronicles Magazine:

Monuments Matter

The Fate of Moses Jacob Ezekiel and His Memorial to the Confederate Dead

Take action TODAY!
Do not allow a Woke, political commission whose standard for historical interpretation is not truth but presentism, based on politics and the goofy woke standards of today.
Call and write your congressional representatives every week and tell them that the Confederate Memorial to the reconciliation and reunification of our great country after a war in which 750,000 Americans died and over a million were maimed, must stand in its magnificent beauty and symbolism for all time!

President William McKinley said after the Spanish-American war in 1898:

. . . every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor . . . And the time has now come . . . when in the spirit of fraternity we should share in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers . . . The cordial feeling now happily existing between the North and 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 this year just passed by the sons and grandsons of those heroic dead.

 

God Bless America

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Five, GENERAL ROBERT E. LEE, General Orders, No. 9, Address to the Army of Northern Virginia, CSA, April 10, 1865

A Summary of
The Last Words
The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States
by Michael R. Bradley
Part Five
General Robert E. Lee
General Orders, No. 9
Address to the Army of Northern Virginia, CSA
April 10, 1865
The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley, front cover.
General Robert E. Lee, actual picture during the war, fall, 1864, on Traveller, Petersburg, VA.
General Robert E. Lee, actual picture during the war, fall, 1864, on Traveller, Petersburg, VA.

Hd. Qrs. Army of N. Va.
General Orders
No. 9

After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude, the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.

I need not tell the brave survivors of so many hard fought battles, who have remained steadfast to the last, that I have consented to this result from no distrust of them; but feeling that valor and devotion could accomplish nothing that could compensate for the loss that must have attended the continuance of the contest, I determined to avoid the useless sacrifice of those whose past services have endeared them to their countrymen.

By the terms of the agreement, officers and men can return to their homes and remain until exchanged. You will take with you the satisfaction that proceeds from the consciousness of duty faithfully performed; and I earnestly pray that a Merciful God will extend to you His blessing and protection. With an unceasing admiration of your constancy and devotion to your Country, and a grateful remembrance of your kind and generous consideration for myself, I bid you all an affectionate farewell.

R.E. Lee, Genl.1

 

ROBERT EDWARD LEE TOOK COMMAND of the Confederate army defending Richmond in the spring of 1862 following the wounding of Joseph E. Johnston at the Battle of Fair Oaks. Almost immediately, Lee changed the name of his command to the Army of Northern Virginia, and, as such, it would win enduring fame as a staunch military organization. Within a few weeks the men of the ANVa, as it was styled in dispatches, formed a personal bond with their commanding officer, a bond more intense than that shared by the soldiers of any other command with their leader.

The confidence of the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia in their general was unbounded. If Lee“Marse Robert” was their affectionate nickname for himsaid “do this,” they did it without question, confident that their well-being and the success of their cause required it.

Lee was a realist and had told the Confederate government many months before that if the struggle became a siege of Petersburg and Richmond, the war would be lost. The South simply did not have the resources to win a protracted fight of that nature. Still, Lee and his men endured, looking for any opening to avoid the seemingly inevitable.

On April 9, 1865, the inevitable became reality. Following a brief exchange of notes, Lee met with Ulysses S. Grant, commander of all U.S. forces, at the house of Wilmer McLean at Appomattox Court House and signed the terms of surrender, which ended the existence of the Army of Northern Virginia. That same night Lee instructed his adjutant, Colonel Charles Marshall, to write an order to the army bidding them farewell. The address written by Marshall reflects the grace and style of writing produced by a classical education as well as the directness expected in a military communication.

On the morning of April 10, the weather was rainy and a constant stream of visitors to Lee's headquarters tent prevented Marshall from concentrating on his task. About ten o'clock, Lee ordered Marshall to get into Lee's personal ambulance so he could work without interruption. When the first draft, in pencil, was finished, it was taken to Lee who struck out an entire paragraph, made one or two other minor changes, and then instructed Marshall to have it copied in ink with copies going to all Corps commanders. These were all signed in person by Lee and then issued to the appropriate officers. During the day many people made their own copies and brought them to Lee and he signed many of them.

The “original” of General Orders, No. 9 was the pencil draft which Lee amended and it was most certainly destroyed when the copies in ink were made. There is no record of the contents of the paragraph Lee edited out of Marshall's first draft but one may assume Lee thought it might encourage continued bitter feeling. President John F. Kennedy admired Lee for that sentiment when he wrote:

[A]s a New Englander, I recognize that the South is still the land of Washington, who made our Nation - of Jefferson, who shaped its direction - and of Robert E. Lee who, after gallant failure, urged those who had followed him in bravery to reunite America in purpose and courage.2

“General Orders, No. 9” became a regular part of the meetings of the United Confederate Veterans, especially those “Bivouacs,” as the local groups were styled, made up of veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia. A hundred years later, at the time of the Civil War Centennial, a direct descendant of Robert E. Lee made a recording of the farewell address. This recording was released at Appomattox on April 10, 1965.

In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, the character and reputation of Lee have come under attack. It has been alleged that Lee lost the war for the South because he was too aggressive, losing lives in attacks instead of husbanding his numbers. Such criticism ignores the military realities of the situation. It may sound wise to remain on the defensive until one's opponent makes a mistake and only then attack. But, what if one's opponent does not make a major mistake that would allow for a successful attack? The point to be defended will be lost. Joseph Johnston used the “passive-aggressive” model in the Atlanta Campaign and every reader of the history of the war knows how that ended. Lee had little choice but to aggressively make his openings.

Much has been made of late that Lee owned slaves. That is not true. Lee was made the executor of the will of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, grandson of Martha Washington and step-grandson and adopted son of George Washington. Custis was the owner of the Arlington Estate, which he passed to his daughter, Mary Anna, wife of Robert E. Lee. Today, that estate is our nation's most sacred burial ground: Arlington National Cemetery.

As executor,3 Lee was responsible for the settlement of Custis's will, and among Custis's possessions were slaves. The executor is not the owner of Custis's property. Lee, like all responsible executors, carried out the stipulations of the will he was executing. These stipulations included the provision that all the Arlington slaves be set free within five years. Lee did this, completing the process in 1862. Lee had labeled slavery a moral problem in 1856 but he saw no ready solution to the matter. At any rate, being administrator of the will of his father-in-law does not make Lee the “owner” of his father-in-law's slaves.

Lee has also been accused of fostering the rise of the “Myth of the Lost Cause” and is claimed to have begun this process in his farewell address. Although called a myth, there is a great deal of truth in the arguments presented under the name “Lost Cause.”

The “Lost Cause” argues that secession, not slavery, caused the war. This is true. If no Southern state had left the Union, who, in the North, would have called for a war to end slavery? The answer is obvious.

This so-called myth argues that the war was fought over States' Rights, i.e., state sovereignty and supremacy over the Federal Government, which had been created as the agent of the states for certain highly limited purposes of government. This was the belief of the Founding Fathers and it is clearly proclaimed in the secession documents of the Southern States. Most foreigners such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Charles Dickens, and the British historian, Sir John Dalberg Acton,4 later Lord Acton, agreed. Acton wrote this to Lee a year-and-a-half after Appomattox:

Without presuming to decide the purely legal question, on which it seems evident to me from Madison's and Hamilton's papers that the Fathers of the Constitution were not agreed, I saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy. . . . Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization; and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.5

Not surprisingly, States' Rights had recently been upheld by the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott Case (1857) with respect to slavery.

The point at which Lee is accused specifically of fostering the Lost Cause position is “compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources.” A look at the 1860 census of the United States shows that Lee was right. The population of the nation in that year was 31,443,321. Of this number 22,000,000 (round figures) lived in the states which remained in the Union, 9,000,000 in the states which seceded. Of the 9,000,000 people in the South almost 4,000,000 were slaves. While the African American population gave strength to the Southern economy and war effort through its labor, it was not a major source of manpower for the armies although some free people of color became Confederate soldiers. The 5,000,000 white population was divided in its loyalties and a significant number of white Southerners joined the U.S. forces.

So, in critical manpower, it was over 22,000,000 white Northerners versus less than 5,000,000 white Southerners. Obviously, the South did face overwhelming numbers. This does not detract from the military accomplishments of the U.S. Army but it does show the “Lost Cause Myth” is no myth.

Lee also had a very clear grasp of the infrastructure which supported both armies. The 1860 census shows that 80% of the country's manufacturing and most of the existing railroad mileage were in states that remained in the Union. The United States also had a stable monetary system based on bullion and a well-functioning government that had been in place for over 60 years. It had an army, navy, merchant marine fleet and relationships with most of the governments of the world.

The South had none of that. The South did not expect war when they seceded. They expected to go on peacefully in their new republic that derived its "just powers from the consent of the governed" as the Declaration of Independence established in 1776. When it became obvious that they were not going to be able to leave in peace, they had to start everything from scratch.

In addition to the North's greater than four-to-one advantage in white population, it also had a pipeline to the wretched refuse of the world with which to feed Union armies continually. While 25% of the Union army were foreign-born immigrants, James McPherson points out that 30% of military age men in the Union states were foreign-born, thus the 25% in the Union army underrepresented the general foreign-born population in the North.6

This may be true but later in the war, when enlistments were low and a real problem for both sides, lavish financial inducements and bounties brought tens of thousands of foreigners into the Union army. All total, "a half-billion dollars" was spent by the North on bounties, and "the conscription-substitute-bounty system produced three-quarters of a million new men." Many foreigners had come for the express purpose of "joining the army to cash in on bounties or substitute fees."7

The South had no such pipeline of manpower at this critical hour with its money virtually worthless and its harbors bottled up by the Union blockade.

The ability to sustain an extended military effort as well as the population to do so, was heavily weighted toward the North. “Overwhelming numbers and resources” is a solid fact, not a myth.

Lee does not deal with the causes of the conflict directly in his farewell address, but, for him, the overriding issue was that of serving his home, his state. That was made clear in 1861 when, after being offered command of the U.S. Army by President Lincoln, he instead resigned and offered his services to Virginia.

The idea that soldiers on both sides saw themselves fighting to defend their homes is born out by James M. McPherson in For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought In The Civil War. McPherson concludes that slavery was not the issue that caused most men to fight. Protection of home was.8

Lee's farewell address acknowledges the great love Lee's men had for their leader, and it shows the love and respect Lee had for his men. They were ready to continue the war despite the odds.

The address is poignant. It reflects the character of the man who issued it, a man who was strong but humble and who thought “duty” the most sublime word in the English language.

Like President Kennedy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had great respect for Gen. Lee and appreciated his efforts to bind up the nation's wounds after its bloodiest war. On August 9, 1960, Eisenhower answered an angry letter from a New York dentist, Dr. Leon W. Scott, who had written eight days earlier and questioned why he kept a picture of Gen. Lee in his White House office.

Dr. Scott wrote:

I do not understand how any American can include Robert E. Lee as a person to be emulated, and why the President of the United States of America should do so is certainly beyond me.

The most outstanding thing that Robert E. Lee did, was to devote his best efforts to the destruction of the United States Government, and I am sure that you do not say that a person who tries to destroy our Government is worthy of being held as one of our heroes.9

President Eisenhower wrote:

Dear Dr. Scott:

Respecting your August 1 inquiry calling attention to my often expressed admiration for General Robert E. Lee, I would say, first, that we need to understand that at the time of the War between the States the issue of secession had remained unresolved for more than 70 years. Men of probity, character, public standing and unquestioned loyalty, both North and South, had disagreed over this issue as a matter of principle from the day our Constitution was adopted.

General Robert E. Lee was, in my estimation, one of the supremely gifted men produced by our Nation. He believed unswervingly in the Constitutional validity of his cause which until 1865 was still an arguable question in America; he was a poised and inspiring leader, true to the high trust reposed in him by millions of his fellow citizens; he was thoughtful yet demanding of his officers and men, forbearing with captured enemies but ingenious, unrelenting and personally courageous in battle, and never disheartened by a reverse or obstacle. Through all his many trials, he remained selfless almost to a fault and unfailing in his faith in God. Taken altogether, he was noble as a leader and as a man, and unsullied as I read the pages of our history.

From deep conviction, I simply say this: a nation of men of Lee's caliber would be unconquerable in spirit and soul. Indeed, to the degree that present-day American youth will strive to emulate his rare qualities, including his devotion to this land as revealed in his painstaking efforts to help heal the Nation's wounds once the bitter struggle was over, will be strengthened and our love of freedom sustained.

Such are the reasons that I proudly display the picture of this great American on my office wall.

Sincerely,
Dwight D. Eisenhower10

 

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Six

A Critical Look at
General Ulysses S. Grant
Address to the Soldiers of the Armies of the United States, USA
June 2, 1865

 

NOTES:


1 Douglas Southall Freeman, R. E. Lee: A Biography, 4 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936), Vol. 4, 154-55.

2 John F. Kennedy, Speech of Senator John F. Kennedy, Raleigh, NC, September 17, 1960, Coliseum Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/speech-senator-john-f-kennedy-raleigh-nc-coliseum, accessed 5/3/2020.

3 According to FindLaw, the world's leader in online legal information for consumers and small businesses, here's what the executor of a will does: "By definition, an executor is entrusted with the large responsibility of making sure a person's last wishes are granted with regard to the disposition of their property and possessions. / When it boils down to essentials, an executor of a will is responsible for making sure that any debts and creditors that the deceased had are paid off, and that any remaining money or property is distributed according to their wishes." See https://estate.findlaw.com/estate-administration/what-does-an-executor-do.html, accessed May 10, 2020.

4 John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron Acton (born 1834, died 1902), is perhaps best known for the aphorism "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." See his biography at https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Emerich-Edward-Dalberg-Acton-1st-Baron-Acton, accessed May 3, 2020.

5 John Dalberg Acton to Gen. Robert E. Lee, November 4, 1866, The Acton-Lee Correspondence, https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/09/no_author/famed-libertarian-writes-robert-e-lee, accessed May 3, 2020.

6 James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 606.

7 McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 600-606.

8 McPherson, For Cause & Comrades, 6.

9 Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee, August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20.

10 Dwight D. Eisenhower letter, August 9, 1960, to Leon W. Scott, in "Dwight D. Eisenhower in Defense of Robert E. Lee," August 10, 2014, Mathew W. Lively, https://www.civilwarprofiles.com/dwight-d-eisenhower-in-defense-of-robert-e-lee/, accessed 5-3-20.

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Four: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Four of Four, Conclusion

A Summary of
The Last Words
The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States
by Michael R. Bradley
Part Four
Prologue, Setting the Stage
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Part Four of Four,
Conclusion
The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley, front cover.

(Continued from Part Three)

AS A MATTER OF RECORD, the British bought and sold black people legally until 1807, and New Englanders and New Yorkers bought and sold black people legally until 1808.

New Englanders and New Yorkers then carried on an illegal slave trade until well after the War Between the States.

Here's how the 2005 book, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged and Profited from Slavery, written by three New England journalists then with the Hartford Courant, described New York's illegal slave trade:

New York City's bustling seaport became the hub of an enormously lucrative illegal slave trade. Manhattan shipyards built ships to carry captive Africans, the vessels often outfitted with crates of shackles and with the huge water tanks needed for their human cargo. A conservative estimate is that during the illegal trade's peak years, 1859 and 1860, at least two slave ships---each built to hold between 600 and 1,000 slaves---left lower Manhattan every month.1

W. E. B. Du Bois in his famous book, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America 1638-1870, writes that Boston, New York and Portland, Maine were the largest slave trading ports on the planet in 1862, a year into the War Between the States:

'The number of persons engaged in the slave-trade, and the amount of capital embarked in it, exceed our powers of calculation. The city of New York has been until of late [1862] the principal port of the world for this infamous commerce; although the cities of Portland and Boston are only second to her in that distinction. Slave dealers added largely to the wealth of our commercial metropolis; they contributed liberally to the treasuries of political organizations, and their bank accounts were largely depleted to carry elections in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut.'2

The North's addiction to slave trading should come as no surprise. Much of the infrastructure of New England and New York was built with the enormous profits from their slave trading.

Five out of six New England states were vigorous slave trading states. Little Rhode Island was a dynamo and America's transatlantic leader in the eighteenth century

launching nearly 1,000 voyages to Africa and carrying at least 100,000 captives back across the Atlantic. The captains and crews of these ships were often the veteran seamen of America: New Englanders.3

Rhode Island's Reverend Samuel Hopkins admits the slave trade was Newport, Rhode Island's "first wheel of commerce" but it was not just Newport's first wheel of commerce, it was all of New England and New York's first wheel of commerce:

'The inhabitants of Rhode Island, especially those of Newport, have had by far the greater share of this traffic, of all these United States. This trade in human species has been the first wheel of commerce in Newport, on which every other movement in business has chiefly depended.'4

Another famous Rhode Island slave trader, John Brown, whose family founded Brown University, said in a Providence newspaper in 1789:

'there was no more crime in bringing off a cargo of slaves than in bringing off a cargo of jackasses.'5

Like the drug trade today, the slave trade was lucrative. When you can buy a slave in Africa perhaps a warrior that had himself been on a mission to capture slaves but instead got captured for $50 and sell him for $1,000, that is a huge profit even today, much less back then.6

Harvard professor, Bernard Bailyn, "dean of colonial historians," wrote:

[T]he main factor in New England's phenomenal economic success, 'the key dynamic force,' was slavery.7

Black tribal chieftains in Africa were the starting point of global slavery and the African diaspora. For centuries, slaves were Africa's chief export. They were the unfortunate captives of tribal warfare, gathered up and waiting in around 40 slave forts built by the British and other Europeans up and down the African coast because they needed labor in their colonies.

Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in a New York Times article, "Ending the Slavery Blame-Game," quotes Boston University historians John Thornton and Linda Heywood who estimated "that 90 percent of those shipped to the New World were enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders."

Gates gets into specifics:

[T]he sad truth is that the conquest and capture of Africans and their sale to Europeans was one of the main sources of foreign exchange for several African kingdoms for a very long time. Slaves were the main export of the kingdom of Kongo; the Asanta Empire in Ghana exported slaves and used the profits to import gold. Queen Njinga, the brilliant 17th-century monarch of the Mbundu, waged wars of resistance against the Portuguese but also conquered polities as far as 500 miles inland and sold her captives to the Portuguese. When Njinga converted to Christianity, she sold African traditional religious leaders into slavery, claiming that they had violated her new Christian precepts.8

Gates writes about the shocking but admirable display by some African leaders today who have begged African Americans to forgive them for selling their ancestors into slavery:

In 1999, for instance, President Mathieu Kerekou of Benin astonished an all-black congregation in Baltimore by falling to his knees and begging African-Americas' forgiveness for the "shameful" and "abominable" role Africans played in the trade. Other African leaders, including Jerry Rawlings of Ghana, followed Mr. Kerekou's bold example.9

Captives in Africa were held sometimes for months, chained and shackled in pens inside slave forts on Africa's coast, waiting for European, New York and New England slave traders.

They would then be placed into the bowels of scorching hot slave ships that were filled to capacity with Africans on their backs, chained side by side to the decks below, where there was no ventilation, no fresh air.

Poor slaves had to endure the stench of vomit, urine, feces and death cooked together in ovenlike heat for months through the Middle Passage. No description of Hell could be worse than a New England or New York slave ship, or a British or Portuguese or Spanish slave ship before them.

The North, especially New England and New York, with Europeans, own the cruelty and brutality of the slave trade, which was more brutal than slavery itself because slave traders did not have to live with their slaves. All they had to do was deliver them and collect their money.

In the American slave trade, New England and New York own the stench and horror of slavery's Middle Passage.

Academia may be shocked to find out but nobody was disappointed that slavery was over, though it was not yet over for three of the six Union slave states that had slavery months after the war, until the Thirteenth Amendment ended it in December, 1865.

As Lincoln himself said, he didn't know how to end slavery and if he had been born into it as Southerners were, he would do no different than  they.

Southerners would have unquestionably ended slavery in a better way than what happened with almost a million blacks dying from disease and exposure after the War Between the States10 followed by a century of second class citizenship. It was in the South's best interest to end slavery with peace, opportunity and good will for all.

Slavery existed in the South but blacks and whites did not hate each other. They got along better than anywhere in America, as Alexis de Tocqueville noted, because the South was a bi-racial nation. There were more free blacks in the South, around 250,000, out of their population of nine million, than there were black people in the entire North out of their population of twenty-two million.

What did Northerners know about blacks except that they had made huge fortunes selling them, and they hated them and didn't want them in the North as job competition or in the West as neighbors.

Literary colossus Charles Dickens, in addition to his many novels and short stories, published a periodical, All the Year Round. He was on top of current events and our American war. Dickens wrote:

Every reasonable creature may know, if willing, that the North hates the Negro, and that until it was convenient to make a pretence that sympathy with him was the cause of the War, it hated the abolitionists and derided them up hill and down dale.11

Jim Crow was born in the North as C. Vann Woodward states in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, and he lived in the North a long time before moving South.

All nations ended slavery with gradual, compensated emancipation and we could have too but there was no plan by virtue signaling abolitionists, and, of course, there was no offer from the North to contribute from the treasury to buy the freedom of black slaves in the South who would then come North and be job competition.

Several Northern and Western states had laws forbidding blacks from even visiting, much less living there, including Lincoln's Illinois.

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Five

General Robert E. Lee

General Orders, No. 9
Address to the Army of Northern Virginia, CSA

April 10, 1865

NOTES:


1 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxviii.

2 W.E.B. Du Bois, The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), 179. Du Bois is quoting the Continental Monthly, January, 1862, p. 87, the article "The Slave-Trade in New York."

3 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxviii.

4 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 99-100.

5 John Brown, in United States Chronicle, March 26, 1789, in Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 110.

6 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 126.

7 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 48.

8 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Ending the Slavery Blame-Game," the New York Times, April 22, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html, accessed 5-21-22.

9 Ibid.

10 Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom, African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2012).

11 Charles Dickens, letter to W. W. De Cerjat 16 March 1862, in Graham Storey, ed., The Letters of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), Vol. Ten, 1862-1864, 53-54.

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Three: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Three of Four

A Summary of
The Last Words
The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States
by Michael R. Bradley
Part Three
Prologue, Setting the Stage
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Part Three of Four
The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley, front cover.

(Continued from Part Two)

GREAT BRITAIN was the dominant economic and military power on earth in the 1860s. The cotton gin, short for "cotton engine," had revolutionized cotton production, which had led to an ironclad relationship between the South and Great Britain:

By the eve of the Civil War, Great Britain was largely clothing the Western world, using Southern-grown, slave-picked cotton.1

All Southerners had to do was establish formal trade and military treaties with Great Britain, with whom they already had an "ironclad" relationship because of cotton, and the North would not be able to beat the South in a war.

Lincoln knew all this and was not going to allow the free-trade Confederate States of America to rise to power on his southern border.

He knew that the future of the American nation for at least the next century, maybe forever, was at stake right then.

That's why, with four times the white population of the South, enormous weapon manufacturing capability, a pipeline to the wretched refuse of the world with which to feed Union armies (25% of the Union army was foreign born), an army, navy and other advantages at that point in history, he sent five hostile military missions into Southern waters in March and April, 1861 to start a war.2

Several Northern newspapers such as the Providence (R.I.) Daily Post saw exactly what Lincoln was doing. In an editorial entitled "WHY?" published the day after the commencement of the bombardment of Fort Sumter, April 13, 1861, it wrote:

We are to have civil war, if at all, because Abraham Lincoln loves a party better than he loves his country. . . . Mr. Lincoln saw an opportunity to inaugurate civil war without appearing in the character of an aggressor.

The New York Herald eight days earlier wrote:

We have no doubt Mr. Lincoln wants [President Davis] to take the initiative in capturing . . . forts in its waters, for it would give him the opportunity of throwing [to the South] the responsibility of commencing hostilities.3

One gets little debate in Woke academia or the idiot news media on the cause of the war because vigorous debate is impossible. Those institutions are virtually 100% liberal and tow the Woke liberal line so the enraged mob doesn't show up at their office or, God forbid, accuse them of being a racist.

Forty years ago, historian Joe Gray Taylor wanted to examine the causes of the war but quickly concluded that esteemed historian David H. Donald was "correct when he said in 1960 that the causation of the Civil War was dead as a serious subject of historical analysis" and that "A 'Southern' point of view on the secession crisis no longer exists among professional historians."4

Without a "'Southern' point of view on the secession crisis" you can never get to the truth of American history. You can not have a debate with only one side presented. The Bible in Proverbs 18:17 says "The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him."

In the 1960s, academia and the news media went from truth as their standard, to the political advantage of the left as their standard, because, as stated, they are virtually 100% liberal.

Like the political operatives they are, so much of their history is filthy politics, not truth. They want to control the past so they can control the future, like Orwell said:

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.5

To have a debate and get at the truth both sides need to be represented 50/50 so they can challenge each other to the full extend of their intelligence, knowledge and passion and see who has the stronger argument.

Politicized academia and the idiot news media are 100/0 so truth is impossible yet if you don't agree with their Woke history, you are a racist hatemonger who deserves to die and certainly not have a career.

Esteemed historian Eugene Genovese (Roll Jordan Roll, The World the Slaves Made, et al.) said 30 years ago that to speak positively about the Old South

is to invite charges of being a racist and an apologist for slavery and segregation. We are witnessing a cultural and political atrocity an increasingly successful campaign by the media and an academic elite to strip young white Southerners, and arguably black Southerners as well, of their heritage . . . 6 (Bold emphasis added)

The destruction of century old historic monuments to Southern war dead is also a cultural and political atrocity, and it is immoral.

Those monuments are gifts from the people of the past to the people of the future. Their destruction denies the people of the future the opportunity to gaze on them and read the inscriptions and ponder for themselves what happened in the past.

Much has been written in the past 40 years on the politicization of our history and its unavoidable result, the falsification of our history. Allan Bloom, in his 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, confirms that "humanities and social science departments within universities [where History resides] had abandoned objectivity and truth and become hopelessly politicized."7

David Harlan, in his book The Degradation of American History, explains how it began. He says that, starting in the 1960s with the Civil Rights Movement, leftist historians began criticizing American history as elitist. He writes that academia wanted to expose the complicity of white men "in the violence and brutality that now seemed to be the most important truth about American history." They "feel no need to say what is good in American history."8

Keith Windschuttle, in The Killing of History, writes that most young people today are "taught to scorn the traditional values of Western culture - equality, freedom, democracy, human rights - as hollow rhetoric used to mask the self-interest of the wealthy and powerful. This teaching, Bloom argued, had bred a cynical, amoral, self-centered younger generation who lacked any sense of inherited wisdom from the past."

Windschuttle points out that for 2,400 years history has ranked "with philosophy and mathematics as among the most profound and enduring contributions that ancient Greece made, not only to European civilization, but to the human species as a whole." History's "essence" has been to "tell the truth, to describe as best as possible what really happened" but today, in much of academia and the news media, "these assumptions are widely rejected."9

Many in the humanities and social sciences "assert that it is impossible to tell the truth about the past" because "we can only see the past through the perspective of our own culture and, hence, what we see in history are our own interests and concerns reflected back at us."

Because of this, supposedly, the entire point of history is no longer valid therefore "there is no fundamental distinction any more between history and myth" or between "fiction and non-fiction."10

In other words, nothing exists except what Woke political liberals in academia and the idiot news media tell us exists.

Academia's hate is having their desired effect. Dr. Edward M. Gilbreth noted in his Post and Courier (Charleston, S.C.) column on July 15, 2021 that in the demographic of 18-24 year olds, a recent Issues and Insights poll finds that only "36 percent of them say they are very or extremely proud to be Americans."

In contrast, that same poll finds that "68 percent of adults say they are 'very' or 'extremely' proud to be an American, with another 15 'moderately' proud." The 18-24 demographic was the only one less than 50%.

Dr. Gilbreth concludes that "attempts to describe the country as corrupt, racist, unfair and in need of 'transformation' have not had much impact on the general population" but it has on young people.

Distinguished professor emeritus of History of the University of South Carolina in Columbia, Clyde N. Wilson, states:

[D]espite the thirst for history and the centrality of historical thinking in our consciousness, academic historians have never been more irrelevant, incestuous, and unreadable.11

We are living in Orwell's Oceania, where, as James S. Robbins writes in Erasing America, Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past:

Progressives seek to demean and demolish, elevating the victims of the past as an indictment of the present. They wield history as a weapon on behalf of the aggrieved, never gratified by the progress made. Indeed, as one supposed injustice after another is rectified, their attacks become fiercer, their complaints more numerous, . . .12

Somebody needs to tell race-obsessed academia that this is 2022 and not 1922 or 1822. We have had a Civil Rights Movement in America. There is unlimited opportunity for everybody. If you fail in America, it's your own fault.

There is not a single law in the entire country discriminating against non-whites because of skin color, which is why millions break our laws every month to come here.

In fact, there is often discrimination against whites and Asians in such things as college admissions (of course, where else but academia would you find such obvious discrimination).

We don't want academia's identity politics and racist hate like Critical Race Theory, or the news media's fake history like the 1619 Project.

The primary theme of the 1619 Project is that the American Revolutionary War was fought because the British were about to abolish slavery. That is a complete fraud, an invention without a shred of evidence. Not a single letter, speech, document, nothing.

Peter W. Wood states in 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project:

The 1619 Project aligns with the views of those on the progressive left who hate America and would like to transform it radically into a different kind of nation.13

Wood points out that Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the 1619 Project, has stated many times her goal is reparations. He concludes there is "only bitterness and anger" in the 1619 Project, that it "is a bucket lowered into the poisoned well of identity politics."14

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Four

Prologue, Setting the Stage

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part Four of Four, Conclusion

NOTES:


1 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 10. Eli Whitney patented his cotton gin in 1794.

2 Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 142. Mitcham states that by the first of April, 1861, the following five military expeditions were "in, steaming toward, or about to sail for Southern territorial waters:

1) the Welles-Fox Expedition, heading for Charleston;

2) the Rowan Expedition, also heading for Charleston;

3) Captain Adams' ships, lurking off Santa Rosa Island;

4) Colonel Brown's Expedition, heading for Pensacola;

5) Porter's Expedition, also steaming for Pensacola."

3 Editorial, New York Herald, April 5, 1861, in Mitcham, It Wasn't About Slavery, 147.

4 Joe Gray Taylor, "The White South from Secession to Redemption," in John B. Boles and Evelyn Thomas Nolen, Interpreting Southern History, Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 162-164.

5 George Orwell, 1984 (New York: New American Library, 1950), 32. This was one of the slogans of Big Brother's English Socialist Party of Oceania, INGSOC.

6 Eugene D. Genovese, The Southern Tradition, The Achievement and Limitations of an American Conservatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), xi-xii.

7 Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, in Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History, How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 10.

8 David Harlan, The Degradation of American History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), xv. This paragraph, written by me, comes verbatim from the Introduction to my book, Charles W. Ramsdell, Dean of Southern Historians, Volume One: His Best Work (Charleston: Charleston Athenaeum Press, 2017).

9 Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History, How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past (New York: The Free Press, 1996), 1-2.

10 Windschuttle, The Killing of History, 2, 7.

11 Clyde Wilson, February 12, 2019 Review of Historical Consciousness or the Remembered Past by John Lukacs (Schocken Books, 1985) in The Abbeville Review, https://www.abbevilleinstitute.org/review/historical-consciousness, accessed February 12, 2019. Dr. Wilson taught in the History Department at the University of South Carolina for over 30 years. He is primary editor of The Papers of John C. Calhoun and author or editor of over 30 books and over 600 articles, essays and reviews.

12 James S. Robbins, Erasing America, Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2018), 3.

13 Peter W. Wood, 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (New York: Encounter Books, 2020), 3.

14 Wood, 1620, A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, 172.

The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by Michael R. Bradley – A Summary, Part Two: Prologue, Setting the Stage, by Gene Kizer, Jr., Part Two of Four

A Summary of
The Last Words
The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States
by Michael R. Bradley
Part Two
Prologue, Setting the Stage
by Gene Kizer, Jr.
Part Two of Four
The Last Words, The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States, by historian Michael R Bradley, front cover.

(Continued from Part One)

THAT IS WHY ABRAHAM LINCOLN said over and over and over that the war was being fought for the preservation of the Union, not to end slavery.

Lincoln wrote Horace Greeley August 22, 1862, sixteen months into the war, and again made that clear. The italics are Lincoln's:

. . . My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do thatWhat I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help the Union.1

To Southerners, the Union had become a violent, lawless threat to their safety. Northerners financed John Brown and sent him and his murderers into the peaceful communities of the South to rape, destroy and kill then hailed him as a hero when brought to justice.

The Republican Party printed Hinton Helper's The Impending Crisis of the South as a campaign document, which called for the throats of Southerners to be cut in the night. Republicans printed hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed them coast to coast.

George Washington warned that sectional political parties would destroy the country but Wendell Phillips proudly stated that the Republican Party

is the first sectional party ever organized in this country. It does not know its own face, and calls itself national; but it is not national it is sectional. The Republican Party is a party of the North pledged against the South.2

Northerners began realizing how critical the Union was to their well being. Editorials like "The Value of the Union" began appearing all over the North. New York City threatened to secede from New York State over its enormous trade with the South.

Horace Greeley acknowledged the right of secession and self-government in a long emotional editorial entitled "The Right of Secession"3 in which he quoted the Declaration of Independence stating "governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; and that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and institute a new government."

That was the most widely quoted phrase in the South in the secession debate that took place in the year prior to states seceding.

Greeley went on: "We do heartily accept this doctrine, believing it intrinsically sound, beneficent, and one that, universally accepted, is calculated to prevent the shedding of seas of human blood" and

if it justified the secession from the British Empire of Three Millions of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of Five Millions of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861.

Greeley says "we could not stand up for coercion, for subjugation, for we do not think it would be just. We hold the right of Self-Government sacred" and we should "Let Them Go!" but when this sniveling hypocrite realized Southern secession would affect his money, he wanted war like the rest of the North.

Northerners were pouring drool like a pack of starving wolves before tearing a lamb to bits to win the election of 1860, control the Federal Government and rule the country with their larger population.4

That is exactly the "tyranny of the majority" the Founding Fathers warned about, but as South Carolina stated:

[W]hen vast sectional interests are to be subserved, involving the appropriation of countless millions of money, it has not been the usual experience of mankind, that words on parchments can arrest power.5

So many of the politicized "historians" in academia and the idiot news media today proclaim that slavery was the cause of the war but one can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the North did not go to war to end slavery.

All Northern documents before and up to two years into the war after hundreds of thousands of men had been killed strongly supported slavery.

Six slave states, or 25% of Union states, fought for the North the entire war.6 That, alone, proves the war was not fought over slavery.

If the North was fighting a war to end slavery, they would have first ended it in their own country by passing a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.

Instead, they passed the Corwin Amendment, which would have left black people in slavery forever even beyond the reach of Congress in places where slavery already existed.

Lincoln strongly supported the Corwin Amendment and lobbied the governors to pass it in their states. He said in his first inaugural, "holding such a provision to now be implied constitutional law, I have no objection to its being made express and irrevocable." Five Union states ratified the Corwin Amendment before the war made it moot.7

The Northern War Aims Resolution passed in July, 1861, three months into the war stated:

. . . That this war is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor for the purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights or institutions [slavery] of the States, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution [which allowed and protected slavery], and to preserve the Union. . . . 8 (Bold emphasis added)

Even the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation issued September 22, 1862, just weeks before the actual Emancipation Proclamation, states in the first paragraph:

I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America, and Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy thereof, do hereby proclaim and declare that hereafter, as heretofore, the war will be prosecuted for the object of practically restoring the constitutional relation between the United States, and each of the States, and the people thereof, in which States that relation is, or may be, suspended or disturbed. (Bold emphasis added)9

There are legion statements by Abraham Lincoln out there supporting slavery such as this one in his first inaugural made before he stated his support for the Corwin Amendment:

I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.

The proof is overwhelming and conclusive that the North did not go to war to free the slaves.

The North went to war because its economy was dependent on Southern cotton and without it they were headed for economic annihilation.

In 1860, the South was "producing 66 percent of the world's cotton, and raw cotton accounted for more than half [over 60% alone] of all U.S. exports."10

The American cotton industry before the war was awesome to behold. The New York Tribune agriculture editor, Solon Robinson, in 1848, wrote about "'acres of cotton bales'" on the docks in New Orleans:

Boats are constantly arriving, so piled up with cotton, that the lower tier of bales on deck are in the water; and as the boat is approaching, it looks like a huge raft of cotton bales, with the chimneys and steam pipe of an engine sticking up out of the centre.11

King Cotton was "the backbone of the American economy" and "the North ruled the kingdom."12 Southerners grew the cotton and Northerners did everything else:

Northern merchants, shippers, and financial institutions, many based in New York City, were crucial players in every phase of the national and international cotton trade. Meanwhile, the rivers and streams  of the North, particularly in New England, were crowded with hundreds of textile mills. Well before the Civil War, the economy of the entire North relied heavily on cotton grown by millions of slaves---in the South.13

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "'Cotton thread holds the union together; unites John C. Calhoun and Abbott Lawrence. Patriotism for holidays and summer evenings, with music and rockets, but cotton thread is the Union.'"14

Without the South, the North was in serious economic trouble. Southerners had made protective tariffs unconstitutional. They had a 10% tariff for the operation of a small federal government in a States' Rights nation.

At the same time, economically ignorant Northerners passed the astronomical Morrill Tariff that was 37 to 50% higher. It threatened to reroute the Northern shipping industry into the South overnight because nobody was going to ship into the North and pay a 47 to 60% tariff when they could ship into the South and pay 10%.

The Morrill Tariff meant that Northern ship captains would have a hard time getting cargoes in the North but in the South they would be guaranteed all the cargoes they could handle of cotton and other valuable Southern commodities to transport around the world.

Those same ship captains would then be able to bring cargoes back from around the world and into warm water Southern ports where they would be put on boats in the Mississippi, and on railroads, and shipped to all parts of the Union.

Northerners could have passed a tariff competitive with the South but they didn't.

Because of Northern greed and economic stupidity, the Morrill Tariff threatened to give Southerners a gift of much of the commerce of the entire country.

The Northern manufacturing industry faced obliteration too because over half of its market was its captive market in the South. Independent Southerners would not be buying overpriced goods from people who sent murderers into their country to kill them.

Southerners had for decades wanted free trade with Europe so they could get out from under extortionate Northern prices for inferior goods jacked up by Yankee tariffs and monopolies.

South Carolina almost seceded thirty-three years earlier over the Tariff of Abominations, and should have.

Next Week:

A Summary of

The Last Words

The Farewell Addresses of Union and Confederate Commanders to Their Men at the End of the War Between the States

by Michael R. Bradley

Part Three

Prologue, Setting the Stage

by Gene Kizer, Jr.

Part Three of Four

NOTES:

1 Letter, A. Lincoln to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862, in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953) V:388.

2 Wendell Phillips quotation in Albert Taylor Bledsoe Is Davis A Traitor; or Was Secession a Constitutional Right Previous to The War of 1861? (Baltimore: Innes & Company, 1866); reprint, (North Charleston, SC: Fletcher and Fletcher Publishing, 1995), 250. Lincoln, whom over 60% of the country voted against, "was the first and only sectional president in American history." See Donald W. Livingston, "The Secession Tradition in America" in David Gordon, ed., Secession, State & Liberty (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 27.

3 "The Right of Secession," The New-York Daily Tribune, December 17, 1860, in Howard Cecil Perkins, ed., Northern Editorials on Secession (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1964), 199-201.

4 Alexis de Tocqueville predicted in Democracy in America that if any one state got control of the federal government it would make the rest of the country tributary to its wealth and power and that is exactly what  happened except it wasn't one state but all the close-knit Northern states with their commercial-industrial interests.

5 "Address of the People of South Carolina, Assembled in Convention, to the People of the Slaveholding States of the United States," adopted 24 December 1860 by the South Carolina Secession Convention, Charleston, S.C., in John Amasa May and Joan Reynolds Faunt, South Carolina Secedes (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1960), 82-92.

6 The Union slave states were Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Kentucky, New Jersey, and West Virginia, which came into the Union as a slave state just weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect. The Emancipation Proclamation exempted all six Union slave states as well as Confederate territory already under Union control.

7 Union states ratifying the Corwin Amendment are "Kentucky, Ohio, Rhode Island, Maryland, and Illinois." See Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. It Wasn't About Slavery, Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2020), 127.

8 The War Aims Resolution is also known by the names of its sponsors, Representative John. J. Crittenden of Kentucky and Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee: The Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, or just the Crittenden Resolution. It passed the U.S. House of Representatives July 22, 1861 and the Senate July 25, 1861. There were only two dissenting votes in the House and five in the Senate. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crittenden-Johnson_Resolution, accessed April 19, 2022.

9 The next paragraph of the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation expressed another of Lincoln's beliefs, that black people should be shipped back to Africa or into a place they could survive: ". . . the effort to colonize persons of African descent, with their consent, upon this continent, or elsewhere, with the previously obtained consent of the Governments existing there, will be continued." See "Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, September 22,1862" at https://www.archives.gov/

exhibits/american_originals_iv/sections/transcript_

preliminary_emancipation.html, accessed 4-12-22.

10 Anne Farrow, Joel Lang, and Jenifer Frank, Complicity, How the North Promoted, Prolonged, and Profited from Slavery (New York: Ballantine Books, Copyright 2005 by The Hartford Courant Company), 7.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, xxvi.

14 Farrow, Lang, Frank, Complicity, 37.