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Then again, what else should we expect from a Bill Clinton voter and his minions?
That'll play real well here in the South!
It all started on Dec. 14, 1898. President McKinley was busy celebrating the victory over the Spanish. All the nation came together during that war, and McKinley deliberately used the moment to make the nation whole. He appointed former Confederates, including Lee's nephew Fitzhugh Lee, who was commissioned Major-General of Volunteers. (I see the Spanish-American War as the final act of the Civil War -- northerners and southerners fought together in common cause).
On that December day, McKinley spoke to the Georgia legislature. He intended to announce that he would ask the Congress to assume responsibility for the care of Confederate graves in the National Cemeteries. A decade before, McKinley visited a National Cemetery at Fredericksburg, VA. He was appalled at the contrast of condition between Union and Confederate graves. As President, he meant to do something about it. There was no better place and no better moment to make this announcement than Atlanta in 1898.
But it was no simple announcement. His speech became much more. It was magic. In a quiet, full voice that carried through the house, he said,
Sectional lines no longer mar the map of the United States. Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we bear each other. Fraternity is the national anthem, sung by a chorus of forty-five states and our territories at home and beyond the seas. The Union is once more the common alter of our love and loyalty, our devotion and sacrifice. The old flag again waves over us in peace with new glories and sacrifice... which your sons and ours have this year added to its sacred folds. What cause we have for rejoicing, saddened only by the fact that so many of our brave men fell on field or sickened and died from hardship and exposure, and others returning bring wounds and disease from which they will long suffer. The memory of the dead will be a precious legacy, and the disabled will be the nation's care.The audience erupted in a wild applause, which radiated out the room and was joined by crowds who waited outside. Old Confederate veterans openly wept. One, a prominent legislator, it was reported, "buried his head in his arms, and while cheers rang out, cried like a little child."A nation which cares for its disabled soldiers, as we have always done, will never lack defenders. The national cemeteries for those who fell in battle are proof that the dead as well as the living have our love. What an army of silent sentinels we have, and with what loving care their graves are kept! Every soldier's grave made during our unfortunate Civil War is a tribute to American valor.
And while, when those graves were made, we differed widely about the future of this government, these differences were long ago settled by the arbitrament of arms; and the time has now come, in the evolution of sentiment and feeling under the providence of God, when in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers.
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 the year just passed by the sons and grandsons of these heroic dead.
What a glorious future awaits us if unitedly, wisely and bravely we face the new problems now pressing upon us, determined to solve them for right and humanity.
In 1900 Congress passed a law that set aside a portion of Arlington Cemetery for burial of Confederate dead. During the war, the Confederates had been cast together and many graves went unmarked (Southern womens organizations cared for many graves after the war). Dead from nearby graveyards were reinterred there as well. In all, there are 482 graves: 46 officers, 351 enlisted men, 58 wives, 15 southern civilians, and 12 unknowns. In 1906, Secretary of War William Howard Taft affirmed a request from the United Daughters of the Confederacy to place a monument at the spot. Artist Moses Ezekial was commissioned, and his work is tremendous. You must see it some day.
Arlington National Cemetary Confederate Memorial page
As a side note, "Memorial bridge" was built in the late 1920s, I think. It, too, was a culmination of a long dream. Andrew Jackson wanted that "the broad and beautiful river separating two of the original Thirteen States [be] spanned with arches of ever-enduring granite, symbolical of the firmly established union of the North and South."
The Confederate Memorial must be upheld and honored. As in 1776, so in 1914, and so today: true self-government is singular to America. Many European nations had by 1910 elected parliaments. Yet, governance in Europe free of monarchy was for France alone, and her history of democracy was no example. The American experiment was still at question in the world of 1914, when President Wilson layed the first wreath at the monument
Perhaps someone would like to share their thoughts on all this with Senator Reids's office. (202) 224-3542. And perhaps a wired Freeper will get another Senator to reply on the floor with McKinley's speech.