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A South Carolinian, West Pointer and Mexican War veteran, Longstreet lent his military talents to the Confederate Army in 1861, becoming a corps commander under Gen. Robert E. Lee. What makes his career truly extraordinary, though, is what he did after the war: Longstreet repudiated the rebellion, accepted the civil and political rights of Black people and supported federal efforts to reform the South.
White Southerners vilified, shunned and threatened him. The general left his postwar home in New Orleans for Gainesville, where he was also met frostily but stayed until his death in 1904, at age 82.
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Visitors to Alta Vista honor his memory, leaving tokens on his headstone: coins, flowers, a state flag of Georgia — even a wristwatch.
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Longstreet’s biography bears consideration as the nation prepares for an emotional next step in coming to terms with slavery, rebellion and Civil War: the planned removal of the 32-foot-tall Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.
The public can offer ideas on the huge bronze sculpture’s ultimate disposition, starting at a Wednesday meeting. But it is supposed to come down by Jan. 1, 2024, pursuant to findings of a bipartisan national commission, which Congress established in 2021 after the police murder of George Floyd and nationwide racial justice protests.
The panel’s mandate was to scrub Defense Department property of “names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate” individual Confederates or the Confederacy, a category Arlington’s Confederate Memorial exemplifies in an especially objectionable way.
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Not only do inscriptions call the South’s soldiers “heroes,” but accompanying imagery sanitizes slavery: alongside bas-relief soldiers are figures of an enslaved Black woman protectively holding the infant child of a White rebel officer as he leaves for war and an enslaved man following his enslaver to the front.
Yet a last-ditch lawsuit filed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans seeks to keep the monument in place, citing its origins in an ostensibly benign late-19th century movement for sectional reconciliation. “The Memorial represents the reunification of the North and South after the Civil War, as well as the commemoration of all fallen members of the military,” the lawsuit reads.
To this legal plea, former Navy secretary Jim Webb, who also served in the Senate as a Virginia Democrat, added an Aug. 18 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Save the Confederate Memorial at Arlington.”
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In its impending removal, Webb sees the latest excess of “this new world of woke.” A symbol of national unity, he laments, is about to be erased in favor of “bitterness and misunderstanding conjured up by those who do not understand the history they seem bent on destroying.”
In fact, the Confederate Memorial embodied a specious unity. President William McKinley, who was a former Union officer, did indeed offer fallen Confederates interment at Arlington — previously reserved for Union soldiers — as a conciliatory gesture in 1898.
As secretary of war, William Howard Taft later approved a request from the United Daughters of the Confederacy to build a monument amid the graves, seeking, as he later said, the “oblivion of sectionalism.”
The monument’s subsequent — and separate — design was paid for and controlled by the UDC and other neo-Confederate organizations, however. Far from being “conceived and built with the sole purpose of healing the wounds of the Civil War and restoring national harmony,” as Webb puts it, the sculpture apologizes for rebellion and sanitizes slavery.
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After its unveiling in June 1914, Hilary A. Herbert, chairman of the committee that sponsored the sculpture, wrote that a “leading purpose” of the artwork “is to correct history” by “illustrating the kindly relations that existed all over the South between the master and the slave.”
The memorial’s latent function, like those of Confederate monuments that went up across the South during the early 20th century, was to bolster the ideological foundation of Jim Crow laws.
At the time, of course, Black service members were buried separately from White service members. That would not change until 1948.
The Confederate Memorial’s propagandistic message is evident to all serious scholars, and to 20 descendants of the memorial’s Confederate veteran sculptor, Moses Ezekiel: six years ago, they published an open letter calling for their ancestor’s work to be put in a museum, as an artifact of “oppressive history.”
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It’s an idea deserving of implementation after the memorial’s removal, which has a clear statutory basis and thus seems inevitable, despite the lawsuit.
Lofty words on the Confederate Memorial romanticize rebel soldiers: “in simple obedience to duty as they understood it; these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all, and died.”
Yet for all their nobility, real or imagined, the United States, and the freedom of millions, would have been destroyed if they had won.
Moving this monument from Arlington to a museum would be an overdue act of real national reconciliation, in the spirit of Longstreet, who took three bullets during his fighting career but whose most courageous deed was, as he wrote after the war, “to abandon ideas that are obsolete and conform to the requirements of law.”
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GAINESVILLE, Ga. — In all the history-saturated South, there is no more thought-provoking site than this town’s Alta Vista Cemetery, where Gen. James Longstreet lies beneath well-trimmed grass and a tall pole flying the American flag.
A South Carolinian, West Pointer and Mexican War veteran, Longstreet lent his military talents to the Confederate Army in 1861, becoming a corps commander under Gen. Robert E. Lee. What makes his career truly extraordinary, though, is what he did after the war: Longstreet repudiated the rebellion, accepted the civil and political rights of Black people and supported federal efforts to reform the South.
White Southerners vilified, shunned and threatened him. The general left his postwar home in New Orleans for Gainesville, where he was also met frostily but stayed until his death in 1904, at age 82.
Visitors to Alta Vista honor his memory, leaving tokens on his headstone: coins, flowers, a state flag of Georgia — even a wristwatch.
Longstreet’s biography bears consideration as the nation prepares for an emotional next step in coming to terms with slavery, rebellion and Civil War: the planned removal of the 32-foot-tall Confederate Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery.
The public can offer ideas on the huge bronze sculpture’s ultimate disposition, starting at a Wednesday meeting. But it is supposed to come down by Jan. 1, 2024, pursuant to findings of a bipartisan national commission, which Congress established in 2021 after the police murder of George Floyd and nationwide racial justice protests.
The panel’s mandate was to scrub Defense Department property of “names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate” individual Confederates or the Confederacy, a category Arlington’s Confederate Memorial exemplifies in an especially objectionable way.
Not only do inscriptions call the South’s soldiers “heroes,” but accompanying imagery sanitizes slavery: alongside bas-relief soldiers are figures of an enslaved Black woman protectively holding the infant child of a White rebel officer as he leaves for war and an enslaved man following his enslaver to the front.
Yet a last-ditch lawsuit filed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans seeks to keep the monument in place, citing its origins in an ostensibly benign late-19th century movement for sectional reconciliation. “The Memorial represents the reunification of the North and South after the Civil War, as well as the commemoration of all fallen members of the military,” the lawsuit reads.
To this legal plea, former Navy secretary Jim Webb, who also served in the Senate as a Virginia Democrat, added an Aug. 18 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Save the Confederate Memorial at Arlington.”
In its impending removal, Webb sees the latest excess of “this new world of woke.” A symbol of national unity, he laments, is about to be erased in favor of “bitterness and misunderstanding conjured up by those who do not understand the history they seem bent on destroying.”
In fact, the Confederate Memorial embodied a specious unity. President William McKinley, who was a former Union officer, did indeed offer fallen Confederates interment at Arlington — previously reserved for Union soldiers — as a conciliatory gesture in 1898.
As secretary of war, William Howard Taft later approved a request from the United Daughters of the Confederacy to build a monument amid the graves, seeking, as he later said, the “oblivion of sectionalism.”
The monument’s subsequent — and separate — design was paid for and controlled by the UDC and other neo-Confederate organizations, however. Far from being “conceived and built with the sole purpose of healing the wounds of the Civil War and restoring national harmony,” as Webb puts it, the sculpture apologizes for rebellion and sanitizes slavery.
After its unveiling in June 1914, Hilary A. Herbert, chairman of the committee that sponsored the sculpture, wrote that a “leading purpose” of the artwork “is to correct history” by “illustrating the kindly relations that existed all over the South between the master and the slave.”
The memorial’s latent function, like those of Confederate monuments that went up across the South during the early 20th century, was to bolster the ideological foundation of Jim Crow laws.
At the time, of course, Black service members were buried separately from White service members. That would not change until 1948.
The Confederate Memorial’s propagandistic message is evident to all serious scholars, and to 20 descendants of the memorial’s Confederate veteran sculptor, Moses Ezekiel: six years ago, they published an open letter calling for their ancestor’s work to be put in a museum, as an artifact of “oppressive history.”
It’s an idea deserving of implementation after the memorial’s removal, which has a clear statutory basis and thus seems inevitable, despite the lawsuit.
Lofty words on the Confederate Memorial romanticize rebel soldiers: “in simple obedience to duty as they understood it; these men suffered all, sacrificed all, dared all, and died.”
Yet for all their nobility, real or imagined, the United States, and the freedom of millions, would have been destroyed if they had won.
Moving this monument from Arlington to a museum would be an overdue act of real national reconciliation, in the spirit of Longstreet, who took three bullets during his fighting career but whose most courageous deed was, as he wrote after the war, “to abandon ideas that are obsolete and conform to the requirements of law.”
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