A bill sponsored by Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) has passed the House and is currently in the Senate for committee review and an eventual vote. H.R. 7608 is entitled the “State, Foreign Operations, Agriculture, Rural Development, Interior, Environment, Military Construction, and Veterans Affairs Appropriations Act.”
The bill provides fiscal year 2021 appropriations for the Department of State, Department of Agriculture, the EPA, various foreign relations initiatives, and related programs. It is the “related programs” that has those who care about American history concerned. If one peruses the 772-page bill, they will find buried way down in the middle somewhere Sec. 442. It reads as follows:
REMOVAL OF COMMEMORATIVE CONFEDERATE WORKS
Notwithstanding any other provision of law or policy to the contrary, within 180 days of enactment of this Act, the National Park Service shall remove from display all physical Confederate commemorative works, such as statues, monuments, sculptures, memorials, and plaques, as defined by NPS, Management Policies 2006.
On the surface, this appears to be just an implementation of the drive to remove Confederate monuments and memorials from the public square. The mantra from the activists in favor of moving out these homages to the Confederacy has been that they should be moved to museums as they are a part of history.
Unfortunately, where Confederate monuments are concerned, there is no solution which would seem to satisfy all. And for those on the far-left, for whom it is always about the next crusade as they continue to march toward that unreachable mirage of a terrestrial Utopia, even allowing monuments to those who fought, and suffered, and died in battle where the combat actually took place is just too much. And H.R. 7608 is a manifestation of this vision of an American landscape wiped clean of any vestiges of one-half of the most consequential and cataclysmic event in U.S. History.
There are some twenty-five Civil War battlefields or related historical sites that would be subjected to the axe of H.R. 7608. That is because hallowed grounds like Antietam, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Vicksburg, Manassas, Petersburg, etc., are under the auspices of the National Park Service. If this bill is passed, as it now reads and can be interpreted, within six months of its passage every monument to Confederate participants on the very locations of some of the biggest and bloodiest battles in American history would be removed.
One can make a reasonable argument for taking down Confederate statues from the public square. After all, should African Americans on their way to work or just strolling the streets be forced to do so in the shadow of those who fought for an upstart nation that, had it been victorious, would have kept their race in chains?
But once removed, what are we to do with these monuments? Some have argued, as stated earlier, that they should be relegated to museums where they lose the aura of celebration and instead become tools for learning and remembering our past. There are, however, real logistical issues here. Even if a museum wanted them, it is not easy to store many tons of brass and stone.
It would seem, then, that the battlefields are the most logical refuge for these orphans of our past. Those who venture to Gettysburg, Antietam, or Shiloh do so precisely to learn about the fighting that took place there, and what it meant to American history. And it is, quite simply, impossible to give an accurate and full account of these engagements without telling the story of the men on both sides of the lines, both individual commanders, and the many units from so many states who did combat.
How can one, for example, possibly understand the story of Gettysburg without delving into the mind of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee? He was the man whose decisions, more than any others’, shaped the nature and ultimate outcome of the three-day bloodbath. It was Lee who invaded Pennsylvania, Lee who gave the nod to his generals to attack the Union Army outside of Gettysburg that first fateful morning, and it was Lee who then stayed to fight what would shape up to be the first major Confederate defeat of the war. And no better way can one understand the mind of Lee, to see what he saw, than to stand beneath his monument on Seminary Ridge, astride his horse Traveler, and gaze with him across the mile-wide open field toward that Union line where he sent so many of his soldiers to their dooms. The equestrian statue of the rebel leader is powerful in its sense of longing and regret. One can almost hear him as his battered and bloody survivors stream past him having had their grand assault violently repulsed saying to his men, “This has been all my fault.” Lose Lee and you lose the very essence of the Battle Of Gettysburg. The same can be said for his commanding officers, each with their own part to play in the drama. It is so with every battle of the war. Take away Albert Sydney Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard, and you lose Shiloh. Banish Stonewell Jackson and James Longstreet to the ether, and 2nd Manassas just ceases to be.
And furthermore, how can one recount a true narrative of these battles while the voices of those men in the rank and file who fought for the South are muted and their visages erased? The story of these historic places is one of men, often in their teens, scared out of their wits, covered in grime and dust, and the caked blood of their comrades who’d already fallen all around them, who engaged in some of the most brutal and up close and personal modes of warfare one can imagine. Their emotions and experiences at those moments of terror knew no politics. A survivor of Antietam later recalled that at one point the action was so severe, his senses so overloaded, that the landscape appeared to briefly turn red. One imagines that during combat so intense, no Southerner loading, ramming, and firing as the balls whizzed all around him, was thinking of the larger question of slavery or free navigation of the Mississippi. As one Union private, David Thompson, 9th New York Volunteers, wrote after walking the still-smoldering Antietam battlefield after the bloodiest day in American history had ended:
All around lay the Confederate dead…clad in “butternut”…As I looked down on the poor, pinched faces…all enmity died out. There was no “secession” in those rigid forms, nor in those fixed eyes staring at the sky. Clearly it was not their war.
The fact is the Civil War did happen. And some 300,000 Southern men died fighting for their cause, even if it was, as Ulysses Grant said, “one of the worst for which people have ever fought. And one for which there was the least excuse.” But that doesn’t diminish the very real suffering of the Confederates who fought over these blood-soaked grounds. And even if one doesn’t wish to give those men at Gettysburg, who lined up and stared across an open field to the other side where they saw a solid line of blue with artillery lined hub-to-hub up on Cemetery Ridge just waiting for them, any credit at all for their feat, at least allow their story, on that place, to be told in toto to weave the complete tapestry of this great human tragedy that affected so many on all sides. And still does.
Speaking on behalf of Gettysburg in particular, Les Fowler, president of the Association of Licensed Battlefield Guides, has made a plea to the Senate to modify this bill to preserve the battlefields as they are. “We urge the U.S. Senate to strip out this provision that would destroy the unequaled collection of monuments, Union and Confederate, that set Gettysburg apart as the great battlefield park and top visitor destinations…The monuments representing all of the soldiers who fought here are a crucial component of interpreting these sacred grounds.”
Another veteran battlefield guide, Deb Novotny, makes a broader appeal. “The monuments serve as tools for us to tell the story not only of this battle but of the struggle of our nation to heal itself after the war.”
Some 75,000 Confederate troops engaged the Union Army at Gettysburg. That salient fact of history cannot be avoided or discarded. How does one go about erasing their memories from a place like this? If there remain any places in the country where it is contextually fitting to remember them, while acknowledging the moral bankruptcy of the broader notion for which they took up arms, it is on the fields where they fought and strove and perished.
It is said that the ghosts of soldiers, Confederate and Union alike, walk the now quiet fields of battle, unable to find peace with their violent deaths on the receiving end of enemy bullets, bayonets, shell fragments or solid shot that cut their lives short. They are a part of these places.
The cause of the Confederacy should be remembered for what it was: a new nation dedicated to the proposition that the black man was inferior to the white man and, as Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens said: “slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.” But the battlefields, where those twisted notions went to die, and where all sides of those particular isolated events must be heard to gain a true understanding of what happened there, should not be the place to make such a symbolic rejection to what is an obviously revolting raison d’etat. The battlefield belongs to the soldiers who fought there. And it belongs to all who wish to travel to these grounds and hear all the voices from the past tell us what they saw and did there. History is not always pleasant. But it must be remembered. Otherwise we are living in a land of make-believe. That is not the country I want us to be.