Abbeville Institute
The 518
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.
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