The Significance of the Arlington Reconciliation Monument

The news that the Reconciliation Monument will be restored to the Arlington National Cemetery should be welcomed as an opportunity to reiterate the importance of peace, and to set aside historical grievances. The monument signifies steps towards reconciliation between North and South that were taken at the turn of the twentieth century, when both sides set out to move beyond the previous era of sectional hatred and fratricidal war. It explicitly invokes peace in the words of Isaiah inscribed upon it: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” It was intended, after a troubled and violent Reconstruction Era, to embrace the new spirit of fraternity that was reflected in the “reunions of the Blue and the Grey.” Writing in 1948, Major C. A. Phillips, of the US Marine Corps describes the location of the memorial, and the poetic words of a Confederate chaplain—the Reverend Randolph Harrison McKim—which pay tribute to the fallen:

Still inside the wall, the visitor continues through the well kept grounds to Jackson Circle where stands the magnificent bronze monument erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Surrounded by the headstones of nearly five hundred graves of Confederate veterans as well as some of their wives, the inscription on the base of the monument attests the simple creed of soldier dead everywhere:

Not for fame or reward,

Not for place or rank,

Not lured by ambition or goaded by necessity, But in simple obedience to duty,

As they understood it,

These men suffered all,

Sacrificed all,

Dared all—and died.

The point of reconciliation is not to relitigate the war or attempt to glorify it, but to look ahead to peace. As Charles Adams has pointed out in his book When in the Course of Human Events, the seeds of war are often sown in the ashes of previous wars. If people fail to learn from history and instead double down on the same claims and counterclaims that previously led to deadly conflict, or if they seek to humiliate and mock the once-vanquished—taunting them and destroying their war memorials—that leads, not to peace, but to what Adams calls “a cold war of bitterness.” Adams argues that, “Wars have seldom been justified, and as the years and centuries pass, war looks increasingly foolish.” Reconciliation is the commonsense approach—to let bygones be bygones, and to settle disagreement by diplomacy, not by denunciation and diatribe.

It is therefore disconcerting to see some liberals now dismissing the importance of reconciliation. Having removed the Reconciliation Monument from Arlington in 2023, they are now furious that it is to be restored. They reject the idea of reconciliation altogether. Preoccupied as they are with virtue-signaling about the perceived evils of centuries past, they fulminate about the causes of the war using the vitriolic language of nineteenth century Radical Republicans. They glorify the military triumph of North over South, and even celebrate the burning of the South and the suffering of Southern civilians. Britannica reports:

After seizing Atlanta, Union Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman embarked on a scorched-earth campaign intended to cripple the South’s war-making capacity and wound the Confederate psyche… Sherman’s 37-day campaign is remembered as one of the most successful examples of “total war,” and its psychological effects persisted in the postbellum South.

Far from regretting incidents of war crimes or acknowledging post-war reconciliation, Sherman’s admirers argue that more should have been done to punish the “traitors” who had the temerity to secede from the Union. One hundred sixty years after the war, they are still angry that Confederates were not, in their opinion, sufficiently punished. An opinion piece in the New York Times laments the fact that Confederate leaders died as free men. The writer seems to be unaware that the causes of this war are contested by historians, and relies entirely on the partisan interpretation advanced by the Marxist historian Eric Foner, whom he cites with approval,

Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy and the commander in chief of forces that killed more than 360,000 American troops, died a free man. Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, died a free man as well. Alexander Stephens, the Confederate vice president, whose “cornerstone” speech defined the secessionist cause, served five terms in Congress after the war and also died a free man. Nor was this trio an exception. Other, less prominent Confederates were also able to escape any real punishment. Most of the leaders of the deadliest insurrection in American history died free men…

The writer contrasts the war to the alleged “insurrection” of January 6, suggesting that contemporary politics can be understood by analogy to the war. He describes President Trump as getting away with insurrection “unchastened and unrestrained,” just like the Confederate leaders. But there is nothing to be gained by interminably perpetuating the hostilities of the nineteenth century in this way, especially since many of those who are most determined to invoke the conflict in contemporary political debate seem to know very little about the war and simply use it as a proxy for grievances relating to what they call “systemic racism.” It is almost as if the war merely supplies them with convenient ammunition for their political arguments about the need for government interventions designed to crush “white supremacy” by vesting more money and power in the race hustlers. Republicans, too, often invoke the war as a way of criticizing their political opponents, frequently comparing today’s communist Democrats to the conservative Southern Democrats of the nineteenth century.

As Ludwig von Mises emphasizes in Liberalism: The Classical Tradition, peace is not just a matter of convenience or an optional extra—it is essential to civilization and to human flourishing. This does not mean that war memorials should be torn down and everyone should try to forget that the war ever happened. On the contrary, erasing history only makes future hostilities more likely as people forget the lessons of the past. Further, the memory of ties that bind people together matters. Mises observes that, “Heroic deeds performed in such a war by those fighting for their freedom and their lives are entirely praiseworthy, and one rightly extols the manliness and courage of such fighters.” We remember the fallen. not in order to endorse the waging of war—with all the attendant loss of life and human suffering—but to remember the courage and sacrifice of those who stood in defense of a just cause. A just war, as Murray Rothbard defined it, is one fought in defense. He regarded both the Revolutionary War and the War for Southern Independence as just wars,

My own view of war can be put simply: a just war exists when a people tries to ward off the threat of coercive domination by another people, or to overthrow an already-existing domination… There have been only two wars in American history that were, in my view, assuredly and unquestionably proper and just; not only that, the opposing side waged a war that was clearly and notably unjust. Why? Because we did not have to question whether a threat against our liberty and property was clear or present; in both of these wars, Americans were trying to rid themselves of an unwanted domination by another people. And in both cases, the other side ferociously tried to maintain their coercive rule over Americans. In each case, one side — “our side” if you will — was notably just, the other side — “their side” — unjust.

Honoring memorials to the fallen is part of history, and history should not be erased. But this does not justify harking back to old wars as a framework for contemporary political discourse. Reconciliation and peace should be the standard.