If America’s Leaders…

“They were so young! Boys! Farm boys!” he practically whispered. 

The urgency of his words made all the more serious by the coarseness of his voice as my friend, paralyzed now well more than three decades, sought to describe an Alabama Confederate cemetery he visited long ago.

“Conscripted! Ill equipped! So very young!”

The Civil War left a culture of death,
a culture of mourning, beyond anything Americans
had ever experienced or imagined.
It left a degree of family and social devastation 
unprecedented for any Western society.”
David Bright, Yale University Civil War historian

“The moral weight of the Civil War is so large
and the consequences of emancipation loom so large that
we forget just how brutal the war actually is.”
Joshua Rothman, University of Alabama historian

America’s just-short-of-four-years fratricidal war – April 12, 1861 to April 9, 1865 - cost an estimated 750,000 lives, according to the 2012 statistical study released by historian J. David Hacker in 2012 - the equivalent of 7,500,000 men and boys when considered in proportion to 2012 America. 

Hacker’s study indicated that, if 28% were married at the time of their deaths, the War created 200,000 white widows and an unfathomable number of orphans. 

While Blacks had served in the American Revolutionary forces and in the War of 1812 and despite a 1792 federal law prohibiting Blacks from bearing arms in the U.S. Army, roughly 179,000 Black men – including nearly 80 Black commissioned officers - made-up 10% of the Union Army in artillery and infantry units, as well as noncombat support functions and another 19,000 served in the Navy. At the same time, Black women – including Harriet Tubman – served as nurses, spies and scouts. 

It is estimated that nearly 40,00 Black soldiers died during the Civil War – 30,000 of infection or disease - and, even now, it remains impossible to calculate the numbers of their widows and orphans. 

And, in the years after the War, it was significantly more difficult for Black women to collect the federally allotted widows-and-orphans pensions, in part, because many of their marriages were not legally registered; this was especially true of runaway slaves who joined Union forces and whose owners never permitted or recognized slave marriages. Initial federal pension laws recognized only legal marriages and ignored slave marriages.

When one considers that many young white women, married for only brief periods of time before their husbands, fathers, sons, uncles, and brothers went off to war, the traditions and customs of the antebellum period – requiring Southern widows to dress in mourning for thirty months, expecting elaborate letters of condolences – and men were often buried in distant and unmarked graves, it might be easy to emphatically understand the importance of monuments constructed in the years immediately following 1865. (One Alabama Confederate Cemetery contains more than 200 graves marked “Unknown Soldier, S.S.A.”)

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please….
Mark Twain

Facts are stubborn things….
Ronald Regan

Almost immediately following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Union veterans returned to fields of battle to memorialize their deeds and fallen comrades, designing and building the monuments themselves, often purchasing them from catalogues. [In fact, the American Battlefield Trust notes that the same soldier adorns “a Union monument at Gettysburg and a Confederate monument at Chattanooga.”] Most Union monuments were in established between 1880 and 1918, while the majority of Confederate monuments were established between 1900 and 1918, with a resurgence between 1957 and 1965 – the core period of the Civil Rights movement. 

I am a believer in the people.
If given the truth, they can be depended upon
to meet any national crisis.
The great point is to bring them the real facts.
Abraham Lincoln

Eleven states formed the Confederacy but, in 2017, there were roughly 700 Confederate monuments and 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy scattered over 31 states and the District of Columbia. In the years immediately after the War commemorative markers tended to be memorials that mourned lost soldiers. However, the majority of monuments were erected between the 1890s and 1950s, with the greatest spike in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century and many were designed and placed to subtly convey to Black Americans that they should “know” and “keep their place.” The spread of Confederate symbols – including the battle flag – was a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. 

Facts are stubborn things….
Ronald Regan

“He’s not a war hero. 
He was a war hero because he was captured. 
I like people who weren’t captured….”

“He” was commissioned in the United States Navy upon graduation from the Naval Academy and became a naval aviator, flying ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers. During the Vietnam War, his aircraft was shot down and he was seriously injured and captured in October 1967. He experienced periods of solitary confinement and torture and courageously refused out-of-sequence early release before his eventual repatriation in 1973. Despite sustaining lifelong physical disabilities as a result of his war experience and imprisonment, he remained in the Navy, retiring a captain in 1981.

“Robert E. Lee, you look at I guess there are about eleven of them 
[military bases in the United States named for Confederate military officers] 
that are talking about changing the names. 
And I like winning. I like continuing to win….”

“The Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part 
of a Great American Heritage, and a history of Winning, 
Victory, and Freedom….”

Robert E. Lee and the ten Confederate officers for whom U.S. military bases are named were traitors. They fought against the Union. They directed attacks on American forces and were responsible for the deaths of approximately 750,000 Americans.

They were not winners. The Confederate forces and their officers lost and surrendered!

If American’s political and civic leaders want to honor heroes with monuments and the names of military bases, they might consider walking the few steps from St. Matthew’s Cathedral, from which President John F. Kennedy was buried, and contemplate the inscription 

“THEY COMFORTED THE DYING, NURSED THE WOUNDED, 
CARRIED HOPE TO THE IMPRISONED, 
GAVE IN HIS NAME A DRINK OF WATER TO THE THIRSTY.”

The monument – authorized by Congress in 1918 - honors the more than Catholic 600 nuns from twenty-one different religious orders and communities “who gave their services as nurses on battlefields and in hospitals during the Civil War.” While more than 4,000 women served as nurses for both sides, it was the Sisters’ organization and their training in nursing and medicine - beginning with their origins in Europe - that made them so important to the wounded of both armies.

Six-hundred women! Consider Sister Anthony O’Connell , a Cincinnati-based Sister of Charity, of whom one soldier wrote: 

Amid this sea of blood she performed the most revolting duties
for these poor soldiers. She seemed like a ministering angel,
and many a young soldier owes his life to her care and charity.
Happy was the soldier who, wounded and bleeding,
had her near him to whisper words of consolation and courage.
She was reverenced by Blue and Gray, Protestant and Catholic alike;
and we conferred on her the title of the 'Florence Nightingale of America.'
Her name became a household word in every section of the North and South.

“Veritable angels of mercy,” wrote Abraham Lincoln. “Of all forms of charity and benevolence seen in the crowded wards those of the Catholic sisters were among the most efficient. More lovely than anything in art are the pictures that remain with me of these sisters going on their rounds of mercy among the suffering and dying.”

If American’s political and civic leaders want to honor heroes with monuments and the names of military bases, they might consider:

• Robert Blake "[I]n an engagement with the enemy on John's Island. Serving the rifle gun, Blake, an escaped slave, carried out his duties bravely throughout the engagement which resulted in the enemy's abandonment of positions, leaving a caisson and one gun behind."

• Wilson Brown "Knocked unconscious into the hold of the ship when an enemy shellburst fatally wounded a man on the ladder above him, Brown, upon regaining consciousness, promptly returned to the shell whip on the berth deck and zealously continued to perform his duties although 4 of the 6 men at this station had been either killed or wounded by the enemy's terrific fire.”

• Alfred B. Hilton "When the regimental color bearer fell, this soldier seized the color and carried it forward, together with the national standard, until disabled at the enemy's inner line."

• Miles James "Having had his arm mutilated, making immediate amputation necessary, he loaded and discharged his piece with one hand and urged his men forward; this within 30 yards of the enemy's works."

• John Henry Lawson "Wounded in the leg and thrown violently against the side of the ship when an enemy shell killed or wounded the 6-man crew as the shell whipped on the berth deck, Lawson, upon regaining his composure, promptly returned to his station and, although urged to go below for treatment, steadfastly continued his duties..."

• Aaron Anderson, Bruce Anderson, William Barnes, Powhatan Beaty, James H. Brownson, William H. Brown, William Harvey Carney, Decatur Dorsey, Christian Fleetwood, James Daniel Gardner, James H. Harris, Thomas R. Hawkins, Milton M. Holland, Miles James, Alexander Kelley, James Mifflin, Joachim Pease, Robert Pinn, Edward Ratcliff, Andrew Jackson Smith, Charles Veale.

The quotations are from their Medal of Honor citations.

If America’s political and civic leaders want to honor heroes with monuments and the names of military bases, they might consider any or all of these twenty-five African Americans awarded The Medal of Honor – seven sailors of the Union Navy, fifteen soldiers of the United States Colored Troops, and three soldiers of other Union army units.

If America’s political leaders really wanted….