Arlington's Confederate Memorial

The Confederate Memorial on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery, former home of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The Arlington National Cemetery web site explains its presence by stating:

"In 1898, President McKinley delivered a speech before the Georgia legislature that urged the U.S. government to assume responsibility for the care of graves of Confederate dead. The first attempt at putting McKinley's idea into practice occurred at Virginia's Arlington National Cemetery. Encouraged by research and petitions presented by Confederate veterans in Washington, D.C., the federal government in 1900 agreed to reinter the Confederate dead buried in gravesites scattered in Washington-area cemeteries into a consolidated Confederate section at Arlington. The success of the experiment at Arlington ultimately led to legislation authorizing the War Department to assume the care of the graves of almost 30,000 Confederates buried in national cemeteries in the North.

This effort on behalf of the Confederate dead provides yet another avenue for studying sectional reconciliation in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By focusing on the valorous deeds of the dead, living veterans from both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line united in celebration of the common soldier. But though the good will created by reburial and re-marking projects was genuine, the Arlington experience also revealed the limits and complexities of sectional reconciliation. The dead were purposefully segregated within cemeteries, causation of the war was studiously ignored in memorial speeches, and white southern women refused to allow the government to interfere with their sacred trust in caring for Confederate graves in the South, all to maintain the careful equilibrium that allowed former Confederates and Yankees to coexist."

Dedicated in 1914, one of the monument's inscriptions reads:

"Not for fame or reward -
Not for place or for 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"
Sincerely,

Randy

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Source: Arlington National Cemetery