Motus Mentis

In Arlington National Cemetery stands a memorial, sculpted by a Jewish sculptor named Moses Ezekiel (who, by the way, was the first Jew to graduate from the Virgina Military Institute). It features a classical female figure wearing a laurel wreath, and bears the inscription “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.”

Today it is to be torn down.

The memorial was erected as a gesture of national reconciliation following the Civil War of 1861-1865, in which Southern states sought to withdraw from the Union, and were coerced by military force to abandon their cause.

After Appomattox, neither side was happy with the result: the South for the obvious reason that they had been defeated, harshly subjugated, and reduced to poverty; and the North for having to welcome into the bosom of the nation a population that they now saw as traitors.

The Union, now victorious, found itself in the position of “the dog that caught the car”. The challenge for America in the latter half of the 19th century, then, was how to reforge a unified nation from two peoples that despised each other. It seemed impossible at first, and the mutual hatred of North and South burned hotly for decades afterwards, poisoning every aspect of national life, politics in particular.

It became clear that for the nation to live and flourish again as “one nation, under God — the restoration of the Union having been, after all, the stated purpose of the war — that some sort of truly heartfelt reconciliation would have to happen, one that would require genuine forgiveness on both sides. This would never be possible if North and South continued to exist as victor and vanquished, as master and cur. The proud people of the South would have to give up their cause; they would have to surrender in their hearts as finally they had on the battlefield. The North would have to accept the South as family again, and lift its boot from their necks. The great fear was that if the North loosened its grip, the South, its blood still hot with repressed fury, would rise again in defiance. (The great Robert E. Lee foreseeing this, in the moment of surrender told his people not to fight on in a bloody insurgency, but to accept defeat and lay down their arms.)

Gradually, little by little (and funeral by funeral), this national reconciliation was achieved. To build a coherent American nation from the wreckage, the North would forgive the South, lift the sanctions it had imposed, withdraw its troops, and allow the defeated to honor the memories of their dead. To this end there were great celebrations of unity and mutual forgiveness throughout the nation, and the Confederate dead were honored with memorial statuary in American cities and towns. Perhaps the most sanctifying gesture was the decision to allow the remains of fallen Confederate soldiers to be interred in the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery, where, with the approval of then-Secretary of War William H. Taft, a monument to the memory of the Old South, and to its beating of its swords into plowshares in the interest of peace and unity, was unveiled in 1914.

Today, at a time of bitter national fracture, the spirit of unity and forgiveness that slowly healed that awful wound is gone, forgotten. In its place we see a reawakening of the haughty and merciless spirit of the North in the wake of the first civil war, even as the prospect of another seems likelier every day.