Transcript of Podcast “About My Country”
Hello, this is Glenda Taylor. Welcome to the OneAndAllWisdom podcast.
A few weeks ago, I heard on the news that something had happened at Arlington National Cemetery that caused a strong response from the guards at the Cemetery and caused a bit of a political furor. Hearing about this took me back in my memory to a time, years ago, when, as a young woman, I lived near Arlington National Cemetery, which is just outside of Washington D.C. where I worked. That was an extraordinary time in my life, and Arlington National Cemetery was a formative presence that shaped some of my attitudes toward my country.
So, I have decided, in this podcast, and in a couple of other podcasts to follow, to speak about some of my experiences, not because I want to talk about me, but because I want now to speak specifically about my country, about some moments in its history, and about how my own experiences in Washington informed my feelings about what is happening today in my country. I think you will find all of this of interest, hopefully of value.
In those days when I lived near Arlington National Cemetery, I would often stop there for awhile, perhaps to sit quietly on the green slope of a hillside, leaned against a tree, simply resting my nerves after a time at work in the hurly burly of that amazing city, Washington DC.
Or, I might just walk in the peaceful cemetery, through the rows and rows of identical white grave markers, or I might wander back among some of the different, oldest gravestones or monuments. Always I would look at names and dates-of-death of generations of Americans, some 400,000 in all, buried there by now.[1]
Or, sometimes, instead, I sat on the steps of the Custis Lee Mansion, the home of Robert E. Lee before the Civil War, that house that had been built, starting in 1802, by slaves and hired craftsmen, and is now a museum there in Arlington National Cemetery.
The Lees left that house after Virginia seceded from the United States at the start of the Civil War and they were never to return. The Union army occupied the estate and used it as an army field hospital during the war.
The possibility of Robert E. Lee and his family returning after the end of the war to their house, which is located on strategic high ground literally looking down upon Washington, the capital city of the United States, was obviously not in the Union’s best interests. So, to discourage that ever happening, of the Lee’s returning, in 1864, the bodies of twenty-six dead Union soldiers were buried, not in the existing old Custis Lee family cemetery, but rather within a few yards of the house itself, right along the perimeter of Mrs. Lee’s rose garden. [2]
And, in 1866, to further ensure that the Lees would not return, the construction of a special Tomb for Unknown Civil War Soldiers was also erected in Mrs. Lee’s rose garden. That monument still stands atop a masonry vault containing the remains of 2,111 other Civil War soldiers found scattered across battlefields within a 25-mile radius of Washington, D.C. The tomb likely contains both Confederate and Union soldiers.[3]
It is not, by the way, the same as the other more famous Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, which is also in Arlington National Cemetery. That one, a white marble sarcophagus, was built in 1921 as a final resting place for one of America’s unidentified World War I service members, and then unknown soldiers from later wars were added in 1958 and 1984.[4]
That Tomb of the Unknown Soldier serves as a symbolic grave for all war dead whose remains have not been found or identified. A national place of mourning, it is also a site where many Americans who visit it take time to reflect on and appreciate the grave necessity and the often tragic consequences of military service. And, in that special place, visitors are called to remember and respect all veterans of war, but especially those who died in service of their country.
A special honor guard of soldiers have, since 1937, been present at that Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, with a sentinel on duty in front of the Tomb every minute of every day, 24/7, in all weathers, in all seasons. The changing of the guard, a solemn ceremony that is breathtaking in its precision and dignity, includes a 21-gun salute and the playing of taps.
I once stood a few feet away from John F. Kennedy when he as president ceremonially placed a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington Cemetery. Kennedy’s solemnity, and that of those guards who stand in constant attendance, night and day, rain or shine, at that memorial spot, was profound. When the sound of “Taps” filled the air, haunting, lingering, drifting across the grounds of the immense cemetery, I could not escape the always present poignant question, “Why, why, do so many have to die because we can’t all get along?”
The same question would often arise when I sat on the steps of the Custis Lee Mansion, the once home of Robert E. Lee.
When I was sitting there, just looking out across the Potomac River toward the capital of my country, I would think, often, in those quiet moments, about Robert E. Lee, and about the heart-wrenching choice he had to make, deciding for himself what patriotism meant, at that time, in those circumstances, just as that question has arisen again and again throughout our country’s history, and how it matters right now.
Lee was already an officer in the army of the United States when the Civil War broke out. He could have been a general on either side of the conflict. It could not have been easy for him to choose to take up what he finally decided was his duty, as commander of Confederate troops, to take up arms against the Union he had earlier sworn always to defend. Some people called it patriotism; others called it treason.
Many years after I had moved away from Washington DC, I would return with my husband and my children, and I would stand on the very battlefield where Lee finally surrendered to the Union’s General Grant, for all practical purposes ending the Civil War. That too could not have been easy for Lee, to surrender, to admit defeat, to admit that he had lost.
Even though reports were still coming in to Lee on the last few days before the surrender that the Confederacy could still win the war, some of the reports even being from Lee’s own nephew in charge of a group of Confederate forces nearby, it finally became apparent to Lee that the war could not, in fact, be won, that it was lost, that he had lost.
What was patriotism then? What was he to do then; how would he conduct himself in the face of that loss; how would he, the loser, be a model for his troops and for the country, during the surrender, during the exchange of leadership and control that had to be turned over to Grant.
Lee’s leadership of the Confederate forces had been impressive, had cost Grant 360,000 dead Union soldiers.[5] Lee had been Grant’s nemesis, a deadly archenemy. But ultimately, Lee had lost, lost the war. And he had to admit it. How would he behave? And what would that mean for the people who had fought with him, who believed in him? How would his actions influence theirs? What would it mean for the country?
Lee was the one who reached out to Grant, asking for terms of surrender. In so doing, of course, he did, publicly admit that the war was lost.
At the official occasion of Lee’s surrender, Lee and Grant both acted with the utmost dignity and respect for each other and for the great solemnity of the occasion.
Grant made sure that his Union soldiers, however they might feel inside, treated with quiet reserved civility the Confederate troops they had only days before been shooting at, as those defeated Confederate soldiers marched silently down an aisle made by union troops, to stack their guns, to lay down their arms, to submit individually to unconditional surrender, to deal with the fact that they had lost.
Inside a little farm house, hurriedly chosen for the meeting there in Appomattox, Virginia, where Grant and Lee met to make official the surrender, Lee, dressed in his finest uniform, held himself in perfect composure, quietly accepting with dignity the formalities of a defeat that he would later say, felt like a devastating personal failure.
Present in the little farm house, incidentally, for part of the official surrender ceremony, as part of Grant’s staff, was Robert Todd Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s only surviving son.[6] What an exhilarating surge of joy at this victory he must have felt that day. Neither he nor anyone else could know that five days later his father, Abraham Lincoln, would be assassinated.
Not everyone in the country would be as gracious or generous or civil as Grant and Lee. After Lincoln’s assassination, Lincoln’s plans for reconciliation and reconstruction, in his absence, turned ugly. To this day, the bitter dregs of remembered grievance haunt the minds of many of the citizens in our country. This month, in 2024, there have been two attempts to assassinate one of our country’s presidential candidates.
This makes me think about the devastating effect of Lincoln’s assassination for our country, so soon after the climax of Lee’s surrender. Some people in the country just could not accept that defeat. The hostile partisan energy present in the country was so white hot, with so much almost mindless volatility, that it was all too easy for one individual to act, with devastating effect on the country for years to come, for generations to come.
I think about that today as I hear people on the internet or speaking in public places predicting a “blood bath” if the presidential election does not go their way. I shudder with concern, and I find I must turn back to my story about Grant and Lee, to think about something positive, uplifting, hopeful, instructive.
So, here’s this. Also present in the little farm house with Lee and Grant that day was a person who wrote out the official copy of the terms of the surrender, Grant’s longtime friend, Lt. Colonel Ely S. Parker, a Seneca leader from the Tonawanda Reservation in New York. In one account of that meeting, General Lee is reported to have recognized that Parker was a Native American, and Lee extended his hand and said, “I am glad to see one real American here,” to which Parker reportedly replied, “We are all Americans.”[7]
Obviously you can hear me wish that more of us today could recognize that we are all Americans.
Grant tried to remember that that day. He was in fact generous in setting the terms of surrender. He pardoned all Confederate soldiers there and allowed them to go home, and to keep a gun and if they had a horse there, to keep that too. [8]
Grant knew that those Confederate soldiers would need both horse and gun and much courage to survive on their way home and afterward, as they began putting their torn-part lives back together, on their mostly devastated farms or towns, many of which had been burned, trampled, confiscated, or otherwise put in such a condition that it would take those returning Confederate soldiers a long time to recover in any way, let alone for the whole country to heal, to “bind up the wounds” of that awful war.
That end to the Civil War, there on that famous battlefield, though, no matter how gracious and considerate Grant and Lee were, was really no end to the conflict, as is even today apparent. The divisions live on.
I observed an example of those lingering divisions up close, at another time in my life, when while working for the University of Houston, I attended a national conference in Chicago, along with one of my co-workers, a friendly young woman from Mississippi whose southern accent was deep and sometimes exaggerated. During that conference, at a crowded after-hours party in someone’s hotel suite, a person representing an east coast university at the conference got to bantering with my co-worker over how many syllables there were in the word Mississippi, which my co-worker pronounced as “Miss-sippi.” Soon she, perhaps pretending, tried to understand where the other person was from, and finally said, “Why, honey, anything north of the Mason-Dixon line is just one big blur to me!”
The Mason-Dixon line? Made part of the Missouri Compromise in 1820? The encounter I just described was in the early 1960’s, a hundred and forty years later, and a hundred years since the end of the Civil War! The person seated next to me, a vice president of Dartmouth College, murmured, “How extraordinary!”
And my co-worker went on, to my chagrin, stating that yes, her family had had slaves, and her family had always been good to their slaves, and the slaves were better off before the war than afterward, she said. And she really believed it! How extraordinary, indeed.
But shortly thereafter, my Dartmouth friend and I both also felt how extraordinarily good it was, when our whole slightly inebriated group of people, from all over the country, began to sing, together, first, a long-drawn out and emotional Dixie, and then the Union song, “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Lord, who has trampled out the vineyards…”
My eyes filled with tears in that moment; I had hope then that somehow it was possible for my country, as it was for this small group of people, to overcome even old, old differences, in such moments of grace. I still hold that hope for my country, even with the differences we have today, even when the still unhealed wounds of the Civil War tear open the fabric of our discourse and of our democracy.
I also hold strongly to the belief that in this age of misinformation, the best hope for our future lies in seeing that more and more people are well informed about the broad complex big picture.
As Thomas Jefferson said: “An enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic.” Enlightened. Informed.
May we be well informed, when, for example, we read some abbreviated, perhaps one-sided, comment about what a guard recently did at Arlington National Cemetery. May we be informed by the history of that cemetery, and especially of the sense of duty the guards there carry for defending the dignity and sanctity of that place.
Franklin Roosevelt said: “The only sure bulwark of continuing liberty is a government strong enough to protect the interests of the people, and a people strong enough and well enough informed to maintain its sovereign control over the government.”
So, today, with all the misinformation and speculation and deceptive half-truths being bandied about, I hope that this little podcast will be in some small way informative as it reminds us of our history, of the wounded soul of our country, and of the danger we face in the days ahead, unless those in positions of power on all sides of the political and ideological spectrum, like Robert E. Lee, have the wisdom, foresight, and grace to be honest, to be willing to admit defeat when defeated, to encourage their followers to put aside violence and retribution, to reach out across bitter dividing lines, as we all work to find ways to come together and heal by listening to each other, caring for each other, even when we disagree with each other, and continuing to find ways to inform ourselves with truth instead of self-serving political or commercial rhetoric.
In the next podcast I will speak about another powerful government official faced with choices about patriotism and integrity. I hope you will tune in, and if you appreciated this podcast, please share a link to it with others. And if you wish. you may go to the OneAndAllWisdom.com website to see a transcript of this podcast, along with footnote references for the quotations or statistics that may lead you to further exploration. You will also find on the home page of the website a place where you can, if you choose, make a contribution to help continue the work that the website represents. So until next time, this is Glenda Taylor.
[1] https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Explore/History-of-Arlington-National-Cemetery
[2] James Edward Peters, Arlington National Cemetery: Shrine to America’s Heroes, 2nd ed. (Bethesda, MD: Woodbine House, 2000), 23.
[3] https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Explore/History-of-Arlington-National-Cemetery
[4] https://www.arlingtoncemetery.mil/Explore/History-of-Arlington-National-Cemetery
[6] https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/robertlincoln.htm
[7] https://www.nps.gov/apco/learn/historyculture/the-surrender-meeting.htm
[8] https://www.nps.gov/apco/learn/historyculture/the-surrender-meeting.htm
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