Grieving Charleston (June 19, 2015) and Remembering the Battle of Gettysburg (July 1 to 3, 1863) - Lessons learned from West Point, Arlington National Cemetery, Oneonta, and beyond

America has been grieving the loss of 9 African Americans at the hands of a white supremacist, Dylann Roof, on June 19, 2015, in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof reportedly brandished the Confederate flag and made various hateful online postings. How did we get here? I went through my memory banks to reference lessons learned in my own study of the Civil War (1861-1865) to the present.

The bloodiest battle of the Civil War lasted from July 1 to 3, 1863, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, between Union and Confederate troops. I wanted to visit Gettysburg in the spring of 1982 as part of a Safety Patrol trip to Washington, DC. Due to a confluence of factors beyond the control of my 12 year self, I was really sad that our class did not go to Washington nor Gettysburg.

Fast forward 7 years to Plebe Year at the US Military Academy (U.S.M.A.) at West Point from June 28, 1989, to June 8, 1990. I'll never forget seeing the portrait of General Robert E. Lee in his Confederate uniform in the U.S.M.A. Library. Lee graduated West Point in 1829 and was Superintendent in 1861 before the Civil War broke out. His father, Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III, was a Revolutionary War General. Lee was highly regarded in both the Union and Confederacy over his 30 year career.  Not wanting to fight against his native Virginia, Lee accepted command of the Confederacy. This link has a 1870 portrait of Superintendent Lee in a blue USMA professor's uniform. 

I lived in metro DC from March 1995 to March 31, 1996, when I moved to NYC. I lived in the District of Columbia for the first 6 months and Arlington, Virginia, for the last 6 months. When I commuted from Arlington to work in Maryland, I remember seeing "Heritage, Not Hate" bumper stickers on other cars. I wasn't in the North anymore and not far from the center of the Confederacy. 

I lived near Arlington National Cemetery. Arlington has been the final resting place of America's soldiers since the Civil War. It had been in the family of General Lee's wife Mary Anna (Custis) Lee who was a great-granddaugher of Martha Washington. 

I reconnected with a West Point classmate, Jim Bryant, in the late 1990s. He was a National Park Service historian at a Civil War battlefield park in Northern Virginia in the 1990s. In spite of running up against the "Old Boys Club," being one of the few African American historians to work at this park, he continued promoting the significant role of African Americans in this conflict. Jim is an expert historian. He completed his PhD. at the University of Rochester and was pre-doctoral fellow with the Frederick Douglass Institute of African and African American Studies. I reached out to a lawyer who was doing some pro bono work at the NAACP to help his cause. This is his book on The 36th Infantry United States Colored Troops in the Civil War. One of the positive outcomes of Jim's research is the creation of a reenactment unit--the 23rd Infantry United States Colored Troops based in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. 

Where Do We Go From Here :

(1) Take down the Confederate flag from every government building. I would prefer it not to be anywhere except in museums for historical and learning purposes.

(2) Continue to educate ourselves on the lessons of the Civil War and race relations. My brother Milan informed me a few years ago that a neighbor's home had been a safe house during the Underground Railroad. The neighbor has moved away and the relics from that time period are no longer there. The home I grew up in was built about 1823 and there are still a few homes from that era in existence. My home area definitely was along the Underground Railroad between Binghamton and Cooperstown. Cooperstown and Hartwick are to the north and Oneonta is to the south. The Greenough House was in Hartwick (page 6) and Isaac Newton Arnold was from Hartwick (page 7). 

Isaac Newton Arnold

—He was born in Hartwick, Otsego County, New York in 1815, the year before Hartwick Seminary

and Academy was chartered by the New York Legislature. After studying at the Academy, he was

later tutored in law by local Cooperstown attorneys. He passed the state bar examine in 1835, and within a year, relocated to Illinois, where he became a close and personal friend of Abraham Lincoln. The two men journeyed to Washington, DC in 1861, following their respective elections to the Presidency and Congress. Arnold’s 1862 HR resulted in the ending of slavery in locales under Federal jurisdiction, e.g., Washington, DC and the Florida Territory. Following President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, effective January 1, 1863, Arnold had a second HR passed that called for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution ending slavery in the United States; it became the

Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.

Congressman Arnold is quoted in a speech in the House of Representatives on January 6, 1864, and a summary of his accomplishments on the Hartwick College website.

"You can have no permanent peace while slavery lives ..... Your contest with it is to the death. Your implacable enemy now reels and staggers. Strike the decisive blow. You could not if you would, and you ought not if you could, make terms of compromise with slavery."

(Excerpted from "The Power, Duty, and Necessity of Destroying Slavery in the Rebel States" Speech of Hon. Isaac Newton Arnold of Illinois, delivered in the House of Representatives, January 6, 1864.)

Arnold's resolution was the first step taken by a member of Congress towards the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. Arnold retired from public life after serving two terms in Congress, and in 1867, he wrote the History of Abraham Lincoln and the Overthrow of Slavery. In 1880, he completed his lengthy Life of Benedict Arnold: His Patriotism and His Treason. He died in 1884.

(3) Continue the healing process of race relations. May we never draw swords or guns against each other ever again.