by Simon Schama
But America has two specified days of military remembrance; one when the leaves are fallen, the other when they spread into full spring splendor. Created after the Civil War, Memorial Day was originally known as Decoration Day from the spontaneous habit of military widows decorating graves with wreaths of white flowers. In 1868 the commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, General John Logan, decided to institutionalize a day of remembrance—for both the Union and Confederate dead—and specified the third Monday in May. For most of the country, Memorial Day is about the inauguration of warmth. Garage sales lay out their wares in driveways. America’s men go through their tribal ritual firing up the grill for the first cookout. Meat meets heat, beer cans pop and hiss, and somewhere, everywhere, a microtractor is harvesting a suburban lawn. But even if the lines of spectators at the parades are thin, some remembering does get done in small-town America. In Sleepy Hollow, New York, where a statue commemorates the “honest militiamen” who caught the British spy Major André in 1780, a dozen or so veterans, some of them octogenarian survivors of Pearl Harbor and Normandy, followed behind a high-school marching band of big girls dressed in glossy black boots, pleated black miniskirts, and scarlet jackets, strangely reminiscent of the British redcoats the “honest militiamen” had thwarted. The band murdered “Sloop John B” (a baffling selection) and “God Bless America,” and an endless procession of fire trucks from neighboring towns followed, each bearing heraldic insignia (“Conquest Hook and Ladder 46”), before the parade ended up at a flower-decorated “Patriots’ Park” (named for the Revolutionary War). There, amid the dogs and babies and aunties and wives, the dignitaries did something surprising: they connected with history. The commander of the local American Legion, a World War II survivor, read the entirety of General Logan’s Order Number 11 from 1868, as though it had just been issued, stumbling a little over its great flights of Lincolnian rhetoric, asking for the perpetuation of tender sentiment for those “whose breasts were made barricades between our enemies [that is, other Americans] and our country.” The Lincolnian tone was sustained when the mayor of Tarrytown read an abbreviated version of the Gettysburg Address, although why he thought fit to shorten a speech that is only 400 words in the first place was mysterious. The dead of that immense slaughter and the president in his high hat were summoned from November 1863 to cookout day 2008, to mix and mingle with the old Vietnam grunts in Ranger hats. But was this just an empty flourish? Was it safer, easier, to invoke Gettysburg and Antietam than dwell on the fifty-two American servicemen and women killed just the previous month in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Up at the Sleepy Hollow cemetery the graves of every generation of servicemen were receiving small American flags planted in the earth beside them. The same had happened at Arlington National Cemetery, where every one of the 260,000-plus graves gets decorated and a guard posted in the fields through the Memorial Day weekend to make sure that neither wind nor rain nor malice aforethought might disturb them. One of those graves means more to me than a random name and date of death. Kyu-Chay was someone whose bright presence I can summon up a lot more easily than his death somewhere in the dun mountains of Afghanistan. His father and mother own a dry-cleaning store in my small town in upstate New York, and as is the custom in Korean families, the children—two boys—stayed close. On leave from Fort Bragg, I would see Kyu helping out at the counter, handling the shirts and suits in his uniform: a big, sunny fellow, sleeves neatly rolled to his biceps, army-style, plunging energetically into the racks at the back of the store as if on patrol. That was pretty much all I knew about Kyu until, one day in early November 2006, I walked into the store and found it strewn with white flowers: on the counters, floor, propped against the walls: lilies, chrysanthemums, roses, nothing but white, a pallid shroud set down while the dry-cleaning machines throbbed on heedlessly behind the counter. Set in the middle of one of the bouquets was a photograph of Kyu in his beret, a broad smile on his big open face. Beneath the picture, a notice announced that the staff sergeant had been killed while leading a mission in Afghanistan. His father, Sam, and his mother, both hollow-eyed and stooped with grief, were still working at the shop, as much, I thought, to keep madness at bay as to carry on earning their living. They are people of great formal dignity, so I wasn’t sure about the propriety of reaching over the counter, but when I did so Sam leaned forward, falling into the proffered embrace, crumpling into mute anguish, shoulders trembling.
Kyu-Chay was buried in Section 60 at Arlington, but on Veterans Day, in deference to the private sorrow of families, it was closed to visitors. A month or so later—a year after his death—I went back to find him. There wasn’t enough room on the standard-issue tombstone for his story, which was, in its way, exceptional, especially for a paratrooper staff sergeant, but it was also classically American. Kyu-Chay had been born in 1971 in the ancient city of Daegu, South Korea, overlooked by Mount Palgongsan, but had grown up conscious that his city and his family had had the narrowest escapes from being overwhelmed by North Korean and Chinese forces at the Pusan perimeter in 1950. Twenty-five years later Sam and his wife had taken their sense of grateful belonging all the way to the Lower Hudson Valley. The older brother Kyu (his younger brother shares the name) was intellectually gifted and worked hard. Upstate college and law school opened to him. But then, in 2001, after 9/11, Kyu-Chay did something not so predictable for a first-generation upwardly mobile Asian American, yet something deep-rooted in the immigrant relationship with his adopted nation: he enlisted in the army. With all his smarts he was the kind of officer material the United States Army dreams of, but Kyu-Chay had something particular he wanted to do: become a cryptologist in a force where that skill was in notoriously short supply. To prepare for an Iraq tour of duty he became a fluent Arabist; and before he was deployed to Afghanistan, added Pashto and Farsi. He had pretty much everything one would want in a paratrooper staff sergeant: physical courage married to strenuous intelligence. There was a practical purpose to his learning: translated intercepts make the difference between life and death, and the glaring lack of Arabists in the CIA in the summer of 2001 had turned out to be lethal. Kyu-Chay was committed to understanding the enemy by taking the trouble to learn his language, culture, faith. But he also wanted to learn Arabic so that he might pay those who could be friends and allies the respectful compliment of learned empathy. Perhaps his greatest act of translation was to take his own complex cultural history and use it against two kinds of insularity: the American habit of assuming that if English was hollered loudly enough at a roadblock or a police station, people would eventually Get the Message, especially if that trusty old tutorial aid, a cocked rifle, was added to the instruction. Moreover, if sermons on democracy were issued at regular intervals, so the official view went, the rest of the world would one day come around to the American way of life. Equally, though, Kyu-Chay’s hard-won knowledge was directed against the insularity of theocratic absolutism, a culture in which the obligation to annihilate dissent is extolled as high duty. Confronting that absolutism, he lost his life on a mountain track.
As I walked back from Section 60 through the field of stones, something struck me about them that I ought to have noticed before. Almost every soldier’s headstone was inscribed on its reverse face with the name of a spouse: “Daisy His Wife, 1888–1941”; “Margaret Mayfield, 1911–1983”—although never, that I could find, “John Doe, Her Husband.” Occasionally, the names of children were inscribed on the same face, although the modest format and size prescribed in the modern era precluded much in the way of an inclusive family tomb on one stone. But children, sometimes painfully young, lie in proximity to the servicemen. For historians of military death and remembrance like Drew Faust, the need to reunite military families in death, starting in the Civil War, has been a peculiarly American habit. In other more wholeheartedly warrior empires and nations, in Prussia, or Japan, severance from family was often assumed, even taken as measure of martial devotion to the Fatherland. The camp and the
barracks became family, military caste overrode the sentimental attachments of hearth and home, and the dynastic commander was supreme patriarch for whom the soldier would gladly offer up his life. In Victorian Britain, regiment was family, and the apprenticeship in separation for the officer classes began as early as possible with the boarding school. In more brutal conscript societies like imperial Russia, soldiering was an extension of servitude; the delivery of the unfree into a sacrificial bondage of unlimited term.
But not in the United States, where, during much of the first half century of the nation’s life, a volunteer army was a negligible presence, hardly ever more than 10,000 for the rapidly expanding continental territory of the republic. At times of emergency like the anti-excise Whiskey Rebellion of 1791 or the War of 1812, the regular army was supplemented by the mobilization of state militia and a temporary increase in enlistments. But it was only during the Civil War that millions of men were torn from their homes, stores, and farms and pitched into the muddy marches and slaughter fields, remote from everything familiar. The scale of letter-writing home by soldiers with even a bare rudiment of literacy testifies to what was felt as the unnaturalness of martial exile, the craved assumption that the separation from loved ones would be temporary. “I want to see you and the children mity bad if the war don’t end vary soon I will come home on a furlow…,” wrote the farmer Hillory Shifflet to his wife from his camp in Tennessee in 1862. Each week, Shifflet received from Jemima back in rural Ohio not just letters, but cooked food and photographs, gloves and boots. In January of the same year George Tillotson, an enlisted man from New York, wrote to his wife: “You can’t imagine how much I would give to here from home and how much more I would give to see home…but then I suppose the satisfaction will be all the sweeter for waiting.” His homesickness was so great that though he didn’t want to “insinuate that I am sorry I enlisted…maybe like enough I would not enlist again to be candid I don’t think I would.” Tillotson was lucky enough to make it home again at the end of his muster. But hundreds of thousands were less fortunate. Which is why “Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” written by the Boston bandleader Patrick Gilmore in 1863 to cheer his disconsolate sister Annie at the very moment when it was obvious that there would be no speedy reunion, remained for enlisted ranks the most poignantly felt of all Civil War songs, neither glory nor hallelujah. It was for the countless families for whom Johnny never did come marching home that the Union established war cemeteries as an act of domestic reparation. Husbands and wives, fathers and children, who had been torn apart by war, could at least be reunited in the long sleep of death.
The man responsible for inaugurating that benevolent practice—Montgomery C. Meigs, the quartermaster general of the Grand Army of the Republic—was himself buried in 1892 (aged seventy-five) on the summit of Arlington Hill in Section 2, where the cemetery began. Appropriately enough, his own family is interred in the grassy patch around the monumental, if plainly cut, tombstone. Meigs’s in-laws, the Rodgerses, who came from the most distinguished naval family of the early republic, are buried nearby, making the plot a grand domestic reunion as if called to Sunday dinner. Montgomery Meigs’s wife, Louisa Rodgers Meigs, faces out toward the path that tracks the brow of the hill, and in her maternal shadow lies the most startling tomb in all Arlington: that of her twenty-three-year-old son, John Rodgers Meigs, bushwhacked in the Shenandoah Valley by Confederate irregulars in the first week of October 1864. Personalized tomb sculptures are almost wholly absent from Arlington. The truism, reiterated by Dick Cheney on Veterans Day, that “we are a democracy, defended by volunteers” materializes in the featureless egalitarianism of the plainly arched low stones, each no more than a foot and a half high, that dominate the cemetery. But even before there was a prescribed regulation design, Montgomery Meigs commissioned a death-likeness of his son that would be much smaller than life-size. A mere three feet or so from head to toe, raised on a low plinth, the sculpture lies hidden from general view, tucked into the shallow space between his mother’s tomb and the path.
There is something touchingly unresolved about the bronze tomb sculpture: a grieving conflict between the parents’ wish to remember their son as both man and child. John Meigs, the precociously promoted brevet major of Engineers, lies just as he was found on the Swift Run Gap Road, by the edge of the woods: flat on his back, boots in the air, wrapped in his cape, Colt revolver at his side. This is the West Point cadet who, just a year before, had graduated first in his class; the officer and patriot who, his proud, stricken father wrote in his journal, “had already made himself a name in the land,” and who at “the age of nineteen, had fought with distinction at the first battle of Bull Run 21 July 1861.” Now the young hero had fallen, “a martyr to liberty.” But then there is the other Johnnie Meigs, the plump-cheeked youth, photographed again and again by his father in his cadet’s smoke-gray uniform, a lick of hair falling over his brow, or frowning in boyish concentration as he looks at a science specimen, his mother’s “darling precious John.” This is the boy cut down in the flower of his years, an emblem of America’s self-inflicted massacre of the innocents. Just before hostilities started, Meigs had predicted that if war was to come, it would be fought “temperately and humanely.” By the time his son was killed, murdered in cold blood, he believed, by cowardly Confederate guerrillas disguised in Union uniforms, Meigs knew better.
The obverse of the tomb, the face on which the quartermaster general’s own name is inscribed, looks in the opposite direction, north, toward the Doric portico of Arlington House. That house is pure Virginia history, a direct link between the two American conflagrations, the war that made America and the war that almost unmade it. The man for whom Arlington House was built was George Washington’s adoptive grandson, George Washington Parke Custis. The man best known for living in the mansion, the master of the slave-tilled plantation that stretched down the hill into the valley, was Custis’s son-in-law, Robert E. Lee. And it was Lee’s fellow West Point graduate, Montgomery Meigs, who in the summer of 1864 made a point of turning the manorial idyll (which the Lees and the Meigses had together enjoyed as a social setting) into a boneyard. Lee, who had been the superintendent of West Point from 1852 to 1855, had, in Meigs’s eyes, violated his beloved academy’s code of “Duty, Honor, Country” by accepting command of the Confederate army, a treachery compounded by the fact that Lee had also been offered the same post for the Union. Other West Point graduates whom Meigs knew well—Joseph Johnston, James Longstreet, Braxton Bragg—had all followed Lee. One of the academy’s roistering young bloods, Jefferson Davis, another of Meigs’s former friends and mentors, became the president of the Confederate States of America. Even more iniquitous in Meigs’s eyes, Pierre Beauregard had actually left his superintendent’s post at the academy in 1861 in order to join the rebels, or as Meigs always called them: “the Traitors.” Had all these men not remembered that the citadel on the cliff was called the “School of the Union” and its graduates the “Children of the Union”? But it was the treason of the slave-owning Lee that most envenomed Meigs’s passions. Lee had broken the house of the American union. Now Meigs would do his utmost to make sure that Lee’s own house, where six of his children had been born, would be made permanently uninhabitable. Should the traitor return, he and his kin would be forced to sleep “in the company of ghosts.” A student of classical literature, Meigs knew the Roman custom of sowing their enemies’ land with salt to make it forever sterile (and quoted it to his superiors when, for example, they were considering how to treat the conquered port city of Charleston, South Carolina). Now he would turn implacably Roman. In August 1864 he had twenty-six Union soldiers, who had been interred near the old Lee slave quarters of the estate, brought to the portico of Arlington House like visitors about to pay their respects, and had them buried again, right beside Mrs. Lee’s rose garden.
2. The fight for the citadel: soldiering and the Founding Fathers
Montgomery Meigs took Lee’s treason per
sonally because twenty-four years earlier, in the summer of 1837, the two men had roomed together by the coffee-colored Mississippi. Their task as young West Point graduates and officers of the Army Corps of Engineers had been to survey the river from the Des Moines rapids down to the new river port of St. Louis and make recommendations for improving navigation. The need was urgent because steamboats had revolutionized the possibilities of river traffic, and ports like St. Louis, then no more than 5,000 strong, were perfectly situated to capitalize on the opportunity. At the junction of the Missouri and the Mississippi, the cash staples of the lower South—cotton ginned in Eli Whitney’s machines—would be warehoused and sold to buyers from the industrial North and East. Northern hardwares and manufactures would in turn be loaded on boats sailing south and west to Memphis, Natchez, and New Orleans. St. Louis was also one of the jumping-off points for the Conestoga covered wagon trains heading west, carrying with them everything needed to make a new homestead America in the prairies: timber, draft oxen, saws, plows and hoes, bedsteads, pots and pans. St. Louis had just been optimistically declared a “Port of Entry for the United States,” but American geography was notorious for failing to cooperate with the dreams of enterprise. Upstream on the Mississippi, the rocks of the Des Moines rapids made navigation hazardous, while downstream, debris-choked islets close to St. Louis threatened boats with grounding at low tide and the city with flooding should a storm surge force the water into the narrowing channel.
